Chapter Twenty-Five
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
T HOMAS DID NOT REALIZE HOW TIGHTLY HE WAS CLUTCHING M ISS Cross’s hands in his own. He only knew that she did not flinch or shy away. She held on to him nearly as fast.
He’d fought for years to keep this secret. To finally force the words out, to confess his truth to another human being—an action that every private molecule in his body rejected—proved difficult. But something was changing tonight. He couldn’t proceed—he wouldn’t —with lies. He’d done that for too long.
“My parents were Irish domestic staff in the service of the Viscount and Viscountess of Ridley,” he said in a rush, the only way he knew how to speak this evening, it seemed.
“Sounds like a high time,” she quipped.
“You may laugh, Miss Cross, but believe it or not, I had one of those rarest of British experiences. A happy childhood.”
Thomas felt his lips curl in a smile.
Although his family’s status had been lowly, his memories of his childhood had a kind of blessed, golden glow to them. His father had risen to the humble rank of assistant land manager while his mother worked as a kitchen servant with a talent for baking bread. No two people had ever been so in love. And no two people had loved their child as much. They were churchgoing folk, determined to teach their son the value of hard work, honesty, integrity, and laughter. His father taught him to read in the evenings, while his mother had a habit of singing softly to herself—songs that still lingered in the back of Thomas’s mind whenever he sat in the back of a vaudeville theater and heard funny tunes about love and summer afternoons.
His parents loved each other. He loved them. And they loved him. That should have been enough.
“I grew up alongside the Viscount and Viscountess’s son. The Honourable Clement Fitzhugh Ridley, heir to the barony and viscountcy of Blagdon and Blythe.”
A small laugh from his audience of one. “What a monogram he must have had.”
“Please, Miss Cross. I am attempting to …” He swallowed hard. If she kept going with these interruptions, with these little jokes, he would lose his nerve. “This is a story I’ve never spoken aloud before. Please. Share it with me.”
“Y-yes. Of course. By all means.”
“Clement was sickly from the day he was born. A weak heart, they said. The Ridleys refused to take him out in society—they said it was because they feared for his fragile constitution, but they were ashamed of him. His parents were conventional, and even if Clement had been healthy, he would never have fit their ideals. Prone to fits and fixations, unable to navigate social situations, even as a young boy. He wasn’t a suitable son, so they hid him away. I suppose they were just misguided. Waiting for the day he magically transformed into a son worthy of them. Someone the rest of society could accept. That day never came.” Thomas swallowed back a wave of bitterness. Emotion was just like Evelyn—if he let himself have even a taste, he would want to drown himself in it. “I took after my father. Big, broad, strapping. I never wanted to be inside. I never had clean trouser knees. My shoes were always scuffed and I was always chasing some bird or bug or dog or another. I could speak to anyone about anything, charm the skin off a rabbit, navigate any crowd, be they rich or poor. I was everything the Ridley boy was not. Yet, unlikely as it was, Clement became my best friend. My brother, really.”
In the reflection of the paned glass window, Thomas caught sight of Evelyn’s jaw dropping slightly.
“Don’t look so surprised, Miss Cross. I was a mere mortal once. Capable of such things.”
“I’m not surprised,” she replied gently. “You’ve always been mortal to me.”
Thomas cleared his throat. “On his eleventh birthday, we escaped the house and snuck into town. A regiment had just arrived from a tour in Ireland, and they were parading. Two weeks later, Clement was dead. And so were my parents. And so were most of the other staff. Typhus, we were told. Ran through the entire estate like a wind of death. I can still feel it, you know. The way the whole house seemed to shudder when Clement’s eyes closed for the last time.”
“Thomas, I’m—”
“As it was,” he continued abruptly, “I was a child without parents, and the Ridleys were parents without a child. Everything slotted together quite tidily, indeed. After all, it was easy to fire the remaining staff and bring on a new one, introducing me as the future viscount. I’d already picked up Clement’s accent. No one outside of the Ridleys knew Clement, so no one knew I was an imposter. They buried him under a grave with my name on it and never visited. I was, from that moment on, their son. I was Clement.”
It had all seemed so simple back then. Righteous, even. They told him this was what Clement would want. They told him this was best.
Now, he knew better. His life, his agency, his future—not to mention Clement’s memory—they had all been sacrificed on the altar of the Ridleys’ vanities and ambitions and longings and shames.
“They painted me in family portraits and I was given extensive lessons in elocution and sums and history. I went to Eton. Summered with dukes. Chased long, pretty silk skirts. Answered my adopted father and mother when they addressed me by a name that was not my own. Learned how to sneak enough drinks from their wine cellars and liquor stores to dull my pain away.”
“And eventually, when I looked in the mirror, I did not see Tom Gallagher, the son of a landman and his songbird baker of a wife, but Clement Fitzhugh Ridley, the heir to all he surveyed. The older I grew, the more resigned I became to my fate.”
His breath rattled in his chest, threatening to fail him. A small squeeze of hands in his spurred him on.
“And by the time I turned eighteen, it was as if my younger self never existed. I graduated from Eton with high marks and was meant to go on a Grand Tour—that’s what aristocratic sons did, after all. Before that, though, a schoolmate invited me to a house party at his family seat. There, somewhere in my alcoholic haze, I met his sister.”
He could still picture it in his mind’s eye. The image of her was always a little distorted because of the amount he’d had to drink—it was common at that time, for him to awake in the morning with but a blurred recollection of the previous night’s events. But still. She was a silly, sophisticated nit in a sunset-pink dress. Years ago, he’d shoved her in a drawer in the back of his mind. Thinking of her now was an ice pick to the sternum.
Eliza Jane .
“You loved her, didn’t you?” Evelyn asked, at length.
“She was a duke’s daughter. Wholly unsuitable for me, viscount’s son or no.”
“But you loved her all the same. Didn’t you?”
Yes. Or as close to love as a foolish, drunken eighteen-year-old boy could manage. From the moment her brother introduced them, he was hers. She was precisely what Clement Fitzhugh Ridley should want. And he did.
Thomas winced and shrugged. What else could he do? He’d been determined to tell Evelyn Cross the truth tonight. And this was the center of that truth. The only way out now was through. “Perhaps you were right. Perhaps I have always been merely mortal, somewhere deep down. No two people were as in love as my parents. Living in the cold clutch of the viscount and his wife’s dead, resentful, booze-soaked marriage for as long as I did only heightened the beauty of that love’s memory. I’d spent a lifetime growing into another man’s existence. I thought, perhaps, I could allow myself this one thing of my own. My own love. I’ve yearned for it all my life. And for a moment, I believed I had it.”
He would never forget the delicious burn of that romance. Being near Eliza Jane was like his best memories of childhood, before the typhus had changed everything. It was like walking the grounds of Blagdon House at sunrise with Clement at his side—as if everything was at his fingertips, no matter how impossible.
“On the last night of the house party, more than tipsy on champagne and claret and anything else we could get our hands on, I declared myself to Eliza Jane. We fell into one of those entanglements men and women so often do when they find themselves beneath starlight … And in her euphoria, she cried out …”
Clement. Oh, Clement.
Even now, the echo of that sound was enough to send a shudder through his entire body. It had spoiled something so beautiful, awakened him from a dream.
He wanted her love. But he would not have it like that. His romance would be true, or he would have none at all.
He could not spend his entire life pretending. Not in everything. Not in love.
“I drew the assignation to a swift end. I loved her. I wanted her love in return. I could not live the rest of my life with another man’s name and another man’s love. It wouldn’t have been right. It wouldn’t have been real.”
Real was a joke. But he’d spent his entire life searching for its punchline.
Nothing in his life was real. His name, his personality. Hell, even his line of work was theater—illusion.
“So when it was over, I cradled her in my arms and told her everything. I told her the truth—about my origin, about my parents, about the real Clement and the real Tom Gallagher. A fool’s mistake.”
“It wasn’t foolish,” Evelyn whispered earnestly.
Thomas wasn’t sure he agreed with her. But he couldn’t change the past now, even if he’d wanted to. Which, more and more lately, he was beginning to think he didn’t. “Once I’d said my piece, she fled. A day later, every scandal sheet in England had the story, and in a day, I lost my position, my family, fake though they were, my friends. Everyone I’d loved betrayed me, abandoned me. I was a laughingstock in every room where I’d once been champion. And I didn’t even have love to show for it.”
She leaned forward. “What happened then?”
“The Viscount and Viscountess had liquidated many of their assets in preparation for my Grand Tour and to set me up with a house and a wife once I returned. I will never understand why, but they gifted that money to me. A few years later, when they died, I inherited everything else.”
“You weren’t totally abandoned, then.”
“Guilt is a powerful thing, Miss Cross. And even monsters feel it every so often, I imagine. I won’t pretend I didn’t benefit from the decision, just as I benefited from their decision to make me into their son. I’ve never gone hungry, never lacked for creature comforts. But you know there’s more to life than that.
“Anyway, I was suddenly an incredibly wealthy man with no name and no prospects and no plan. I went to France for a few years. At first, I went to their vaudeville halls and the Folies Bergère for escape. They were places a man could waste a great deal of time and money drinking and whoring himself into a stupor. But in the few, quiet moments of sobriety I allowed myself, I learned a great deal from that world. I learned how to make an illusion real.”
“And how do you do that?”
“By making the world a stage. By never allowing anyone to see that it is an illusion.”
That, he knew she could understand. They both lived by that simple axiom, didn’t they?
“That was my mistake, after all. I had gotten out of control. I’d been drunk and reckless and trusted someone with my secrets. I’d let my affections drive me out of my senses. I’d been so addicted to feeling good, to feeling loved, to being myself, that I’d let it rob me of my future. So I took control of my life. I swore off women. I never touched liquor again. And I reinvented myself for this new, American stage, determined to win back a life for myself. I changed my name from Tom Gallagher to Thomas Gallier—Gallagher was too Irish, of course, and if I was going to make it anywhere in America, I knew that was the last thing I could be. I re-trained myself in the ways of an English gentleman. I made a vow to re-conquer society. To claw my way to the top again.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“You could have done anything. You were a wealthy man. You could have stayed in Europe. You could have lived out the rest of your days in perfect comfort. You didn’t need to become one of them again—”
His pride flared. “They rejected me. I was molded and shaped into one of them my entire life . My real self was thrown into a shallow grave at eleven years old with the body of my best friend and now, I am this. I wanted their acceptance. I wanted to be so powerful they could never deny me again . ”
Undeniable . That’s what he’d wanted to be.
“So I hid everything I could of my past. I became a performer—or, I suppose I became one again . I controlled every aspect of my life. I never let anyone see past the mask. It was the only way to secure my future, you see.”
Her gaze pierced him. “Yes, I see. I see an incredibly lonely man with the world at his feet and nothing in his heart.”
Yes. He supposed that was true.
“You’ve never told anyone any of this?” she asked. “Never?”
It was then that he realized her hands had never left his.
She knew the truth of him … and she wasn’t leaving. She wasn’t pulling away or running to the scandal sheets.
“No. Not until this moment. Not until you.”