Read Online True Born by Lara Blunte - Free Book Online

thing in my life."
    His face was even more troubled as he said,
"Georgiana, for heaven's sake, don't speak as if your life were
over! I understand that I am a poor man now, and that to come with
me would expose you and the girls to difficulty. But trust that I
shall find a way! Trust in me, I beg you!"
    "I have no right to take away all the
possibilities they have. I have no right to place them under
persecution from the society they know. This will never change,
John."
    She was already getting up and getting
dressed, and when she was ready, having managed to cover the damage
to her dress and the gash on her shoulder, she walked over to him
and kissed the welt she had left on his face, and kissed his lips,
but she said nothing else.
    Georgiana left, and he didn't follow her
downstairs. He held the handkerchief which he had stolen from her
sleeve, and saw with a grim smile that the initials on it were GB,
the initials of her maiden name. He had wanted to ask if Hugh at
least treated her well, but his jealousy and the fear that he might
see that her husband hurt her had stopped him. He had lost his head
enough times, and none of it had helped her.
    John went to his desk and opened it, taking
out a pack of letters tied with a ribbon, then he fell onto the
bed. Her handkerchief and his pillow smelled like her. He untied
the ribbon, and the letters fell on his chest. There were many of
them, over the course of two years, and he hadn't reread any since
he had found out that she had forsaken him, but neither had he had
the courage to burn them.
    He started to read them again now, from the
beginning, and the happy girl on the page was so different from the
woman with the sad eyes that this man, whom so many other men
feared, couldn't help the tears that stung the gash on his
cheek.
     

Thirteen. Let Me Weep

    John reflected on the nature of his love for
Georgiana.
    What had it been before he left for war, when
she had been a girl and he had considered himself a man, and yet
had been untested except by the accident of his birth?
    He had thought there could be no one more
lovable than she. Nothing had made him happy, until he had been
with her, in the fields at Halford, at her father's house with her
small sisters, at his mother's seeing how much they liked each
other.
    She had been purity and innocence, with wit,
generosity and heart -- a chance for things to be good and clear
like the water of a brook.
    What had she been to him during the years of
war, when her letters made him smile after he had waded in blood,
smelled rot and seen human bodies treated like meat?
    And what had she been when he had heard that
she hadn't waited for him, but had instead married his despicable
brother for money, with nary a note to warn him?
    What was she now, when he had come back to
find her a woman, more beautiful than ever, with a sadness and
longing in her eyes that hadn't been there when he had left?
    He had thought that he loved her before, with
passion, but as he looked at her from across the theater he knew
that he loved her now, that  this  was love.
    John had watched Georgiana more than once in
the three weeks that had passed since they had been together in his
room. He had seen her riding in the park, at Vauxhall Gardens, at
the opera and at mass in the cathedral, since she had had to
convert to Catholicism when she had married Halford.
    He had known where she would be, because the
steps of a fashionable and dizzyingly rich noblewoman were often
announced in the paper, just as the paper had announced that she
planned to attend this performance
of  Rinaldo  tonight.
    John had told her that he wouldn't try to see
her or seek her out, and he had meant to keep his word, but he
thought that if he only looked at her from afar there could be no
harm.
    Except to him, he realized. He had bought a
place in a box across from hers and it had cost him a sum he should
not spend, but he did not care. He stood at the back of the box, in
darkness, and