She gasped when she saw Kane behind her.
“Turn around,” he said, “I have something for you.”
She turned back toward the mirror and, as she did so, Kane slipped a cascade of diamonds about her neck. They fitted high on her neck like a tall collar, with looping strands falling over her collarbone. There were long, double-strand earrings to match.
He stepped back to look at her. “Good,” he said, and took her hand in his and led her to his bedroom.
Without saying a word, very aware of the cool diamonds around her throat, she sat down in the blue brocade chair in front of an inlaid round table.
Kane went to a panel in the wall, slid aside part of the molding and released a little handle. The panel moved back to expose a safe built into the wall.
“Very few people in the world know the whole of the story I’m about to tell you. Some people know parts of it and have guessed at the rest of it, but they’ve been wrong. I’ve only been able to piece it together after years of work.”
From the safe he removed a leather portfolio, opened it, and handed Houston a small photograph. “This is my mother.”
“Charity Fenton,” she whispered, looking at the pretty woman in the picture, very young, both her eyes and hair dark. She looked up to see surprise on Kane’s face. “Edan told me who she was.”
“He told you everything he knows.” He gave her a photograph of four young men, all looking nervous and out of place in the photographer’s studio. Two of the men looked like Kane. “These are the four Taggert brothers. The youngest is Lyle, Ian’s father, next is Rafe, then Sherwin, then my father, Frank.”
“You look like your father,” she said.
Kane didn’t reply but put the rest of the contents of the portfolio on the table. “These are originals or copies of all the documents that I could find pertaining to my parents or to my own birth.”
She only glanced at the papers, blinking once at a copy of a family tree that showed a Nathaniel Taggert who’d married a twelve-year-old French duchess, but soon looked up as she waited for him to continue and tell her the story behind the papers, to explain his many years of hatred for his mother’s family.
He walked to the window, staring down at the garden. “I don’t guess you know anything about Horace Fenton, since he died long before you were born. He was Jacob’s father. Or at least Jacob thought Horace was his father. The truth was that Horace gave up tryin’ to have his own kids, so he adopted the newborn baby of some people travellin’ to California after they were killed by a stampede of horses. But Jacob was only a few years old when Horace’s wife finally had a little girl, and they named her Charity because they felt so lucky.
“From what I could find out, there’s never been a kid more spoiled than Miss Charity Fenton. Her mother took her travellin’ all over the world, her father bought her ever’thing she even thought she wanted.”
“And how was Jacob treated?” Houston asked.
“Not bad. Ol’ Horace spoiled his daughter, but he taught his adopted son how to survive—maybe so Jacob could support Charity after her father died. Jacob was trained to run the empire that Horace’d built.
“I’m not sure how they met. I think Frank Taggert was elected to present some grievances to Fenton about the sawmill—that was before the coal mines were opened—and he met Charity. Anyway, they took to each other pretty fast, and she decided that she wanted to marry Frank. I don’t guess it crossed her little spoiled mind that her father would ever deny her anything.
“But Horace not only refused to let his daughter marry a Taggert, he locked her in her room. Somehow, she managed to escape and spend two days with Frank. When her father’s men found her, she was in bed with him, and told her father she was gonna have Frank Taggert even if her life depended on it.”
“How terrible for her,” Houston whispered.
Kane took a cigar from a drawer by the bed and lit it. “She got him, though, because two months later she told her parents she was pregnant.”
“With you,” Houston said softly.
“With me. Horace kicked his daughter out of the house and told her she was no daughter to him. His wife went to her bed and stayed there until she died four months later.”
“And that’s why you hate the Fentons, because you are rightfully an equal their with Jacob, but you were sent to the stables.”
“Equal, hell!” Kane exploded. “You ain’t heard half the story. Charity moved down to the slums where the Taggerts lived, the only place they could afford on what Fenton paid ’em, and hated it. Of course, nobody would talk to her since she was one of the Fentons, but, from what I heard, her uppity ways didn’t help none.
“Two months after she married Frank Taggert—and I have the marriage certificate there—he was killed by some fallin’ timbers.”
“And Charity had to go home to her father.”
“He was an unforgivin’ bastard. Charity’d tried to make it without him, but she nearly starved. I talked to a maid that used to work for Fenton, and she said that when Charity returned she was filthy, thin and heavily pregnant. Horace took one look at her and said that she’d killed her mother and that the only way she could stay was as a servant. He put her to work in the scullery.”
Houston rose to stand beside her husband and put her hand on his arm. She could feel him trembling with emotion. Kane’s voice quietened. “After my mother put in fourteen hours of scrubbin’ Fenton’s pots, she went upstairs, gave birth to me, and then very calmly hung herself.”
Houston could only gape at him. “No one helped her?”