More than a Mistress/No Man's Mistress by Mary Balogh

his glass. On this occasion its use was an affectation anyway. His eyesight was not so poor that he could not see her perfectly well without it. He let the glass fall to his chest.
    â€œMy mother and father were a perfectly happy couple,” he said. “I never heard them exchange a cross wordor saw them frown at each other. They produced three children, a sure sign of their devotion to each other.”
    â€œWell, then,” Jane said, “you have just disproved your own theory.”
    â€œPerhaps,” he said, “it was because they saw each other for only a few minutes three or four times a year. As my father came home to Acton Park, my mother would be leaving for London. As she came home, he would be leaving. A civil and amicable arrangement, you see.” One he had thought quite normal at the time. It was strange how children who had known no different could adapt to almost any situation.
    Jane said nothing. She sat very still.
    â€œThey were wonderfully discreet too,” he said, “as any perfect couple must be if the harmony of the marriage is to be maintained. No word of my mother’s legion of lovers ever came to Acton. I knew nothing of them until I came to London myself at the age of sixteen. Fortunately I resemble my father in physical features. So do Angeline and Ferdinand. It would be lowering to suspect that one might be a bastard, would it not?”
    He had not spoken those words to hurt. He remembered too late that Jane Ingleby did not know her own parents. He wondered who had given her her last name. Why not Smith or Jones? Perhaps it was a policy of a superior orphanage to distinguish its orphans from the common run by giving them more idiosyncratic surnames.
    â€œYes,” she said. “I am sorry. No child should have to feel so betrayed even when he is old enough, according to the world’s beliefs, to cope with the knowledge. It must have been a heavy blow to you. But I daresay she loved you.”
    â€œIf the number and splendor of the gifts she brought with her from London are any indication,” he said, “she doted on us. My father did not depend upon his months in London for pleasure. There is a picturesque cottage in a remote corner of Acton Park, Jane. A river flows at the foot of its back garden, wooded hills grow up around it. It is an idyllic setting indeed. It was home during several of my growing years to an indigent relative, a woman of considerable charm and beauty. I was sixteen years old before I understood just who she was.”
    He had always intended to give the order to have that cottage pulled down. He still had not done so. But it was uninhabited now, and he had given his steward specific orders to spend not a single farthing on its upkeep. In time it would fall down from sheer neglect.
    â€œI am sorry,” she said again as if she were personally responsible for his father’s lack of taste in housing his mistress—or one of them anyway—on his own estate with his children in residence there. But Jane did not know the half of it, and he was not about to enlighten her.
    â€œI have much to live up to, you see,” he said. “But I believe I am doing my part in perpetuating the family reputation.”
    â€œYou are not bound by the past,” she told him. “No one is. Influenced by it, yes, perhaps almost overwhelmingly drawn to live up to it. But not compelled. Everyone has free will, you more than most. You have the rank, the wealth, the influence to live your own life your own way.”
    â€œWhich, my little moralist,” he said softly, narrowing his eyes on her, “is exactly what I am doing. Except now, of course. Such inaction as this is anathema to me. Butperhaps it is a fitting punishment, would you not agree, for having taken my pleasure in the bed of a married woman?”
    She flushed and looked down.
    â€œDoes it reach your waist?” he asked her. “Or even