“Something Jane’s aunt said. She’s forever mistaking people for their forebears. She caught a glimpse of you tonight through the carriage window and thought you were your father—Jim, she called him.” Maggie searched his face. “It is true, isn’t it?”

“It’s true,” he admitted. “James Beresford was Gentleman Jim.”

He hadn’t realized how much of a burden the truth was until he confessed it to her. No one else knew of it, save his grandfather. And the Earl of Allendale wasn’t much for talking about the past. Not St. Clare’s past, anyway. His boyhood in Somerset was a subject the earl had discouraged almost from the first moment they’d met.

“How ever did you find out?” Maggie asked. “The night you left Beasley Park, all you had was the merest suspicion. And that was only that a highwayman was your father, not a nobleman.” Her eyes widened on a sudden thought. “Did you ask after him at the hedge tavern in Market Barrow? The one where Jenny used to work?”

St. Clare’s thumb moved over her jaw in a slow caress. And then he dropped his hand. He exhaled heavily. “I didn’t go to Market Barrow. I couldn’t risk it. It would have meant riding inland, instead of to the coast.”

“But how—”

“I went to Bristol, just as I’d planned. I asked after Gentleman Jim at every tavern I passed. All the while, I was dreading the moment the authorities would catch up with me and haul me back to Somerset to face the noose. And it wasn’t only them I feared. On one occasion, two sailors from His Majesty’s Royal Navy nearly impressed me into service. I managed to get away from them, but it was a very near thing.”

“I thought you must have joined up. I thought you’d become a soldier or a sailor and gone away to fight Napoleon.”

“Nothing so noble as that. I carried on with my search for Gentleman Jim. Kept looking—kept asking. Nearly got myself killed once or twice venturing into the wrong places.” He still had the scars to prove it. Grim mementos of his early days searching for his father. “He wasn’t as romantic a figure as you and I made him out to be, Maggie. He was an out-and-out rogue who kept dangerous company. Rumor was he’d escaped to the continent. To Italy some people said, by way of Geneva.”

“So you traveled there yourself?”