Maggie went on. “Mr. Mullens said that Jenny left after that, and that they all assumed she’d returned to her parents’ farm. But by the time she arrived at Beasley Park, she was in a dreadful condition. Not only with child, but half starving, my father said. As if she’d been wandering a good long while. By that time, she believed her baby was illegitimate.”

“And you suggest that my son would have married a gel like that? A tavern wench?” Allendale scowled. “Impossible. He must have known he would come home one day. That I would forgive him. To have attached himself to such an unsuitable female…” He shook his head. “No. Not James.”

“Might he have done it out of spite?” St. Clare asked. “To punish you for casting him off?”

The question hung in the air for a moment. It had a strange effect, changing the very atmosphere around them. As if the suggestion opened a Pandora’s box of painful possibilities.

“Spite?” Allendale echoed at last. Something in his face seemed to crumple. A light in his gray eyes dimming slightly, as if he had absorbed a blow. He grew smaller before Maggie’s eyes, and for the briefest moment, looked every bit of his age. “He might have done.”

Maggie averted her gaze. She felt as though she were witnessing a private moment. One she wasn’t meant to observe. The moment when the Earl of Allendale fully accepted that his late son had been a rogue and a villain, not merely a lad who had gone a bit wild.

“I was too hard on him,” Allendale said. “After he killed Penworthy’s boy. It was the final straw, I told him. I was washing my hands of him. But the breach wasn’t meant to be permanent. He was still my heir. Still my son.”

“You didn’t drive him away,” St. Clare said quietly. “And even if you did, he was a man grown. A man with a child of his own on the way. He could have come back. He should have done, if not for you, then for me.”

Allendale cleared his throat. “No point being maudlin. We are where we are. And you, Miss Honeywell—” He fixed her with a look, no longer soft with memory but hard with disapproval. “You have no business being abroad at this hour. I’ve ordered my carriage to see you home.”

“Thank you, my lord.” She affected a meek expression. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

“My grandson and I will call upon you tomorrow. I trust you mean to proceed with this dinner party of yours?”

Maggie blinked. “You still intend to come?” She flashed St. Clare an alarmed glance. He looked as bewildered as she was. “Mr. Burton-Smythe will be there, and so will his father.”

“And that idiot son of my second cousin’s,” Allendale added. “And his mother.”