‘I had to know you, I had to see you and talk to you. I had to know what stock I had come from, I had to know if you were as low as I had been told...’

Briony laughed then, a heartrending little sound that was nearly crying.

‘And am I?’

Benedict finished the brandy in one gulp and looked into the face so like his own.

‘Yes, you are.’

With that he stood up and left the room.

Briony heard his footsteps as he walked to the front door, she heard the crunch of his expensive boots as he walked across the gravel of the drive and away from her.

Then the tears did come and with them the burning heat of humiliation and shame.

He was her son, her boy. She still loved him with every ounce of her being.

Benedict walked from his mother’s house and down the drive in a state of terror and shock. He had seen her, spoken to her. He had sat in her house. The biggest impression she had made on him was the fact she looked the same age as him. They could have been brother and sister.

As he pulled open the door of his car and got into the driving seat, he felt his heartbeat begin to slow down. His pulse was not so erratic now and he took long deep breaths to calm himself.

She was so young.

Brother and sister.

The thoughts swirled around in his head, making him dizzy. He saw her then in his mind’s eye as a young girl, a very young girl of ten or eleven. He saw his father as he had seen him in countless old photos, taking the young girl as a grown man might a woman. Taking her as his right. After all, he had paid for her. He saw the frightened face, her crinkly red hair and those huge green eyes. The scene before his eyes sickened him, and the way he had hurt her sickened him more. But, oh, he had wanted to hurt her, that girl-woman who had borne him. He had wanted to make her hurt as he had been hurting for the last year.

But hadn’t she been hurting for fifty years? Over fifty years in fact. Since she had first come into contact with his father? Hadn’t he wanted to hurt her because she had abandoned him, given him to Isabel and Henry Dumas, when she was his flesh and he was hers. When they were mother and son?

Hadn’t he wanted to hurt her for every hurt inflicted on him by a father who couldn’t stand the sight of him, who had wickedly tortured the young boy in his care because he was the product of Briony Cavanagh and for no other reason but that? Because his mother had been a young girl, a young child, and Henry’s wife Isabel had bought his son from her because she wanted a baby so desperately?