‘Listen here, Benedict Dumas, I was thirteen when you were born, thirteen years old! My father sold me to your father, it’s as simple as that. It was a business arrangement. My elder sister Eileen had gone to him first, God rest her, she never got over it. She died because of Henry Dumas, she died out of her mind!

‘Now you listen to me and you listen good. Your mother bought you from me. I was a kid, that’s all. I didn’t know what life had in store for me, I knew nothing, yet thanks to your father I knew everything! I bore you and I loved you, God help me, I loved you more than anything in the world, but circumstances were such that I had to give you up. It was another of the Dumas business deals.

‘Your father was incapable of sleeping with a grown woman, he liked little girls with no breasts and no knowledge of men. He bought and paid for them as other men would a grown prostitute. I’m sorry to shatter your illusions about him, but facts are facts. He shaped my life, Henry Dumas, he shaped it and left me half a woman who felt nothing for years.

‘Not a day has gone by since but I’ve thought of you, Ben. The only child of my body. I’m sorry if I don’t fit the bill, but that’s another thing I can’t do anything about.’

Benedict looked into her face and what he said didn’t really surprise her.

‘I hated Henry Dumas all my life. It’s funny, but my mother’s ... my adopted mother’s ... father was the only man I ever cared for. Yet now I know he was nothing to me really, no blood relation at all.’

Briony was sorry for her outburst, but this big handsome well-spoken man frightened her, even while she loved to look at him and hear his voice. He frightened her because she knew he was looking down his nose at her. Knew he would be ashamed of her, was ashamed of her and what she was. The knowledge made her want to cry.

‘Why did you come here? Why did you want to see me?’

She asked the question even though she was terrified of the answer.

‘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.