He still found it difficult to comprehend that she had not married. When he had left, he'd been sure that she would be wed within the year, if not sooner—as soon as her father could arrange for it.

He had not cared to stay and watch the ceremony. He was a contemptible French scoundrel, so he went to France. To his bloodthirsty delight, he'd found that Bonaparte had good use for young men with bruised hearts and even more deeply lacerated pride. For a few years Trev had labored under the name of Thibaut LeBlanc and shot at Englishmen, starved hideously, looted Spanish peasants, and learned how far down he could plunge into brute existence. What final vestige of pride or humanity he retained was burned out of him at Salamanca. He had not rejoined the crushed remnants of his company as they retreated; he'd surrendered instead to a British aide-de-camp who recognized him from their school days, and spent the rest of the wars in the reasonable comfort of various officers' prisons, interrogating French captives for Wellington's staff.

He might have gone back to Shelford after Waterloo. Instead he had remained in France. He'd begun to write to his mother, but somehow he had not told her of the battles or the ruin he had found at Monceaux, or the burned-out shell of her childhood home in Montjoie. Somehow he had written instead of how he would win it back for her, the fabled château and the titles and everything she had lost.

He knew all the stories. His grandfather had made certain of that. Instead of nursery rhymes, Trev had been weaned on tales of the Terror, of his father's heroism and his mother's sacrifice. His father had not surrendered, like Trev, but gone as a true nobleman to his fate. His mother had barely escaped the mob. Trev owed his life and his baptismal name to one Captain Trevelyan Davis, an enterprising Welshman who had smuggled her and her five young children across the channel just two days before she gave birth to him.

In spite of the bloody backdrop, his childhood had been golden. He didn't miss a father or a country he'd never known, but he remembered his pretty mother laughing while she taught his elder brother to dance. Trev had worshipped Etienne as only a seven year-old could worship a dashing brother of thirteen. Those had been the sweet, carefree times, the years of perfect boyhood bliss. Then one day Etienne had tried to raced his hot-blooded horse past a carriage, and amid a crush of wheels and his mother's frenzied grief, Trev's brother had died, and the sunny world of childhood ended.