“You cannot speak for either of them. She is your mother, and the child—my child—has come of age.”

She said nothing but merely turned her head away from his determined face, to gaze down at the empty grate again. He controlled his temper with an effort but could not stop himself seeing that she had matured into a strong square-faced beauty. She looked like a woman of authority who cared nothing for how she appeared and everything for what she did.

“The child is twenty-one years old now, and can choose for himself,” he insisted.

Again, she said nothing.

“It is a boy?” he asked tentatively. “It is a boy? I have a son?”

“Twenty-one gold coins, at the rate of one a year, does not buy you a son,” she said. “Nor does it buy you a moment of her time. I suppose that you are a wealthy man now? You have regained your great house and your lands, your king is restored and you are famous as one of those who brought him back to England and to his fortune? And you are rewarded? He has remembered you, though he forgets so many others? You managed to elbow yourself to the front of the queue when he was handing out his favors, you made sure that you were not forgotten?”

He bowed his head so that she should not see the bitterness in his face that his sacrifice and the danger he had faced had done nothing more than bring a lecher to the throne of a fool. “I am fully restored to my family estates and fortune,” he confirmed quietly. “I did not ever stoop to curry favor. What you suggest is . . . beneath me. I received my due. My family were ruined in his service. We have been repaid. No more and no less.”

“Then twenty-one pistoles is nothing to you,” she triumphed. “You will hardly have noticed it. But if you insist, I can repay you. Shall I send it to your land agent at your great house in Yorkshire? I don’t have it in coin right now. We don’t keep that sort of money in the house, we don’t earn that sort of money in a month; but I will borrow and reimburse you by next week.”

“I don’t want your coins. I want . . .”

Once again her cold gaze froze him into silence.

“Mrs. Stoney,” he cautiously used her married name and she did not contradict him. “Mrs. Stoney, I have my lands, but I have no son. My title will die with me. I am bringing this boy—you force me to speak bluntly to you, not to his mother, and not to my son, as would be my choice—I am bringing him a miracle, I will make him into a gentleman, I will make him wealthy, he is my heir. And it will be her restoration too. I said once that she would be a lady of a great house. I repeat that now. I insist that I repeat it to her in person, so that I can be sure that she knows, so that she knows exactly, the great offer I am making her. I insist that I repeat it to him, so that he knows the opportunity that lies before him. I am ready to give her my name and title. He will have a father and ancestral lands. I will acknowledge him . . .” he caught his breath at the enormity of the offer, “I will give him my name, my honorable name. I am proposing that I should marry her.”