Free Gail Whitiker by A Scandalous Courtship

action, but it was not what your mother chose to do.’
    ‘Why not?’ Robert abruptly halted his pacing. ‘Whatin God’s name was she thinking? What could have possessed her to take a baby home and pretend it was hers? It is beyond all things conceivable, not to mention incredibly stupid and irresponsible.’
    ‘Your mother thought it was anything but irresponsible at the time,’ Lady MacInnes told him. ‘Indeed, I think Charlotte felt the irresponsible person was the one who had left the baby in her carriage in the first place.’
    ‘Undoubtedly. But the logical remedy for that would have been to take the baby back into the inn and leave it there!’ Silent for a moment, Robert struggled to sort through the chaotic whirl of thoughts and emotions clogging his mind. ‘How did you find out what my mother had done?’
    ‘She wrote to me about a week after she got home.’
    ‘What did she say?’
    ‘That she had found an abandoned child in her carriage and that she intended to keep it.’
    Robert stared at her. ‘You must have been flabbergasted. Both at what she’d done, and that she’d had the courage to admit it to you.’
    ‘I was shocked that she wanted to keep the child, but not that she’d wanted to tell me.’ Lady MacInnes sighed. ‘Your mother and I were very close, Robert. In fact, I looked upon her more as a sister than as a cousin, and when she came to stay with me rather than go to London to be with Prudence after your father’s death, I was absolutely delighted. But she stayed with me for eight months, and it was obvious she wasn’t with child at any time during her stay, so she could hardly have pretended that the child was John’s. A deceit like that could only be perpetrated on people who didn’t know any better. I did, so she had to tell me.’
    ‘She could have pretended it was another man’s, even to you.’
    ‘Oh, my dear, she would never have done that. Charlotte loved your father with all her heart. The last thing she would have done was claim that the child was another man’s. She would never have disgraced John’s memory in such a way.’
    Robert swallowed, abruptly feeling the guilt for having thought exactly that—and for having held it against his mother his entire adult life. ‘Go on,’ he said harshly.
    ‘Well, after she wrote to tell me about the child, I immediately came here to see her,’ Lady MacInnes continued. ‘I thought perhaps I might be able to talk some sense into Charlotte, and to convince her to see reason. But I soon realised that there would be no changing her mind. Your mother told me, without emotion or histrionics, how she had found the baby in her carriage, and how, after a great deal of consideration, she had decided to keep it. Then she showed me the letter.’
    Robert froze. ‘There was a letter?’
    ‘Yes. Tucked down inside the shawl the baby came wrapped in.’
    ‘What did it say?’
    ‘Only that the child’s mother was dead, and that the father knew nothing of its existence. Charlotte even showed me the shawl in the hopes it would convince me that Hannah had not come from the depths of poverty and degradation.’
    ‘And did it?’
    Lady MacInnes shook her head. ‘Hannah could have been wrapped in gold for all the difference it would have made to me. She was still a foundling as far as I was concerned. But the shawl was a lovely piece of work,and your mother was right, it could have been worn by a lady of quality or a gentleman’s daughter.’
    ‘What did you say? About the baby, I mean.’
    ‘Well, naturally, I was appalled. I accused your mother of having lost her senses. I told her that to take an unknown child home and raise it as her own was not only a contradiction of society’s laws, but of God’s. But she wouldn’t listen. She told me she understood my feelings but that she had no intention of giving the child up, or of denying that Hannah was her own. Instead, she tried to appeal to my sense of compassion. She begged me