“I wasn’t sure.” It was a relief to put it into words. “Sometimes they would leave home, but they generally told me where they were going, and they’d never been gone for three whole days.”
“You never found out what they were doing in London?”
She shook her head. “No one knows. My father was driving the curricle because we didn’t have a coachman, and he went off Blackfriars Bridge. From what they told me, he tried to rescue my mother.”
“Neither of them survived?”
She swallowed, feeling the same old lump of grief going down her throat again. “He wouldn’t have wanted to live without her.” It was stupid, stupid, stupid, to feel that her father should have wanted to live for her. Half the time he didn’t even remember she was alive.
Thorn reached out and grabbed her wrist. Then he pulled her forward, and she toppled onto his lap.
“What are you doing?”
He wound his arms around her, and India stopped thinking about her parents.
“Your father and mother should have told you they were leaving,” he said into her ear. “They should have wanted to make sure you were safe. I can see that they weren’t wonderful parents. But I am absolutely sure that they loved you.”
“How can you know?” India said, her voice cracking.
“I’ve been in the Thames a thousand times,” he said. “The water is murky at the best of times, and it would have been stirred up by the carriage and horses. A person gets turned around trying to swim in the muck, and there’s a wicked current slashing around the curve just past that bridge. Boys would dive down and never come up, and we never knew what had happened to them.”
India’s eyes were prickling, and she turned her cheek against his shoulder. “I—I think they might have been leaving home for good.”
“Why do you think that?”
“We had no money, but my mother did have some jewelry.”
“You implied once that you had been hungry as a child. They allowed you to go without food, although they had jewelry they could have sold?” His voice was incredulous.
“The set was given to my mother by her grandmother,” India explained. “She couldn’t sell it.”
“She could,” Thorn said bluntly. “She should have.”
India’s mouth wobbled. She had thought that sometimes, but it was terribly disloyal. “She planned to give them to me. Except she must have changed her mind, because they took them to London, and obviously they were going to sell them. I realized later that they must have decided to go to the Barbados. They always talked of it.”
His arms tightened around her, and he asked, “Where was Lady Adelaide during your childhood?”
“She was married and living in London. She had no idea what it was like in the country.” India used to dream that a fairy godmother would arrive, bringing beautiful gowns, or perhaps just a clutch of eggs . . . but it never happened. One day rolled into another, and when one was worrying about food and the coming winter, anxiety made the days blur together. There were whole years of her childhood that she couldn’t quite remember.
Anguish tightened in her chest. Thorn must have realized, because he dropped a kiss on her hair just as the first sob struggled out of her mouth.
“I n-never cry,” she gasped five minutes later.
“It’s all right,” he whispered, his deep voice as soothing as the caress of his hand on her back. “There are parents who make terrible decisions, India, but that doesn’t mean they don’t love their children. I do not believe for a moment that your parents scooped up those jewels, planning to leave you behind.”