“We all missed you,” his mother said, giving him a warm smile. “Surely this can wait a few weeks, or months.”
“Waiting will change nothing, Mother. I am set on this.”
A long, tense silence followed this declaration. “Before you embark on marriage, there is something we must tell you,” his father said. “It is what we called you up here to discuss.”
His mother turned away from him to look into the fire. When he saw how pale she was, the icy hand of fear gripped his heart. God forbid that she was with child again at her age.
He rushed to her side and knelt beside her. “Mother,” he said, taking her hand, “are you unwell?”
Her hand felt clammy to his touch. As he rubbed her fingers against his cheek, he regretted every day he had been away. He and his mother had a special bond. In the unhappy days before William FitzAlan came into their lives, they had been through harrowing experiences that had not touched her other children’s lives. He had been so young he could not be sure how much of his recollections were real. But he still had dreams in which he heard her screaming.
She brushed his hair back from his forehead, a gesture from his childhood. “Truly, I am well.”
He closed his eyes against the surge of relief that coursed through his body and gave a silent prayer of thanks.
“This cannot be about Father’s health,” he said, glancing at his father. “He still looks as if he could slay dragons for breakfast.”
When this old family joke about his father did not bring a smile, Jamie looked from one to the other of his parents. “What is it, then?”
Like many old soldiers, his father still wore his hair cropped short, in the style made popular by their dead king. When he ran his big hand through it, Jamie noticed it had almost as much white as bronze in it now.
“It is my story, William,” his mother said. “I will tell him.”
His father was always more a man of action than of words. After giving her a searching look, he nodded. “If you are certain, love.”
She cleared her throat. “You have always known that William is not your true father.”
Jamie drew in a breath and let it out. After all this time, his mother was finally going to tell him. He got up off the floor and settled himself into the chair opposite her.
William FitzAlan took his place behind his wife and put his hand on her shoulder.
“I never wanted a different father from the one who raised me,” Jamie said, meeting his eyes. “I know I could not have had a better one.”
“Stephen told you some years ago that Rayburn, who was my husband at the time, also was not your father.”
His mother’s speech was uncharacteristically hesitant. He should tell her it did not matter, he did not need to know, but he had waited too many years to hear the truth of his birth.
“I thought… I had reason to believe… that the man with whom I conceived you…”
Hell, this was awkward. He did not want to think about his mother “conceiving” with a man, as she put it, particularly with a man who was not William FitzAlan. He ran his hand through his hair, conscious that this gesture—like so many of his—mirrored those of the man who raised him.
“You thought what, Mother?”
“I never told you about him, because I believed he died shortly after you were born.”
Why did it matter just when the man died?
“I received a message from a monk, who advised me that… your father had come to his monastery gravely ill.”
His mother leaned back in her chair, looking exhausted.
“The monk wrote that the young man hung on the edge of death for days and did not recover,” she said. “But we learned a few months ago that he did survive. The monks thought it a miracle.”
Jamie sat up straight.
“He never left the monastery,” she said. “After he recovered his health, he took vows and joined the brothers.”
“Are you telling me he has been alive all this time?” Jamie demanded. “And that he is amonk?”