“She wore your gown, the one I bought on our wedding trip. And your betrothal ring.” For weeks after they found the body he hadn’t allowed his housekeeper to touch the filthy rag and muck-
encrusted gold and diamond band. Looking upon them each day had been his penance. His own living hell.
“I had them when I ran away to find my parents. I thought Mama and Papa were here in town, but they were not. I sold the gown and ring to a girl on the street for money so that I could hire a wretched room. It was horrifying, filthy, and there were rats. I didn’t sleep. But I was able to send word to Papa and Mama and they came and fetched me. When I heard about the girl and how you and everyone else believed her to be me, I was sorry.”
“Sorry? Did you pause to consider her family?”
“I don’t think she had one. She was a—a—” Her brow grew more fretful. “From the people I saw her with, I’ve no doubt she met the end she expected to someday.”
“That is unforgivably cold, Cornelia.”
“I was frightened of you! You had—” Her voice broke off. “James had died and I did not know what you would do next.”
He turned. “An affecting story, to be sure.”
She stared at him.
“Do you hate me so much still?” she whispered.
“No. I never did.” The admission no longer surprised him. “Rather, myself.”
Her lower lip quivered.
“Then do you—Can—Leam? Husband, can you love me still?”
His stomach turned.
“When, I wonder”—he could barely mouth the words—“will you ask after your son?”
Her eyes widened. She folded her hands in her lap. “How is he?”
“Well.”
“Does he…?” She blinked as though deterring tears. “Does he ever speak of me?”
“Rarely, which is to be expected. You know, your maternal devotion intrigues me.” He took up his glass and refilled it, the brandy barely touching the icy center of his chest.
“What do you mean? I have missed knowing him dreadfully,” she said quickly, a slight whine to her tone now. “I have, Leam. You must believe that.”
“I don’t, really.” He downed the spirit, then lowered the empty glass from his lips and set it on the table. “Especially since you left him in the care of a man you feared would do you serious harm. For years.”
Her mouth opened and closed.
Taking up his hat and crop, he moved toward the door. The rustle of her skirts preceded her light footsteps across the floor. She grasped his sleeve.
“Don’t go, Leam. Please.”
He looked down at her small hand wrapped around his arm like a talon, her knuckles white.
“Do not worry yourself needlessly, my dear,” he said, drawing air into his compressed lungs. “I will return. And when I do, I expect you to still be here.”
She released him. “I—I will be.”
“Cornelia?”
“Yes, Leam?”
He looked into her face, so close now, and saw fear and uncertainty behind her blue eyes. “Why did you reveal yourself now?”
“Mama and Papa said you had thrown off your ungentlemanly ways quite abruptly,” she whispered. “As long as you adopted them, I knew you would not remarry.” Her pink lips curved into a quivering smile, and for a moment her dimples flickered to life. “My Leam would not court a lady looking like anything but a perfect prince.”
She reached to touch him again. He moved away.
Not swiftly enough he was on the street, mounting his horse, and riding—he knew not where, he knew not for how long. Only that he sought motion to give rest to his careening mind. He would move until he could no longer, then he would drink. In the activity or alcohol he might find sanity.
Something in her eyes and tone rang false. Falser than years ago. He would discover it and finally lay his ghosts to rest.
Kitty did not receive callers or pay calls. She kept to her personal chambers, once daily walking to her brother’s house. She read to Serena, and brought over interesting books and music. When her sister-in-law wished to rest she went home and locked herself in her rooms once more.
She told her mother she was unwell and disinterested in company, and indeed felt perfectly wretched, inside a welter of unhappiness. At lunch near the end of the week her mother questioned her.
“You look pale, Kitty. This malady is persisting far longer than I like.”
“Oh, no doubt I will be well enough shortly.” In a hundred years or so. Dear Lord, she hadn’t imagined anything could hurt so much. Her heartbreak over Lambert Poole held nothing to the pain inside her over losing Leam to his dead wife. She felt faint perpetually, as though living in a terrible dream.
“You are not eating.”
“It is a stomach complaint, Mama.” Nausea beyond anything she had ever felt, thorough, endless, filling her heart and head. She folded her napkin and placed it on the table. The footman came forward to pull out her chair.
“John, Lady Katherine is not yet ready to retire from the table,” the dowager said. “That will be all.”
“Yes, mum.” He left them alone.
“Mama, truly I feel quite peaked. Allow me to wish you a pleasant afternoon at the salon with Lord Chamberlayne and—”
“Kitty.” Her mother’s voice was soft and firm. “Lord Blackwood has called on you several times daily for nearly a sennight.”
Kitty barely managed to lift her brow in an attitude of curiosity. It was difficult to do so and not succumb to tears.
“Oh, really?” John and Mrs. Hopkins had delivered each of his calling cards to her personally.
“How persistent of him.” She should speak with him. But once they spoke it would be truly over and she was not yet ready for that. She needed time to accustom herself to losing him before she had ever really had him.
“You have heard, no doubt, the remarkable news?”
“What news is that, Mama?”
“His wife appears to have returned from the dead. Apparently she suffered an accident and amnesia. Her parents have only just discovered her in an Italian convent.”
“How nice for them all.” She pushed out her chair, holding the tears at bay as she had been doing for days. “Mama, I really feel quite ill. Please excuse me.”
She went to her room and, sitting on her bed, she did not cry. Instead, she grabbed the chamber pot and cast up her accounts.
She cleaned herself up and went to the clothes press for a fresh gown. Misery, it seemed, would not be tidy.
Her new riding habit beckoned to her. Charcoal gray, with black lace about the high neckline and cuffs and a matching pillbox hat, it suited her. But she hadn’t any place to wear funereal garb.
Except, perhaps, she did.
She rang for her maid and dressed, calmer than she had been in weeks.
Within a half an hour she was dismounting before a modestly stylish town house on a quiet street.
The gated park across the way was charming, the neighborhood of good quality, the homes of genteel ladies and well-to-do merchants and such. A pair of school-aged boys played at spinning wheels on the corner and gave her friendly tugs on their caps before she ascended the steps to the front door.
The drawing room was elegant, devoid of pretension yet fashionable, with silk hangings in the Oriental style and Chinese and East Indian vases and urns all about. A half-dozen ladies sat around the tea table. The butler announced her.
The chamber went silent. A single titter sounded, a lady pressed her kerchief to her lips. Then silence once more.
“Do come in, Lady Katherine. My friends were just leaving.” The lady’s voice was smooth and perfectly modulated.
Mrs. Cecelia Graves had always, in Kitty’s memory, seemed enormously elegant. She still did. Her taffeta gown of mauve was modestly cut and trimmed in black fur and embroidery with tiny black beads sewn in for glimmer. It was a gown much like Kitty might someday choose for herself, suitable to a woman of ma
ture yet not advanced years. Her hair, dark gold with only a hint of gray, curled neatly beneath a cap of the finest Belgian lace, and on her ears and neck shone deep, rich amethysts set in gold.
Kitty’s father had given Mrs. Graves those amethysts. She knew this because one day shortly after her return from Barbados, she had stolen into her father’s study late at night, searching for some correspondence from Lambert indicating that he sought Kitty’s hand.
Instead, on her father’s desk, she had noticed a receipt for the amethysts from the jeweler’s. But, contrary to her expectations, Kitty had never seen them on her mother. One day she asked her mother about them, and the countess told her all that she had not known before.
The lady had been widowed at a very young age. She lived alone in town and off-season in Derbyshire, with an elderly female relative as a companion. She was something of an heiress and had no need to remarry.
Her mother never told her the lady’s name. But eventually, when Kitty made her own bows to society, she heard it from girls who called themselves friends, from girls who pretended to disapprove yet were secretly titillated, Kitty understood now.
One by one the other ladies stood, said their good-byes, and departed, each giving Kitty a curtsy or nod, a few even a smile as they passed her. Finally the room was empty. Kitty could not move, attached to the threshold of the drawing room of the woman she had never once spoken to although she had shared her father’s life for decades.
“Come now. You have come here of your own accord, and I shan’t bite.”
She went forward. Mrs. Graves’s expression of benign interest did not change. Without a word, she shifted her cool blue gaze from Kitty’s face down her person, then back up again.
“You were a plump little thing back then,” she finally said. “All cheeks and round belly. I never imagined you would become such a beauty.”
Kitty’s tongue finally loosened. “I suppose I am to take that as a compliment.”
The lady studied her thoughtfully. “Why have you come here, child?”
“Could you never have any of your own?” She did not pause for niceties. There were none in her heart. “Is that why you chose a man who already had his own family? Because you could not conceive a child and did not wish to ally yourself with a man who expected children? You were young when your husband died, after all. You could have married again.”
Mrs. Graves’s lips pursed. “You are impertinent. But you have clearly given this a great deal of thought.”
“I have wondered all these years.” Kitty clasped her hands over her own useless womb. “I wish to know finally.”
The lady regarded her for a long moment, her eyes ever cool.
“He did give me a family. Yours.” She assessed Kitty again, this time only her face, but her gaze was penetrating. “I knew you when you were a babe, when you were a girl, and when you grew nearly to womanhood. Then he died and I haven’t known a thing about you since, except what I read in the papers and hear through the gossips.” She gestured about her drawing room as though indicating the women who had just left. “The same with your brothers, of course.” Her lips grew stiff. “Do you think a woman could wish to have a family in that manner?”
“He never cared about us. Or even you, I think,” Kitty heard herself say. “He could not have been a caring person and have done what he did to my mother. He was a hard man.”
“But a constant one.”
“To one too many women.”
“I loved him, you know. With my whole heart.”
“That,” Kitty said through clenched teeth, “does not excuse you.”
Mrs. Graves stood, a small woman, compact and exquisitely elegant.
“Spend your life hating me, child, if you wish. You will not be the first.” She moved past Kitty and out of the chamber.
Kitty rode home blindly, tears clogging her eyes that she strove to hide from passersby. She hurried up the stairs to her bedchamber, nearly stumbling on the steps. But her mother sat in her room, staring out the window. She looked around and her elegant features fell into sorrow.
“My dearest daughter.” She sighed.
“I paid a call on Mrs. Graves.”
The dowager’s eyes widened. “Whatever for?”
“Whatever for? Mama.” Moisture trickled down Kitty’s cheeks. She tore off her gloves already ruined by tears and swiped them across her eyes. But without the shield of tears through which to see her mother, she found the compassionate, wise brown eyes too much to bear. She turned away, pressing the back of her hand to her mouth. “She told me I could choose to hate her my entire life, if I wished, but that I would not be the first.”
“You would not. She is a lady of influence in some circles and has enemies. But none of them is I.”
Kitty swung around. “What do you mean, not you?” She shook her head. “You have never spoken with her in society. You have never called on her. You never even spoke of her to me except that once.”
“Kitty dear, it would not have mattered if I had. She and I are nothing alike and I daresay would have little to speak about if we did meet in society.”
Kitty stared. “Then you did not cut her because of Papa?”
“I never cut her at all.”
“You did! We have been at the same balls and parties with her on any number of occasions.”
“We avoid one another, it is true.”
Kitty sucked in breath. “But why don’t you hate her?” she exclaimed, her voice breaking.
“Why should I? I had what I wished from your father, three wonderful children and several comfortable homes. She did not hurt me.”
“But—but, Mama.” Kitty’s insides twisted. “Those months you sent me to Barbados with Alex and Aaron, when Papa rusticated Alex for whatever indiscretion he’d committed that time…” After so many years, the words stumbled from her. “Why did you send me there, Mama, all alone, with only my governess, if not because you were fighting to win him back?”
The dowager’s face went still, only her eyes alight with feeling now.
“I was fighting then still. You are correct. I still hoped. But not to win his heart, only to win a certain measure of discretion from him.” Finally her brow wrinkled. “He was taking her about in society a great deal in those days, and I was to bring you out soon. I did not want your first season colored by gossips’ wagging tongues. I fought for months to force him to cease publicly flaunting their alliance, and I won.”
“At my expense. You left me alone and Lambert Poole used me.”
The dowager’s throat worked. “I could not have known that would occur at the time.”
“Why,” Kitty whispered. “Why did you never speak of it to me?”
“I did not truly realize the extent of the injury until after your first season.”
“After I let him finally ruin me.”
“You are never ruined, Katherine.” The dowager’s voice was stern, her eyes suddenly flashing.
“You have a spirit within you that cannot be cowed by any man, or even a woman. Or all of society.
You must always remember that. No matter what another person may do to you or say of you, your heart is your own.”
“Do you know, I have sometimes thought—sometimes, that I did that to him because I couldn’t do it to Papa. I could not hurt Papa like he hurt you by allowing that woman to come first with him. So I hurt another man instead.” Kitty’s whole body shook. She knelt at her mother’s feet and laid her head upon her lap. “Oh, Mama, I am so unhappy.”
She wept. Softly her mother stroked her hair.
“Mama,” she finally whispered when the tears had slowed. “I want what you had. I want a family of my own. I do not want to become her.”
“You needn’t become her. You are still young enough to have a splendid family. You might yet fill a nursery.”
She lifted her head and sat back on her heels, wiping her cheeks.
“I cannot conceive a child. There. I have said it to you. It
is proven I cannot.”
Her mother’s face stiffened. “How is it proven?”
“I was with Lambert many times, Mama. At first it was because I loved him and believed he would marry me. After it became clear that he wished only for Alex to suffer through my ruination, I devised a plan of revenge. I determined to do whatever I must to learn his secrets so that someday I might publish them to the world and bring him shame. I allowed him to believe I still loved him and I continued to allow him liberties. In this way, on occasion, I gained access to his personal chambers.”
Her mother’s cheeks were white. “For how long did this persist, Kitty? Until last summer when he was exposed?”
“No.” Until three years ago when a Scottish lord laid his beautiful gaze upon her and she began to imagine a manner of living free of twisted anger and pretense. “But for long enough.”
The dowager’s voice quieted. “I knew of the first occasion only. That night when you came to me in tears, I realized what you were not able to tell me directly.”
“I suspected so. I did not imagine you would allow me to remain unwed unless you understood that I was no longer fit to be a gentleman’s bride.” She took a trembling breath. “I saw a physician, and Lambert even showed me proof of his own ability to father children. I shan’t have a family of my own.
But I will be happy to be aunt to Alex and Serena’s children.”
Her mother studied her for a moment, then touched her fingertip to Kitty’s chin and lifted her face to the light.
“You will be a wonderful aunt.” She kissed Kitty’s brow. “Will you come out with me and Douglas tonight? It may improve your disposition to see friends, to remember that you are admired and appreciated by many.”
Kitty shook her head. “I must look frightful and I feel wretched. Perhaps tomorrow, Mama.”
She did not attend her mother on any outings for the following several days. Her illness persisted, allowing her an unexceptionable excuse to remain within. But finally she was able to eat some dinner.
The following day she walked in the park with Serena and paid a call on Lady March, agreeing with both the countess and her mother that she would attend the season’s opening ball that evening. It was sure to be a thorough crush; she would be able to escape it early if she wished without her mother’s notice.
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