by Mary Balogh
“It was not impossible to find her,” the solicitor continued, “even though we did not know by what name she had been admitted to the institution or indeed which orphanage it was. Neither was it difficult to find the solicitor through whom the business of supporting her was conducted. Mr. John Beresford is a lawyer of some distinction in Bath and has his offices close to the Abbey. He was not willing to talk to my man, for which I can only commend him, but knowing that his lordship was deceased and that Brumford, Brumford & Sons had represented him in all his other business dealings as well as his father and grandfather before him, he did agree to talk with me if I would go to Bath in person and show him ample proof of my identity. I went without hesitation or delay and was able to reassure Beresford that I had the young lady’s best interests at heart in that his late lordship’s widow, with the full concurrence of the Duke of Netherby, the present Riverdale’s guardian, had commissioned me to find her and make a generous settlement upon her.”
If there was a long version of a story to be told, Brumford would invariably choose it, Avery thought. Camille had heard enough. Her back had stiffened and she spoke up.
“If you are about to disclose that this . . . woman for whom you searched was my father’s—” But she could only inhale sharply rather than speak the word. “You really ought to have followed your instructions and made this report privately to my mother and His Grace, Mr. Brumford. Such sordid details are not for my sister’s ears or mine or those of Lady Jessica Archer, who is not even out of the schoolroom yet. I wonder at your temerity, at your vulgarity. I wonder that His Grace—”
“Bear with me, ma’am, if you please,” Brumford said, holding up one hand, palm out. “In a moment it will be clear why this must be said to all of those gathered here, painful as I am sure it is. Beresford informed me, with full documentation to put the truth of what he said beyond any doubt, that twenty-six years ago the recently deceased Earl of Riverdale, who bore the courtesy title of Viscount Yardley at the time, being his father’s heir, but called himself merely Mr. Humphrey Westcott, married Miss Alice Snow in Bath by special license and settled her in rooms there. One year later, almost to the day, Lady Yardley, who appears to have known herself only as Mrs. Westcott, was delivered of a daughter. When the child was a year or so old, however, she moved back to live with her parents, the Reverend Isaiah Snow and his wife, in a country vicarage several miles from Bristol, her health having broken down. She died there of consumption two years later. The Reverend Snow and his wife for undisclosed reasons found themselves unable to keep the child and raise her, and the girl’s father, by then the Earl of Riverdale, removed her from the vicarage and delivered her to the orphanage in Bath, where she grew up and where she was still living, in the capacity of teacher at the orphanage school, until a few days ago.”
“Good God!” Harry had leapt to his feet and turned to stare behind him at the woman sitting close to the door. “You? You are our father’s . . . ? No, you are not his by-blow, are you? You are his legitimate daughter. Good God. You are my half sister. Good God.”
The dowager countess too had turned her head and raised a lorgnette to her eyes.
The woman herself looked back at Harry, apparently unmoved by what she had just heard. But Avery, observing her more closely through his quizzing glass, noted that her knuckles were whiter than they ought to be.
What she was, he thought, was Lady Anna Westcott, legitimate daughter of the late Earl of Riverdale. Interesting. Very interesting indeed. But Brumford had not finished.
“There is more, sir,” he said, addressing Harry and clearing his throat again, “if you will be seated.”
Harry sat, turning his head slowly away from his newfound sibling. He was looking more pleased than outraged.
“I checked certain crucial facts and made a disturbing discovery,” Brumford continued. “I had Beresford check them too, but I had not been mistaken. The dates on the relevant official documents showed to our shocked eyes—and you may believe me that we were very deeply shocked—that Humphrey Westcott, Viscount Yardley, married Miss Viola Kingsley at St. George’s Church here on Hanover Square four months and eleven days before the death of his first wife.”
Ah. All was suddenly clear.
Avery let his glass drop on its ribbon. A stunned silence fell upon the room. Brumford mopped his brow with a large handkerchief before continuing.
“The marriage of Lord Yardley to Miss Kingsley was bigamous and therefore invalid,” he said. “It remained invalid after the death of his first wife. The children of that illicit union were—and are—illegitimate. The late Earl of Riverdale had only one legitimate child, Lady Anastasia Westcott.”
For a moment longer the silence resumed and held. Then someone wailed horribly—Jess—and Avery pushed himself away from the wall. The dowager countess was on her feet, her lorgnette trained upon the woman by the door while Lady Matilda Westcott produced a vinaigrette from her reticule and tried to press it upon her mother while making bovine noises probably intended to be soothing. Elizabeth, Lady Overfield, spread both hands over her face and bowed her head forward until it almost touched her knees. Baron Molenor set an arm about Mildred’s shoulders in an unprecedented display of public affection for his wife. The countess too was on her feet and turning to look back, her face drained of color. The duchess, also out of her chair, Jess clutched to her bosom, was promising to call down fire and brimstone upon Brumford’s head and to have him disbarred for incompetence and other assorted crimes and cast into some deep, dark dungeon. Abigail had buried her face against her brother’s shoulder and got to her feet when he did. Camille was loudly declaring that such vulgarity was not for the ears of delicately reared ladies and she would listen to no more of it. Alexander Westcott was sitting rigidly to attention and gazing at an ashen-faced Harry. His mother was clutching Alexander’s arm.
Lady Anastasia Westcott, alias Anna Snow, sat straight-backed on her chair, her hands clasped in her lap—without his quizzing glass Avery could not see if they were still white-knuckled—and looked calmly back at them all. Perhaps, Avery thought, she was in shock.
He strolled forward and set a hand on his stepmother’s shoulder. He squeezed slightly while smoothing the other hand over Jessica’s head. “A lawyer,” he said, “cannot be disbarred or imprisoned or cast into hell merely for telling the truth.” Unfortunately.
He had not raised his voice. Yet it seemed everyone had heard him, including his stepmother, who stopped talking and closed her mouth with a clacking of teeth. Everyone looked at him—the dowager through her lorgnette while she batted away her daughter’s hand and the vinaigrette. There was expectation on almost every face, just as there had been earlier when he walked into the room, as though they expected him to wave some magic wand—his quizzing glass, perhaps?—and set their world to rights again. But ducal powers were, alas, finite.
“I believe,” he said, “Brumford has more to say.”
Miraculously everyone who was standing sat down again, Molenor removed his arm from about his wife, and there was silence once more. The solicitor looked as though he wished he had been disbarred years ago, or had never been barred, if that was indeed the opposite of disbarred. He must ask Edwin Goddard, Avery thought. He would know.
“The late Earl of Riverdale’s nearest legitimate paternal male relative and therefore the rightful successor to his title and entailed properties is Mr. Alexander Westcott,” Brumford said. “Congratulations, my lord. All his unentailed properties and all of his fortune, according to the will he made at Beresford’s office in Bath twenty-five years ago, now belong to his only daughter, Lady Anastasia Westcott, who is here present, having been fetched from Bath.”
The countess rose again and turned, a look of strangely mingled blankness and resentment on her face. “And this is all my doing,” she said, addressing the woman who was Lady Anastasia Westcott, sole legitimate daughter of the late earl. “I
thought to do you a kindness. Instead, I have disinherited my own son and shamed and beggared my daughters.” She laughed, but there was no amusement in the sound.
“Harry is no longer the earl?” Abigail asked of no one in particular, her hands creeping up to cover her mouth, her eyes huge with shock.
“But I have no wish to be the Earl of Riverdale,” Alexander Westcott protested, getting to his feet and frowning ferociously at Brumford. “I have never coveted the title. I certainly have no wish to benefit from Harry’s misfortune.”
“Alex.” His mother rested a hand on his arm again.
“You,” Camille said, rising to her feet and pointing an accusing finger at Lady Anastasia. “You conniving, scheming . . . creature. How dare you sit here with your betters. How dare you come here at all. The Duke of Netherby ought to have had you tossed out. You are nothing but a vulgar, ruthless, fortune-hunting b-b-bastard.”
“Camille.” Lady Molenor rose and reached across the chair in front of her to try to draw her niece into her arms. But Camille pushed them away and took a step back.
“But it is we, Cam, who are the bastards,” said Abigail, as ashen faced as her mother.
There was a beat of shocked silence before Avery’s sister Jessica wailed again over the horrible blow that had just been dealt her favorite cousins and launched herself once more at her mother’s bosom.
Harry laughed. “By Jove,” he said, “and so we are, Abby. We have been disinherited. Just like that.” He snapped a finger and thumb together. “What a lark.”
“Humphrey was always trouble,” the dowager countess said. “No, Matilda, I do not need smelling salts. I have always maintained that he worried his father into an early grave.”
Another voice spoke, soft and low pitched, and silenced them all, even Jess. It was the voice of a schoolteacher accustomed to drawing attention to herself.
“I am Anna Snow,” the voice said. “I do not recognize the other person you say I am, sir. If I am indeed the legitimate daughter of a father and mother I now know by name for the first time, then I thank you for disclosing those facts. And if I have indeed inherited something from my father, I am pleased. But I have no desire to take more than my fair share, however much or little the whole might be. If I have understood you correctly, the young man in front of you and the young ladies on either side of him are also the children of my father. They are my brother and sisters.”
“How dare you! Oh, how dare you!” Camille looked as if she were about to burst with outrage.
Harry laughed again, a little wildly, and Abigail clutched his arm.
“Miss Westcott,” Brumford said. “Perhaps—”
But Camille, realizing suddenly that he was addressing her, whipped about and turned her outrage on him. “I am Lady Camille Westcott to you,” she said. “How dare you!”
“But you are not, Cam, are you?” Harry said. He was still laughing. “I am not even sure we are entitled to the name Westcott. Mama certainly is not, is she? What an absolute lark.”
“Harold!” his aunt Matilda said. “Remember that you are in the presence of your grandmother.”
“Brothers! Oh, I could murder Humphrey,” the duchess said. “I am only sorry he is already dead.”
“You would have to stand in line behind me, Louise,” Lady Molenor said. “He was always a toad. I was never fond of him even if he was my own brother. I would not have said that in your hearing before today, Viola, or in yours, Mama, but now I will not hold back.”
“My love.” Molenor patted her hand.
Avery sighed. “Let us retire to the drawing room to imbibe tea or whatever other beverage takes anyone’s fancy,” he said. “I find myself having had a surfeit of rose pink for one morning, and I daresay I am not the only one. It is too much like seeing red. Brumford doubtless has an office and other clients awaiting him and may be excused for the present. Her Grace will lead the way. I shall follow with Lady Anastasia.”
But Lady Anastasia Westcott had risen to her feet at last and was buttoning her cloak at the neck. Her bonnet and gloves and reticule were upon the seat of her chair. “I shall return to Bath, sir,” she said as Brumford drew level with her on his way out. “I have duties awaiting me there. Perhaps you would direct me to the stagecoach stop and lend me the money for a ticket if what I have with me is not enough. Or perhaps there is enough in my portion of the inheritance from my father to make a loan unnecessary.”
She drew on her bonnet and tied the ribbons beneath her chin while addressing the rest of the room. “No one need worry that I will impose myself further upon a family that clearly does not want me. My father did none of us a good turn, but I cannot apologize for the devastating effects this morning’s disclosures are having upon his other family any more than any of you can apologize to me for a near lifetime spent in an orphanage, not even knowing that Snow was not my legal name or Anna my full first name.”
They all watched her as they would a riveting performance onstage. She was just a little slip of a thing, Avery thought, and quite unappealing in her cheap, dreary garments and severe hairstyle, which had all but disappeared beneath her bonnet. Yet there was something rather magnificent about her, by Jove. She did not appear either upset or discomposed, though she had described them all as a family that clearly did not want her. She was like an alien creature to the world in which she had found herself this morning, and the world to which she belonged by right. She had just wondered if there was enough money in the fortune she had inherited to pay for a stagecoach ticket to Bath. She clearly had no idea she could probably buy every stagecoach in the country and all the horses that went with them without putting so much as a dent in her inheritance.
She followed Brumford from the room, and no one made any move to stop her. Everyone filed upstairs in an unnatural silence. Avery found the solicitor and the heiress still in the hall when he emerged last from the room.
“There is a great deal of business to be discussed, my lady,” Brumford was saying, rubbing his hands together. “It would be altogether more convenient if you were to remain in London. I took the liberty of reserving you a suite of rooms at the Pulteney for an indefinite period as well as the services of Miss Knox as chaperone. The carriage is at the door. I will be happy to send you back there if you do not wish to go up to the drawing room with the Duke of Netherby.”
She looked consideringly at Avery. “No,” she said. “I need to be alone, and I believe the other people who were here this morning need to be able to talk freely without the encumbrance of my presence. I can walk back to the hotel, though, sir. I am far more accustomed to walking than to riding in a carriage.”
An alien creature, indeed.
Brumford made a suitably horrified response, and Avery strolled past them and outside, to where a carriage did indeed wait, complete with a large, hatchet-faced woman inside, who looked more like a prison guard than a chaperone. Brumford stood back with much bowing and scraping as Avery offered his hand to help Lady Anastasia in. She ignored it and entered unassisted. Perhaps she had not seen it—or him. She sat beside the chaperone and gazed forward.
Avery reentered the house and proceeded upstairs to the drawing room and the Westcott family, minus its newfound member—its wealthiest member.
Even he could not complain that this morning had been a crashing bore.
Five
Dear Joel,
Do you remember how Miss Rutledge’s too-oft-uttered repertoire of wise sayings used to make us groan and cross our eyes at each other? One we always particularly hated was “Beware what you wish for—your wish may be granted.” It seemed so cruel, did it not, when our dreams were so very precious to us? But she was right!
I have wished and wished all my life, just as you have and almost all the other children with whom we grew up and whom we teach now, that I knew who I was, that I could discover that I came of distinguished parents, and
that I would be taken at last to the bosom of my rightful family and be showered with riches, not necessarily all of them monetary. Oh, Joel, my dream came true today, except that it seems more like a nightmare at this precise moment.
I am writing to you from my private sitting room at the Pulteney Hotel—I do believe it is one of the grandest London has to offer. It seems like a palace to me.
Were you told about Miss Knox, the chaperone appointed me for my journey? I daresay you were, and by more than one person. She is still with me. She has withdrawn to her own bedchamber, though she has left the door ajar between the two rooms, presumably so that she may feel she is keeping proper guard over me and is doing the job for which she was hired. She is a very silent person. Today, though, I am thankful for that fact.
This morning I was taken to a vast mansion on a regal square with a park at the center of it in surely the most exclusive part of London. As soon as I set foot inside the door, I was promptly ordered by the most frightening man I have ever seen to leave again—he turned out to be the owner of the house and A DUKE!
But after it was established that I really was in the right place, I was shown into a room where thirteen other people waited. One of them—she turned out to be A DUCHESS—instructed the very superior butler to remove me, but again it was confirmed that I was supposed to be there.
No one actually spoke to me or to one another after I had arrived, though it was quite clear they were all outraged. So much for my best Sunday dress and my best shoes! In addition to the duke (who came into the room after I did) and the duchess, who must be his mother rather than his wife, I believe, the young Earl of Riverdell or Riverdale—I am not sure which—was there with his mother and his two sisters. There was also a very young lady all in white and five other ladies and two gentlemen, of whose identities I am not perfectly sure.
Joel, oh, Joel, I must rush ahead with my narrative here. The young earl and his sisters are MY BROTHER AND SISTERS. Oh, I know, Miss Rutledge would have frowned her disapproval of those capital letters and the ones I used earlier. She would have said they are the written equivalent of a rudely raised voice. But, Joel, they are my half siblings! (Miss R was not overfond of exclamation marks either, was she?) Their father, the Earl of Riverwhatever, was also MY father. You see? I cannot help but rudely raise my voice again. Moreover—oh, moreover, Joel—my father was married to my mother, who was Alice Snow before she married him. My real name, though I am not at all sure I shall ever be able to bring myself to use it since it does not sound at all like me, is Anastasia Westcott, or more accurately LADY Anastasia Westcott. My mother, who had left my father and taken me to live with her at a vicarage somewhere near Bristol—the vicar was her father, my grandfather—died when I was still an infant, and my father died just recently. I narrowly missed knowing him, though I suppose that was by his choice. After my mother’s death he took me to the orphanage in Bath and left me there.