Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The wind tore at Lydia’s clothing as she followed the old, familiar path through the gardens and into the wider estate beyond. The rust on the gate bit at her fingers. The darkness felt as though it might swallow her whole, and the rain spat at her face.
Still, she walked.
She didn’t precisely know where. All she knew was the night contained every emotion she had locked in her chest, and she needed to go somewhere safe to release them.
Her chest ached.
Grief held her in its grasp as she made her way through the woodland that lined the edge of the estate’s grand gardens. Once, it had been part of the parkland that ladies and gentlemen had walked around, but it had since been neglected, more attention given to the formal gardens beside the house.
The path was barely visible in the darkness, and she stumbled more than once. The trees’ skeletal branches did little to protect her from the storm, but she didn’t care.
She kept walking and walking. Until finally she got where she was looking for.
The moment Alexander reached Halston Manor, he strode inside the doors without waiting for the coachman to hand him down. “Where’s the duchess?” he demanded of the nearest footman. “Has she arrived?”
“Her Grace?” Oliver blinked at him, looking perplexed. “I thought you and she were arriving together, Your Grace.”
Alexander inhaled through his nose, fighting the urge to hurl something against the wall. “So she hasn’t returned home?”
“Not to my knowledge, Your Grace.” The man turned and opened the servants’ door, speaking to a maid there. Then he returned his attention to Alexander. “I’m afraid I don’t know where she is, sir.”
“Prepare warm blankets for her,” he barked, looking at the storm raging outside. If something had happened to her—
No, he wouldn’t think it.
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Hot soup, hot cocoa, anything that might warm her.”
“Of course, Your Grace.”
Without another word, Alexander turned and strode from the house once again. This time, however, he didn’t bother with the carriage. What cared he for getting wet? And he would be faster traveling cross-country on a horse.
“Prepare my gelding,” he commanded as he approached the stables, snatching a lantern and holding it aloft.
“Where are you going at this time of night, Your Grace?” Philips asked, entering through a side door.
“To find my wife,” Alexander said shortly.
The stable boys scrambled to fulfil his request, and Alexander ground his teeth as he glared at the rain. Was it possible she was still at the house? Miss Parsons had not specifically informed him that she had gone.
If she intended to hide away at the house until she perceived him to have left, then…
He would go there first.
The moment his horse was saddled, he swung atop it. “Send out search parties,” he instructed his head groom. “Check around the house and surrounding areas in case there’s a chance Her Grace tried to make her way home and lost her way.”
The head groom, a worn, kindly faced man with a patient expression, nodded his head. “At once, Your Grace.”
Without waiting for anything more, Alexander swung his mount around and set off for Harrogate’s house once again.
The minutes slipped by as the miles slowly passed beneath his horse’s thundering hooves.
Instead of traveling the roads, he took a path across fields and over hedges.
This was the land he used to cross as a boy; he had taken a horse and ridden this way more than once.
He used that knowledge now, and faster than he could otherwise have hoped to arrive, he reached the house. Lights blazed from the windows; the ball was evidently still in full flow.
And yet, even as he strode inside the door, dripping wet, he knew Lydia wasn’t there.
How, he didn’t precisely know, but know he did.
“Your Grace!” the butler gasped, rushing to his side. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Bring me Lady Harrogate,” he commanded. “Tell her the Duke of Halston wishes to speak with her.”
“At once!” the man nodded, slipping away. Alexander stood in the hallway, barely noticing the way he dripped across the marble floor, as he waited for Lady Harrogate to appear. After only a few minutes, she did, her expression tightening when she saw his condition.
“You haven't found her?” was the first thing she said. “Eliza—Miss Parsons—informed me you were looking for her.”
“I thought she might have returned home, but I was mistaken. Is she not still in the house?”
“I've been looking for her since you left.” Lady Harrogate wrung her hands. Unlike the combative Miss Parsons, she didn't appear to blame him for his wife's disappearance. “Could she have gone to London? I hardly know why she would, but—”
“There is no reason for her to,” Alexander cut in, raking a hand through his wet hair. His mind raced through possibilities, each more terrible than the last. Where could she have gone in this weather? What if she'd been hurt? What if—
Footsteps sounded behind Lady Harrogate, and Lord Harrogate emerged from the depths of the house, the portrait clutched in his hands.
“Your Grace,” he said, slightly breathless. “Before you go—I know the timing is poor, but you left so abruptly earlier. This portrait—my wife insisted I return it to you tonight.” He pressed it into Alexander’s hands. “It belongs with the duchess.”
Alexander barely spared it a glance, his patience fraying. “Not now, Harrogate. My wife is missing. I don't have time for—”
His eyes fell on the portrait for a second, and his world stopped.
The girl in the portrait couldn't have been more than twelve or thirteen.
She sat in a garden chair, her posture stiff with the self-consciousness of youth.
Her copper hair was pulled back, but several rebellious curls had escaped to frame her face.
And her eyes—those hazel eyes that shifted between green and brown depending on the light—stared out at him with an expression that was both despairing yet hopeful.
Ever since returning to York, something about those eyes had struck him as familiar…
Now, he recognized those eyes at once.
Alexander's hands began to shake. Not from the laudanum withdrawal that had plagued him for so long, but from something else entirely. Recognition, sharp and undeniable, pierced through him.
“Lydia, darling! Get back here!”
A girl, running through woodland at dusk, tears streaming down her face.
“What are you doing, miss?”
He saw her now as she had once been… so small, so frightened, standing waist-deep in freezing water with death in her eyes.
The way she had shuddered when he pulled her from the pond.
The desperate grip of her hands on his coat.
The trust she had placed in two strangers who had promised her everything would be well…
“We shall contrive together,” a man's voice—her father's voice—had echoed through the trees as they led her home. “Just the two of us. You'll see.”
But her father was dead.
Dead because of him.
The portrait slipped from nerveless fingers. Lady Harrogate caught it with a gasp, but Alexander barely registered the sound. His vision tunneled, the edges of the world going dark.
All this time.
All this time, she had been that girl.
The one he'd saved. The one whose anguish had moved him so deeply he'd thought of her often in the years that followed, hoping she'd found the happiness he'd promised. The girl whose grief had reminded him, even in the depths of his own sorrow over Helena, that others suffered too.
And he had married her. Married her and abandoned her. Married her, not knowing—not seeing—that she was the same girl who had already trusted him once before. Who had looked up at him with those enormous eyes and believed him when he said everything would be well.
“…Your Grace?” Lady Harrogate's voice seemed to come from very far away. “Are you quite all right?”
He'd failed her. Not once, but twice. First by being the reason her father died. And second by not recognizing her, by not remembering the promise he'd made to a frightened child in the dark.
“You'll see…” her father had said.
But Alexander hadn't seen. Hadn't seen anything.
“Your Grace!” Lady Harrogate's hand on his arm finally broke through his stupor. “You have gone quite pale. Should I fetch the doctor?”
Alexander sucked in a breath, his lungs burning as though he'd been underwater. His mind struggled to reconcile past and present, the threads of his life suddenly weaving together in a pattern he'd been too blind to see.
She had trusted him then. Had she married him now because of that trust? Because some part of her remembered the boy who had pulled her from the water and held her until she stopped shaking?
The irony was viciously sharp. She had placed her faith in him because he'd once saved her life. And he had repaid that faith by abandoning her to a life of loneliness.
“The pond,” he gasped, the realization hitting him like a physical blow. His head snapped up, wild eyes meeting Lady Harrogate's confused gaze. “Dear God. She has gone to the pond.”
“What pond? Your Grace, I don't understand—”
But Alexander was already moving, shoving the portrait back into Harrogate's hands and striding toward the door. His heart hammered against his ribs, terror lending speed to his steps.
The place where they'd first met. The place where she'd once stood in freezing water, contemplating an escape from unbearable pain.
If history was repeating itself—if she had gone there again, seeking the same dark comfort…
Please. Let him not be too late. Not this time…