Chapter 20
Edward had barely finished breakfast when Giles brought the letter.
“From Lincoln’s Inn, Your Grace,” the butler said, silver salver steady, expression as neutral as ever. Only the faintest tightening around his eyes betrayed any awareness of how the name might land.
Edward wiped his fingers, took the envelope, and broke the seal. Latham’s hand, precise and compact, marched across the page.
Your Grace,
Further to our previous correspondence on the matter of Lord Deverell, I write to inform you that his lordship has removed from his former lodgings and taken up residence in York.
The forwarding address is enclosed. He expressly declines to return to Town at present, but indicates willingness to receive you privately should you find yourself in that region.
Kindly advise if you wish me to press him further or leave the matter to your own discretion…
The words blurred, then sharpened, as if the paper breathed.
York. North. On the road to … Scotland. The idea slid into his mind so naturally he almost mistrusted it on principle.
Isla had spoken more than once, carefully, always carefully, of wishing to see Strathmore again with her own eyes.
To reassure herself that the staff were housed, the tenants not left destitute.
Alistair’s silence had disturbed her greatly.
If he suggested a journey north, on the face of it, to support her, to see the state of her family seat, no one could call it unreasonable. A dutiful husband accompanying his wife to her ravaged home.
A duke assessing, perhaps, a future investment. They could travel as far as York and stop there. A night, perhaps two. Enough time to call on Deverell. To look the man in the eye, to see if he recognized Isla or if she recognized him.
If she did, if some flicker of guilty recognition passed between them then Deverell’s statement would be confirmed. If she did not…
Relief tugged at him, unwilling and sharp.
He wanted more than he liked to admit to find that he had been wrong.
That Deverell’s accusations were colored by shame and Glenmore’s whispers.
That Isla’s warmth in the hayloft, her fierce concern for Strathmore’s people, were not weapons but simply…
her. He folded the letter, fingers resting on the crease.
“Thank you, Giles,” he said. “Has Her Grace gone out?”
“To the paddocks, I believe, Your Grace,” Giles replied. “Harold Godwin mentioned she wished to see the young grey worked on the long rein.”
“Very good,” he said. “If I am needed I will be in my study.”
***
Lady Eleanor did not trouble to knock. She burst into Edward’s study as if she were still Duchess, with claim to go where she wished.
“Edward, I wanted to talk to you about dear Charlotte …”
“And I do not. I am occupied,” Edward replied, tersely.
“I did not bring her here simply to aid me in the charity exhibition.”
“I am not so naive.”
“She was once very dear to you.”
Edward glared at his mother, slapping his hand against the surface of his desk.
“No, she was not. We were thrown together by agreement of our parents. I was never consulted. Neither was she.”
“That is how your father and I became married. That is how half the gentry of England become married.”
“Not me.”
“She came here at my request, putting aside her own engagements, to assist with the exhibition and to give you the opportunity to right the wrong you once did.”
“I have done no wrong to her. Nothing except end our engagement which was not one founded on love anyway. I just followed my desire to be free.”
“To escape your duty, you mean.”
Edward pinched the bridge of his nose, sudden weariness overcoming him.
“I grow tired of the same battle fought over and over, mother. Kindly surrender. It matters not that Charlotte is here for I will not be.” He picked up Latham’s letter from the desk, turning it over between his fingers.
“This is from my solicitor,” he said. “Lord Deverell is in York. I mean to go there. With Isla.”
“Isla is gone,” his mother said.
The words were so at odds with the thought in his mind that for a moment they did not land.
He looked up sharply. “Gone?”
“Left this morning,” the Dowager replied. “Driving herself in the trap. I assumed you knew. She said you had agreed it was best.”
He rose so fast the chair tipped and fell.
“You let her leave,” he said. “Alone on the road.”
“Hardly alone,” Lady Eleanor said. “She is hardly a helpless child. She has been most insistent on her independence.”
“There are highwaymen,” he said. “Accidents. Illness. The distance…”
“You sailed to India at eighteen,” she cut in. “But your little Scotswoman cannot manage the Great North Road with a Wexford purse?”
“She is my wife,” he said, voice low and dangerous. “I am responsible for her safety.”
“She is a danger to herself,” the Dowager retorted. “She terrorizes your guests. She pries into wings you have clearly marked as forbidden. You should be grateful she has gone. The air in this house is easier without her.”
He stared at her. “You speak as if she broke into a bank, not rattled a door handle.”
“That door,” Lady Eleanor said sharply, “is not just any door. It leads to your father’s rooms. The things he left. The thoughts he did not share.”
He went very still.
“My father’s …” He swallowed. “I know his papers are stored there. I ordered them kept together.”
“There is more than papers,” she said. A curious, almost taunting light came into her eyes. “Did you never wonder what he thought of you? Truly?”
“I know what he thought,” Edward said, the old ache rising. “He thought I was a disappointment.”
“He told you so,” she said. “Often enough. But men do not always say what they mean. They write it. In diaries. In letters never sent.”
He stared. “Diaries?”
“One in particular,” she said. “I did not know of it until after he died. It was in the bottom drawer of his writing table. I … read it.”
“You never told me,” he said.
“What would it have served?” Her mouth twisted. “You hated him enough already. I did not see why I should complicate the neatness of your resentment.”
“What did he write?” The question escaped him before he could cage it.
“That,” she said, with sudden, wicked satisfaction, “you may discover for yourself. If you choose to go into those rooms at last.”
He pictured it with painful clarity. The locked wing opened.
Dust motes dancing in light not seen in years.
His father’s desk. A drawer. A book. His father’s hand on the page.
Maybe condemnation, as he had always assumed.
Maybe something worse. Or, impossibly, approval.
A thing he had never had. A thing he had convinced himself he no longer needed.
“If you know where the diary is,” he said slowly, “why have you left it there?”
“Because it is not mine,” she said. “It is his. And yours, perhaps. If you are brave enough to read it.”
He took a breath that shuddered. “When I return with Isla, I will do so.”
Her eyes narrowed. “When you return?”
“I am going after her,” he said simply.
“Edward,” she said, exasperation sharpening to anger, “do not be a fool. Let her go. She has what she wanted. She is back with her brother, free from English company. You, meanwhile, could remain here and put your life in order. It may not even be too late to seek an annulment. The marriage is recent. No issue has come of it. The Church is sympathetic to alliances entered into under pressure.”
He laughed, short and humorless. “Do you hear yourself? You speak as if you are negotiating the return of a defective bolt of cloth.”
“I am speaking as your mother,” she said. “I see you walking toward a cliff and I am trying to pull you back.”
“You see only the drop,” he said. “Not what might be on the other side.”
“On the other side is ruin,” she said flatly. “Of your fortune. Your reputation. Your prospects. Charlotte may forgive much, but not a heart once given to a woman who used you.”
“Charlotte has tried to use me more in the last fortnight than Isla has,” he said.
It is truth. Charlotte has done nothing but attempt manipulation of me. Perhaps Isla does the same but that is yet to be proved.
She stiffened. “How dare you.”
“How dare you,” he shot back. “You speak of Charlotte as though she were a prize mare to be stabled here just in case I come to my senses. Do you know what the makes you, mother?”
Her chin lifted. “Choose your next words very carefully.”
He stopped himself, barely, from voicing the comparison that had leapt to his tongue. A brothel madam. A woman arranging assignations for profit. The thought hung between them anyway, loud in the silence.
“I will not cast off my wife to satisfy your preference for a particular pedigree,” he said instead. “Nor will I leave her to travel the length of the country with no protection but your good opinion of the roads.”
“She chose to go,” Lady Eleanor insisted. “You could remain. You could read the diary. You could finally know that your father did not despise you as much as you think. Is that nothing to you?”
It was not nothing. The longing for his father’s approval, buried under years of anger and salt water, stirred like something waking.
Then another image overlaid it. Isla on the road.
A carriage axle cracking, a wheel sliding in mud.
Rough men at an inn, seeing only a young woman of quality and calculating what her jewelry might fetch.
A fever caught from some damp, cold lodging. A letter arriving days too late.
Honor, Lieutenant Ravenscroft, is what you do in a storm when the choice is between yourself and someone who cannot swim.
Those were the words of Captain Rearden. Charlotte was safe on dry land. Isla was rowing out into dangerous waters. Honor’s demands were clear. His mother watched his face, saw the struggle, and pressed her advantage.
“If you go,” she said quietly, “I will burn it.”
He looked up sharply. “Burn what?”
“The diary,” she said. “Your father’s words. His thoughts. The truth you have wanted all these years. If you walk out of this house now, I will see to it that by the time you return there is nothing but ash in that drawer.”
He stared at her.
“You would destroy it,” he said. “Out of spite.”
“Out of necessity,” she replied. “If you will not be guided, there is no use leaving weapons for you to turn against yourself. Better you never know than that you know and still throw your life away on that … woman.”
“That woman,” he said, very softly, “is my wife.”
Silence. He could feel the weight of the ultimatum settling over him like a damp cloak. He thought of her standing in this room, chin lifted, telling him she would not be a cow at market. Of her hands on a horse’s neck.
Of her face when she spoke of Moira and the old gardener and the children in the south courtyard.
Of the way she had brushed his hair, so lightly he had almost believed he dreamed it.
He thought, too, of himself. The man he had tried to be aboard the Argus.
The man Rearden had expected when he said:
If there is danger to your crew and comfort to yourself, you know which side of the line you stand on, Wexford. Or you are no officer of mine.
He was not an officer now. But the line remained.
His mother’s eyes were fixed on him. “Well?” she said. “What matters more? A woman who has brought you nothing but trouble, or truth from a man whose opinion you have let rule your whole life?”
He moved. Not to the bellpull. Not to the drawer where the keys lay in their orderly box.
He crossed to the writing table, opened the top drawer, and took out a small steel and flint.
The same tools he had used a hundred times at sea to coax reluctant tinder into flame.
He set them carefully on the desk, between himself and his mother.
“If you are determined to set something alight,” he said, “you will find these useful.”
Her lips parted. “Edward …”
“I will not leave my wife on that road alone,” he went on. “Not for the sake of a diary. Not for the sake of your schemes. Not for the sake of ghosts.”
He stepped around the desk, picked up his riding gloves from the chair back, and shrugged on his coat before striding from the room without looking back. Within minutes he was saddling a horse. Honor, once chosen, did not permit dawdling.