Chapter 6 #3
Rosalind offered him a faint, apologetic smile. “I hope you understand.”
A ghost of a smile answered hers. She had forgotten how easily he smiled. It transformed him, softening the careful reserve that had settled over him since they met again. For the briefest instant, she caught a glimpse of the young man she had known years ago.
Before she realized what she was doing, she smiled back. The realization unsettled her enough that she looked away first.
“If our positions were reversed, I should do exactly the same.”
Something shifted between them.
The questions remained exactly as they had been. William was still the last man known to have seen Father alive.
Yet, for the first time, Rosalind found it increasingly difficult to reconcile the quiet kindness before her with the man she had convinced herself must be hiding something.
It would have been easier if he had been cold.
Easier still had she not begun remembering all the reasons she had once liked him.
She wondered whether they might truly be searching for the same answers.
For tonight, that was enough.
By the time she, her mother, and Isabella finally departed the exhibition, Rosalind felt as though she had lived through several evenings rather than one. William's apology lingered beside his mother's reassurance.
The duchess’s advice refused to leave her thoughts. And now William's discovery threatened to unravel everything she had refused to believe about her father's disappearance.
She scarcely remembered the journey home.
The carriage rolled through the evening streets while Isabella spoke now and then, though Rosalind could not afterward have repeated a single word.
Father had paid for the horse.
Why?
Why commit himself to such an expensive purchase if he intended to disappear the very next day?
Nothing about it fit.
By the time the carriage drew to a stop before Carlisle House, Rosalind had reached only one conclusion.
They had overlooked something.
Inside, Lady Eastmere retired almost immediately, exhaustion finally overcoming the composure she had maintained throughout the evening.
Rosalind watched her disappear upstairs before turning to Isabella. “I should like to look through Father's study once more.”
Isabella did not hesitate. “Of course.”
The room remained almost exactly as Edmund Carlisle had left it.
His chair stood neatly behind the desk. The inkstand rested where he always kept it. Several ledgers remained stacked in orderly piles, awaiting a master who had never returned to finish his work.
Rosalind crossed the room slowly, her fingertips trailing across the familiar edge of Father's desk.
She had searched this room more times than she cared to count.
Tonight she hoped only that exhaustion or grief had caused her to overlook something before.
Without a word, they began again.
Isabella moved to the cabinet where Father's correspondence was kept while Rosalind settled behind the desk, unlocking the center drawer with the small brass key she now carried herself.
Blank stationery lay neatly stacked beside a bundle of estate accounts. Several sealed documents awaited delivery to the family's solicitor. Everything appeared precisely as she remembered.
Nothing.
She closed the drawer and opened another.
More ledgers.
Receipts tied together with faded blue ribbon.
Her hand was already moving to close it when something caught her eye.
Tucked against the back panel, half-hidden beneath one of the account books, rested a single folded sheet of paper.
It was alone.
Not tied with the household correspondence. Not filed among the accounts. Simply... waiting.
Rosalind frowned. Her pulse quickened as she reached for it.
The moment she turned it over, the breath left her lungs.
Written across the front, in a hand she would have recognized anywhere, were only a few simple words.
To my beloved wife... and my darling Rosalind.
The room seemed to fall away around her.
“Rosalind?”
Isabella's voice sounded strangely distant.
She could not answer.
She knew every stroke of Father's handwriting. She had watched those same elegant letters appear on birthday cards, little notes left beside her breakfast tray, and books he insisted she read before returning them to his shelves.
She had spent weeks searching for some sign that he had intended to leave them.
Now she held one in trembling hands.
“What is it?” Isabella asked again, abandoning the cabinet and hurrying to her side.
Rosalind swallowed hard.
“It...” Her voice failed her. She tried again. “It's Father's.”
Neither woman spoke after that.
Rosalind slipped a finger beneath the seal.
She hesitated.
Once it was broken, there would be no returning to this moment. Whatever Father had intended to tell them had remained hidden until now.
She drew a careful breath and broke the wax.
The paper crackled softly as she unfolded it.
Isabella leaned closer, and together they stared at the familiar script.
Rosalind steadied herself before beginning to read aloud.
“And thus the heart will break…
yet brokenly live on.”