Chapter 30
Rosalind had decided she loved Wales.
Perhaps that was an unreasonable conclusion to draw after everything that had happened there, but four days at the Duke of Merriton’s estate had done much to soften her opinion.
The house stood on a rise not far from the Welsh border, surrounded by green hills that seemed to roll endlessly toward the horizon.
From the windows of the room they had given William, Rosalind could see fields broken by hedgerows, distant trees, and a road winding away until it vanished behind the hills.
There was something wonderfully anonymous about it.
No one here cared that she was the daughter of the Earl of Eastmere or that her father had disappeared from London under circumstances half the ton had probably begun inventing explanations for.
No one watched to see whether Lord William Sinclair escorted her into a room or whether she smiled too often in his direction.
For four days, she had simply been Rosalind.
She stood beside the window now, one hand resting against the frame while morning sunlight warmed her face.
“I think I might stay.”
Behind her came the rustle of paper.
William looked up from the correspondence spread across his lap. He was sitting in an armchair near the bed, dressed properly for the first time since arriving, although the careful way he held himself betrayed the wound beneath his waistcoat.
“Stay where?”
“Wales.”
“Permanently?”
“I am considering it.”
William set the letter aside. “And what precisely would you do here?”
Rosalind glanced back at him. “Anything I liked.”
“That sounds dangerous.”
“That is why I find it appealing.”
His mouth curved.
Rosalind turned toward the view again. “It feels rather like freedom. I can walk through the gardens without wondering who has seen me or ride into a village without imagining what story someone will tell about it later. Even the servants know too little about me to expect anything.”
William was quiet for a moment before he said, “I understand.”
Rosalind looked at him and suspected he did, perhaps better than anyone.
Four days earlier he had spoken of an endless road beneath a peach-colored sky, of a place where he might go anywhere he chose.
Her father was alive, William loved her, and for the first time in weeks, Rosalind was not chasing an answer or racing toward some new danger. There was nowhere she needed to run.
“You will have to return eventually,” William said.
“Must I?”
“I have been informed we are fit to travel tomorrow.”
Rosalind turned from the window with a frown. “You nearly fainted yesterday because you stood too quickly.”
“I did not faint. I merely became suspiciously acquainted with the wall.”
“You leaned against it for several minutes.”
“The wall was conveniently positioned.”
“And you claimed to be admiring the wallpaper when there was no wallpaper.”
William considered this apparent flaw in his defense. “Then I was admiring the craftsmanship.”
Rosalind laughed, and his answering smile made him look more like himself than he had since waking at Bryn Hir.
It faded quickly, however, as his attention returned to the papers resting in his lap.
“What is it?” she asked.
“More correspondence arrived this morning. Some from London and another letter from Pembry.”
The last of Rosalind’s amusement disappeared. She crossed the room and settled into the chair opposite him, already suspecting what the magistrate might have written.
“Algernon?”
William nodded and looked down at the letter in his hands. From the worn crease along the fold, Rosalind suspected he had already read it more than once.
“The matter of the title has been resolved,” he said after a moment. “Algernon has been stripped of it. He will remain in custody and will be imprisoned for what he did.”
There was no satisfaction in his face, but she had not expected there to be. William could condemn the man Algernon had become without ceasing to remember the boy who had been frightened and beaten into silence.
“And Augusta?” she asked.
William’s expression changed. “That is where matters became rather more complicated. Pembry has continued the investigation since we left Bryn Hir. He followed several of the connections back to London and managed to find the man from the auction rooms.”
“The one who disappeared?”
“Yes. He had been hiding outside London. Apparently, once he realized what he had become involved in, he was frightened enough to leave.”
Relief came first, but it was quickly overtaken by confusion. “What exactly had he become involved in?”
Rather than answer, William handed her the letter.
She read quickly at first, following Pembry’s account of the man’s disappearance and what his questioning had uncovered. Then her pace slowed.
Augusta had known far more than any of them had suspected. She had known Edmund was being held at Bryn Hir and had helped Algernon conceal it.
Rosalind looked up from the page. “She knew Papa was there all along.”
“Yes.”
Her eyes returned to the letter, and another piece fell horribly into place. “She arranged the farewell letter too?”
William nodded. “She had the man guarding your father write it. The same man who later wrote to Algernon from Bryn Hir.”
Rosalind thought of Isabella seated beside her father’s ledger, studying the peculiar upward curve of the final strokes that appeared in both letters.
“That was why the handwriting matched.”
“Yes. Augusta apparently thought it safer to use someone whose hand no one in London would recognize. She provided him with examples of your father’s writing so he could imitate it.”
“And the letter to Algernon?”
“His own doing. By then, he had become increasingly uneasy about keeping your father there and wanted Algernon to decide what was to be done with him.”
That fit with what Edmund had told them about the arguments he had overheard. It also explained the familiarity that had troubled William when he first read the letter.
“The way he addressed Algernon,” Rosalind said. “We thought they must have known one another.”
“For years, apparently. Pembry has not uncovered all of it yet, but the man had some connection to Bryn Hir long before your father was taken there. Algernon trusted him enough to place your father in his keeping.”
A stranger hired for the task might never have dared challenge a duke, but this man had known Algernon before any of it began. Whatever history existed between them had given him enough confidence to argue with him and eventually demand an end to Edmund’s imprisonment.
“Have they found him?”
“Not yet. Pembry has men looking.”
Rosalind lowered her gaze to the letter. Whatever conscience had eventually troubled the guard, it had come far too late. He had helped keep her father imprisoned and written the lie meant to convince his family that Edmund had abandoned them.
His regret did not make him innocent.
Nor did it erase Augusta’s part in what had happened.
She had helped Algernon maintain the illusion that Edmund left London voluntarily, arranged the forged farewell, and later supplied Rosalind with the false story of another woman when she came too close to the truth.
She had even helped frighten the man from the auction rooms into silence once he realized how dangerous the situation had become.
Rosalind lowered the letter as Augusta’s face returned to her. She remembered the exhaustion that had seemed so genuine when they questioned her and the bitterness beneath her voice when she had spoken of William.
You’re getting the less complicated brother.
All that time, she had known what Algernon had done.
“She protected him,” Rosalind murmured.
William’s jaw tightened. “She did far more than protect him. She knew my brother had taken your father, helped him keep an innocent man imprisoned, and then lied to you when you came too close to discovering the truth.”
“I know.” Rosalind folded the letter carefully and set it aside. “I am not defending her.”
Some of the anger left his expression, although he looked away rather than answer. Rosalind understood it well enough. Perhaps anger was easier for him to hold than grief.
Augusta had known the parts of Algernon that William had never been allowed to see, and when confronted with what her husband was becoming, she had chosen to help him conceal it rather than stop him.
“What will happen to her?” Rosalind asked after a moment.
“She has been charged as an accomplice. They believe she will face transportation to New South Wales if she is convicted.”
The flatness of William’s voice made the answer feel heavier than anger would have.
Rosalind sat quietly, trying to imagine loving someone enough to discover they had done something monstrous and then choosing to help them hide it. She could not. Yet the past several weeks had taught her that love did not always bring out the best in people.
It could inspire extraordinary courage and equally extraordinary foolishness. In the wrong hands, it could even become an excuse for forgiving things that should never have been forgiven.
“We do strange things for the people we love,” Rosalind said softly.
William met her eyes, and she reached across the space between them to take his hand.
“But perhaps loving someone should sometimes mean refusing to help them destroy themselves.”
His fingers tightened around hers.
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Then William shifted slightly in the chair, and Rosalind caught the flicker of strain across his face before he could hide it.
“You are tired.”
“I am perfectly well.”
“You have been awake for nearly two hours.”
“A heroic achievement.”
“It will be considerably less heroic if you exhaust yourself and delay our departure.”
William sighed. “I begin to regret teaching you how easily I can be ordered about.”
“You never taught me. I discovered it naturally.”
That earned her a smile.
Rosalind rose and bent to kiss his forehead, but before she could straighten, William caught her hand.
“Tomorrow?” he asked.