28. CHAPTER 28
L ord and Lady Kilbrannan arrived in London three days after he and Vivienne did, which meant they had left Scotland the moment they received the news and had not stopped traveling since.
He had sent a letter the morning of their arrival, by special courier.
He was uncertain whether the rumor or the letter had reached them first.
When Prowse announced them, he was in his study. He did not go to Vivienne first. He met them alone because he knew what was coming, and he intended to absorb the worst of it before it reached her.
Lady Kilbrannan came through the study door already furious. Small and red-headed, she was shaking with the kind of rage that only comes from deep grief. She stopped at the sight of him, her eyes boring into his face.
"One month," she said, and her voice shook. "You have had my daughter for a month, and you didn't think to tell us she was alive."
"I did not have her," Dalton said. "I was earning her trust. Vivienne remembers nothing, Georgiana. Nothing. She does not know your name. Did not even know her own. I could not bring her to London and bury her beneath a family she could not recognize. She needed time."
"She needed her mother."
He took the blow without flinching, because she was right, and because he had known she would be furious and hurt, and because the decision to delay had still been the correct one, regardless of how it looked from the outside .
Lord Kilbrannan stood behind his wife, taller, grayer, his jaw working. He said nothing, but his stance was no less accusatory.
"I understand your anger," Dalton said. "I do not expect your forgiveness. But I would ask you to temper your reunion with her. Her fragility is not always visible. She will want to please you. To remember. She will fail, and the failure will cost her."
Lady Kilbrannan's face crumpled. The fury went out of her, and what remained was seven years of grief, compressed into the trembling of her lower lip and the brightness gathering in her eyes.
"Take me to her," she whispered.
He did.
The reunion happened in the drawing room.
Dalton stationed himself by the door because he had learned that the most useful thing he could do in moments like this was to be present without being central.
Vivienne sat on the settee, her hands clasped, wearing the composure she put on when she was terrified. She rose at once at their entrance.
Lady Kilbrannan crossed the room and stopped three feet from her daughter.
Her wide eyes brimmed with tears, and her expression was painful to watch.
But to give her credit, she did not rush to embrace her.
She looked at Vivienne and, with a voice that trembled just a little, said, "Hello, my darling girl. "
Vivienne's composure held for approximately four seconds.
Then her face crumpled and she was in her mother's arms, weeping against her shoulder.
Lord Kilbrannan was there too, his large hands cradling the back of his daughter's head, and Venus was pressing a handkerchief to her own eyes by the window.
Dalton remained by the door. Watching, and wondering for the hundredth time whether he had done the right thing in delaying this encounter.
Or if there even was a right thing to be done.
H er parents had their own townhouse in London, but for the first week they stayed with her. Vivienne learned this from her mother, who announced it over the breakfast table on the second morning as though no other arrangement had ever been under discussion.
"We will not be away from you for a single minute more than we have to," Lady Kilbrannan said, and reached across the butter dish to tuck a curl of Vivienne's hair behind her ear. "I hope you will forgive the imposition."
Vivienne didn't know what to do with the hand, or the curl, or the easy possessiveness of the gesture. Her mother's fingers smelled faintly of rose water and something else she could not place, but that made her chest feel full and tight at once.
"You are not imposing," she said.
It was the truth. Or at least, what she wanted the truth to be.
What a good daughter was supposed to answer.
Her parents loved her. It was obvious in her mother's glittering eyes, in her father's deep and pensive stares.
In the way they soaked up every interaction with her.
And she… she could not remember them, but their love had found an echo in her heart.
A sort of kinship that transcended memory.
The days settled into a pattern. Her mother sat beside her on the settee in the long yellow drawing room, their knees almost touching.
Her father sat in the armchair by the window, a newspaper folded in his lap that he never opened.
The silver tea service that Mrs. Hewitt brought in at eleven and again at four, and the particular sound of her father clearing his throat before he spoke, which he did rarely and always as though he had practiced the sentence before letting it out.
Her mother, on the other hand, spoke enough for them both.
She was full of stories. So many stories.
"There was the oak," her mother said on the first afternoon. "In the south garden at Kilbrannan. You climbed it when you were seven, and you got yourself up past the second branch. When we found you and demanded that you come down, you refused. Do you know what you said to your father?"
"I do not," Vivienne said, but she very much wanted to .
"You said, I will come down when I get the puppy you promised me. And your father sent a groom into Perth that very afternoon for a spaniel."
Her father made a small sound from the armchair. It might have been a laugh. It might have been the clearing of his throat.
"I got a puppy for being disobedient?" Vivienne asked, bemused.
"You got a puppy because you were impossible and we adored you," her mother said.
"His name was Tam. He lived to be fourteen and slept on your bed every night until you went to London for your first Season.
He died the week after you left. I have always thought he held on just long enough to see you off. "
Something moved in Vivienne's chest. Not a memory. Nothing so clean as that. A pressure. A dog called Tam. She could almost picture him in her mind.
"What color was he?" she asked.
"Liver and white. One brown ear and one mostly white one. You used to say he was wearing only half his hat."
She laughed. She had not meant to; it came out as a hiccup. But what her mother described matched the picture of the dog she had made in her mind. That had to mean something, did it not? Her mother's face lit up as though Vivienne had just handed her a piece of silver.
"There," Lady Kilbrannan said softly. "There you are."
Vivienne looked down at her teacup so that the shine in her mother's eyes would not undo her.
The stories kept coming. About the pony who threw her into a burn and the twelve-year-old Vivienne who walked home dripping and announced she would ride him again before supper.
The French governess who lasted nine days.
The first ball at sixteen, when she had torn the hem of her white silk in the reel and pinned it up with a brooch from her mother's dressing table and danced until dawn with the pin working loose by degrees and a trail of torn silk behind her like a comet's tail.
"You were magnificent," her mother said. "You were always magnificent. Our pride and joy. "
Vivienne reached for another biscuit from the plate at her elbow, because her mother's overt feelings were too much to bear, and chewing distracted her from the stinging in her eyes.
She asked questions. She could not help herself. Every scrap from her childhood was like a gem. Her mother answered everything. The answers poured out of her the way water pours out of a jug filled to the brim.
But beneath the wanting, it was an exhausting performance. Both things were real. Both were true.
Making small adjustments to her face when a story did not land anywhere she could feel it.
Producing, every few minutes, a smile or a laugh or a quiet tell me more , so that her mother's face would not do the small collapsing thing it did when Vivienne's expression went blank for a second too long.
The effort of being the daughter they knew, when she was not entirely certain that daughter still existed. At least not whole.
By the afternoon of the third day, her head ached in a low, even band across her temples, and she caught herself twice wishing, with a pang of shame, that she could go upstairs and lie down for an hour without anyone telling her another beautiful thing about a girl she did not know.
She wouldn't say so. She would not. Her mother had held her and wept against her hair and called her my darling girl , and Vivienne had felt something in her body answer to that voice. Whatever else was true, that was true. She would not trade it for an hour of quiet.
"Are you tired, my love?" her mother asked late on the third evening. Her father lifted his head from the unopened newspaper at that exact moment. He had been watching, then. He was always watching.
"A little," Vivienne said. "Not unpleasantly."
"We are giving you too much."
"You are giving me exactly what I asked for," she said, which was true, and was also the sort of sentence she had been producing all week.
Her father cleared his throat. "Georgiana."
"I will stop," her mother said. "I will sit here with my hands in my lap and say nothing for an hour. "