Chapter 20
The trunk was not hers, so she left it untouched against the wall.
Her own leather portmanteau sat open on the narrow wool blanket of the attic cot, its mouth yawning in the gray, pre-dawn light. Packing took less than three minutes.
Two plain gray gowns, three aprons that still smelled faintly of the starch from the laundry copper, a spare pair of stockings with a mended heel, and a small carved wooden horse that Roman had left in the nursery.
Her fingers lingered on the smooth, planed oak of the horse’s mane for a single heartbeat before she shoved it deep beneath the linen.
Her mind was a cold, spinning void, the echo of the baby’s midnight cries still rattling inside her ears. There is nothing you can say. His voice had been so flat. It was worse than angry.
He had looked at her as if she were a growth on the stone walls, something to be scraped away with an iron spade and forgotten before the next season.
"The carriage is in the lower yard, Miss Preston."
Mrs. Ames stood in the low doorway of the attic room, her black silk skirts rustling like dry autumn leaves against the timber frame.
Her keys did not jingle; she held them tight against her thigh with one large, square hand, her face a mask of iron-grey neutrality that allowed no room for pity or explanation.
Thelma swallowed the dry lump in her throat, her hands trembling as she buckled the leather straps of the portmanteau. "I have the child's things in the basket by the washstand, Mrs. Ames. The flannel is damp from the wash, but I can—"
"The child’s basket is already below," the housekeeper interrupted, her voice dropping into that rhythmic, professional cadence that handled births, deaths, and dismissals with the exact same weight. "The child is wrapped in her wool. You are to take her and go. Now, if you please."
Thelma hoisted the heavy leather strap over her shoulder, her other arm swinging down to lift Liliana from the center of the cot.
The baby was heavy with sleep, her small head dropping into the hollow of Thelma’s collarbone with a soft, warm grunt, entirely ignorant of the shifting of the earth beneath them.
"Am I permitted to see Patricia before the gates?" Thelma asked, her voice sounding small and thinned by the cold draft coming through the roof tiles. "Only to say goodbye to her…"
"The duke has asked that you leave the house now, Miss Preston," Mrs. Ames said, turning her back to the room without waiting for a reply. "We must not delay."
The descent down the back stairs was a progression through shadows. Thelma followed the black hem of the housekeeper’s skirts, her boots making no sound against the worn stone steps.
Her inner thoughts were a frantic, circular scream. If I had only told him yesterday. If I had walked into the study when the door was open, before Lady Daphne found the ledger. Before she told him the child was mine.
The lie was so perfectly constructed it made her sick. To a man like Roman Berengar, an unmarried woman with a secret bastard was a common enough tragedy, but a woman who would drop her own flesh into a wet ditch to bait a hook for a duke? That was a monster.
He would never look at her long enough to see the truth now; the image Lady Daphne had painted was too vivid, too heavy with the grease of a scandal.
They reached the lower corridor, the stone walls sweating with the morning damp. As they passed the wide, low arch of the main kitchen, the heavy scent of baking bread and chicory coffee rolled out into the hallway, warm and sickeningly familiar.
Thelma slowed her pace, her eyes darting through the gap in the heavy oak door.
Patricia was there. She was standing by the long iron range, a heavy iron kettle held in her large, flour-dusted hands. At the sound of the footsteps, the cook’s head snapped toward the corridor. Their eyes met through the three-inch gap of the iron-hinged door.
Patricia’s mouth opened, her large chest rising as if she meant to shout a name, to drop the kettle and storm into the passage with her apron flying. But her eyes shifted to the rigid, black back of Mrs. Ames, and the words died on her tongue.
Her lips pressed into a hard, white line, her head dropping back toward the iron stove as she slammed the kettle down against the grate with a loud, ringing clatter.
"Keep your eyes forward, girl," Mrs. Ames murmured, her large hand coming down to rest against the small of Thelma’s back, steering her with a firm, unyielding pressure toward the grand entrance hall.
The Great Hall was cold, the grey light from the high clerestory windows turning the marble floor flags the color of river ice. Standing near the grand oak doors, silhouetted against the bright square of the open portico, was Lady Daphne Vane.
She wore a heavy traveling cloak of dark blue wool, the hood thrown back to reveal her silver-blonde hair, perfectly coiffed and pinned despite the ungodly hour. She looked smaller in the vast space of the hall, but her presence filled it like the scent of woodsmoke after a fire has been put out.
"Thank you, Ames," Lady Daphne said, her voice a light, melodic purr that echoed off the high rafters. "You may return to your duties. I shall see that the woman is properly settled into the conveyance."
Mrs. Ames gave a single, stiff inclination of her head and retreated into the shadows of the western gallery, her keys clicking against her skirt only once before she vanished.
Thelma stopped five paces from the door, her arm tightening around Liliana until the baby stirred against her neck, let out a tiny, whimpering sigh, and went still again.
"You look remarkably pale, Thelma," Lady Daphne said softly, using the name with a casual, familiar cruelty that felt like a slap.
She stepped forward, her silk skirts trailing over the cold marble, her blue eyes scanning Thelma’s old gray gown and uncombed hair with a quiet, triumphant satisfaction. "Though I suppose a night spent in expectation of the watch would do that to any woman of your station."
Thelma kept her chin high, though her heart was hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs. She forced her voice to remain steady, refusing to give the woman the satisfaction of a sob. "Your story was very thorough, my lady. You gave His Grace exactly what he expected to find."
"Roman is a man of logic, as you may have noticed," Lady Daphne replied, her smile widening by a fraction of an inch as she adjusted the lace at her throat. "He prefers a narrative that balances the ledger.
A ruined girl from the south who drops her own bastard in a ditch to capture a dukedom? That is a story he understands perfectly. It appeals to his rather vast sense of moral superiority. He was entirely primed to believe it."
She stepped closer, the sweet, heavy scent of her rose-water perfume washing over Thelma like a wave of stagnant river water.
"You were very clever, my dear. You almost had him believing you were some sort of tragic angel.
But a duke does not marry the nurse, Thelma.
Not even in the stories they sell to the shopgirls in the city. You simply overplayed your hand."
Thelma’s fingers curled into the wool of Liliana’s blanket. She stayed silent, knowing that any defense she offered would only be twisted into further evidence of her malice. The trap had closed, and there was no sense in rattling the bars.
Lady Daphne turned toward the door, pointing a gloved hand toward the single, closed carriage waiting beneath the portico.
It was not the grand ducal coach with the crest on the panels; it was a plain, dark green brougham with two shaggy bays in the traces, the driver sitting high on the box with his hat pulled low over his eyes.
"I have arranged for this conveyance through my own stable," Lady Daphne said, her tone shifting instantly back into that light, charitable cadence she used for the vicar’s wife.
"It will take you and the child to the coaching inn at the county border. From there, you may find a common stage back to the south. It is a kindness, given the circumstances. The duke would have had you walked to the parish boundary by the beadle."
Thelma looked at the open door of the carriage. She had no money, not a single copper stayed in her pockets after the haste of the night.
Her purse was inside the large trunk she had left in the attic, forgotten or locked away.
She had no way to feed the child, no way to pay for a seat on a common wagon, no way to walk thirty miles through the high passes with an infant in her arms. She had no choice but to accept the poison offered under the guise of charity.
"Thank you, my lady," Thelma said, the words tasting like ash in her mouth as she stepped across the threshold and into the cold morning air.
"Have a safe journey, Miss Preston," Lady Daphne murmured behind her. "Do try not to lose any more children in the hedges."
The carriage door opened before she could reach it, the iron step let down by a silent footman in a dark, unlabeled livery.
Thelma climbed inside, her boots sliding on the damp straw covering the floorboards, her portmanteau tucked between her feet as she pulled Liliana tight against her breast. The door slammed shut with a heavy, wooden thud that sounded like a coffin lid being nailed down.
The carriage moved instantly, the horses leaping into a sharp, bone-rattling trot before she could even find her seat on the hard horsehair bench.
The hour passed in a blur of gray stone walls and high, mist-shrouded moors. Thelma sat with her back to the horses; her eyes fixed on the small square of glass in the door.
The landscape outside was changing, the neat, cultivated fields of the Langley estate giving way to the wild, heather-choked hills of the high ridge where the wind blew the yellow gorse flat against the turf.