Chapter 21
Roman pushed open the nursery door with one finger. The room was empty.
The silence hit him first… thick, unnatural, pressing into his chest. The wicker cradle stood stripped and skeletal near the hearth.
No blankets. No soft flannel. Just bare woven ribs and a faint indentation where Liliana’s small body had once rested.
The porcelain basin on the washstand was dry, a thin white ring of starch marking where water had evaporated hours ago.
She was gone.
He stepped inside. His boots sounded too loud on the bare floorboards. The narrow stool where Miss Hartley—no, Thelma—had sat, night after night, was pushed neatly against the wall, its legs squared with military precision. The small door to her attic room stood ajar.
He already knew what he would find.
The cot was stripped to its ticking. The bolster lay flat and uncrushed. Her trunk remained against the far wall, iron-bound and closed, but the padlocks were missing. She had taken only what she could carry in three frantic minutes under Mrs. Ames’s cold supervision.
Roman stood in the center of the small room, hands clenched at his sides. This is what you ordered, he reminded himself. This is what was required. You protected the name. You preserved the family. You did what any sensible duke would do.
The words tasted like ash.
He turned slowly, eyes scanning the empty space for something, anything that she might have left behind. A ribbon. A torn page from one of her letters. A single hair on the pillow.
There was nothing. The room had been scrubbed clean with terrifying efficiency, as though Thelma Preston and Liliana had never existed there at all.
He dragged a hand down his face. The skin across his knuckles felt tight, aching with a sharp, physical pain that had nothing to do with the cold draft coming through the skylight.
He had been so terrified of the sudden, hot blood in his veins when she stood close that he had welcomed Lady Daphne's lie, using the legal cover of an estate boundary to push her out into the frost. He ran a heavy hand through his dark chestnut hair, thoroughly unsettling it, his jaw locking against a sudden, bitter surge of self-disgust.
The heavy crunch of carriage wheels on wet gravel broke the stillness below. Orson’s brougham.
Roman did not hurry. He descended the stairs with hands tucked behind his back, jaw locked in the same rigid mask he had worn since midnight. But inside, everything felt hollow.
He entered the study to find Orson already waiting. His friend had not removed his heavy cape. His tall hat sat on the corner of the mahogany desk, its silk crown damp with morning mist.
Several thick bundles of foolscap tied with red twine spilled across the green blotter. Orson had a face that did a great deal of work when he chose not to speak, and right now, the deep, tight lines around his mouth made Roman’s chest constrict.
“You are early,” Roman said, closing the heavy oak door behind him. He remained by the window, his back to the light.
Orson looked up, studying him for a long moment. “And you look like hell.”
Roman gave a short, humorless laugh. “Thank you. That is exactly what I needed to hear.”
"She is gone," Roman said. "I dismissed her before the dawn."
Orson’s fingers stopped on the twine. He slowly lifted his head, his pale blue eyes fixing on Roman with a steady, unblinking neutrality that made the silence in the room grow twice as thick. "You dismissed her."
"Lady Daphne brought the records from the London agency last night," Roman said, his voice dropping into that level, unyielding register he used when defending an administrative boundary.
"The name was a fiction. The true Eliza Hartley is in the south.
The woman here was Thelma Preston, an unmarried daughter of a broken gentry house.
She used her own child, her own bastard, left in the north lodge ditch, to force her way onto the ledger and secure a position.
I will not harbor an adventuress, Orson. Not under this roof."
Orson let out a short, dry breath that was not a laugh. He slid the top document from the bundle and pushed it across the mahogany blotter, his palm flat against the paper.
"Sit down, Roman," Orson said softly.
"I am not inclined…"
"Sit down," Orson repeated, his voice rising just enough to catch the edge of the fire’s crackle. "And read the parish register from Saint Mary’s in the Valley."
Roman did not move for three seconds. Then he crossed the room and sat in the high-backed leather chair. He did not touch the paper; he looked down at the copperplate script through the gray morning light.
The name Yvette Preston Gainsborough was written at the top of the column, dated five years prior. Below it, in the same neat hand, was the record of her marriage to Ralph Gainsborough, gent. And below that, dated exactly fourteen months ago, was the baptism of a daughter: Liliana Gainsborough.
Roman’s eyes stayed on the name Gainsborough until the letters began to blur. “Yvette.”
“Thelma Preston’s older sister,” Orson said, his voice level and entirely devoid of dramatic inflection as he leaned back against the desk.
“She died three months ago in a coaching accident on the Bristol road. Her husband, Gainsborough, died with her. Liliana survived because she was home with Thelma that evening.”
Roman felt the cold air in his lungs turn to lead. “The child... Liliana is not Thelma’s?”
“She is her niece,” Orson said. He reached into his coat and pulled out a second, smaller document, dropping it onto the register.
“This is the deposition from the Preston family’s remaining solicitor.
When Yvette and Ralph died, Thelma took the baby within three days.
She raised her alone until her father, old Preston, took the child by force and sent her north without telling her where.
He believed a gentry girl with another woman’s child would never marry.
He thought he was protecting her future. ”
The fire crackled, a large pocket of sap exploding in the birch log with a sharp, metallic snap.
Roman looked at his own hands resting flat on the green leather of the desk. They were completely steady, but his chest felt as if it had been hollowed out with a timber adze.
A monster who dropped her own flesh in a ditch. That was the story he'd accepted, standing in the nursery doorway, and he'd accepted it in under a minute, because it was easier than admitting he didn't actually know the woman he'd been falling for.
"She didn't bait a hook," he said. "She came to find the child."
He sat with that for a moment. It didn't make the rest of it disappear. She had still let him believe a lie for a month. She had still stood in front of him a dozen times with the truth sitting behind her teeth and chosen, every single time, to swallow it instead.
"She still lied to me," he said, mostly to himself. "Knowing what she knew. Every day."
"She did," Orson agreed, without softening it.
"I'm not going to tell you that part doesn't matter, Roman. It does, but she arrived at the Langley gates with nothing but a stolen reference from an old schoolmate and the gray gown on her back,” Orson said, his thumb tracing the edge of his pocket watch.
“A gentry girl with no character and another woman’s child is not permitted past the kitchen arch of a ducal estate. She lied because she had no other choice. Everything she did under this roof, Roman, was simply a woman trying to stay within arm’s reach of the only piece of her sister left alive.”
Roman rose from the chair so quickly it struck the cedar wainscoting behind him with a dull thud.
He walked back to the window, his fingers gripping the bronze latch until the metal dug into his palm.
“Why did you not speak sooner? You had the Somerset files. You knew I was verifying the bank records.”
“I confirmed the marriage and death records two days ago,” Orson said, his tone entirely reasonable.
“You were in London, buried in the solicitors’ accounts.
I took the night rider to bring the documents myself.
By the time my horse was led to the stables this morning, Lady Daphne had already spent the evening in your drawing room. ”
Roman turned around, his eyes dark with a sudden, violent heat that made Orson straighten his shoulders. “Lady Daphne had the London agency records. She knew the name was false.”
“She must have had access to the exact same information I dug up,” Orson said, his brow furrowing as he paced toward the hearth.
“A man doesn't hire a London investigator without leaving a paper trail. If she found the same clerk in Bristol, she would have discovered the marriage certificate of Yvette Gainsborough and the baptismal record of the niece. She had more than enough to guess the truth, Roman. She simply chose a version that served her own prospects. She gave you the bastard story because she knew your mother was sitting by the hearth, and she knew you would not risk the Langley name for a woman who could be painted as a common opportunist.”
Lady Daphne had looked him in the eye and remade a grieving, desperate aunt into an adventuress, knowing he would be too proud to ask for the details until the woman was already past the gates.
“The shawl,” Roman said, his voice dropping into a dangerous, low vibration.
“The child was wrapped in a cashmere shawl when the lodge-keeper found her. It had no marks, but it was old. It bore our house’s emblem, Orson.
If Albert Preston was the one who sent the child north, how did a country gentleman from Somerset possess a textile from the Langley family chests? It makes no sense.”