Chapter 22 #4
Roman’s mind raced, struggling to process the words. A child. My mother had a child after me?
"They were terrified," Preston said, a bitter, resentful edge creeping into his exhausted voice.
"They were the proudest house in Yorkshire.
To present a child with such a condition to the ton...
they believed they would be ruined. Whispers of curses, of bad blood, of madness.
Your mother could not look at her. She ordered the child to be hidden.
They told the staff the baby had died in the night. A stillbirth."
"No," Roman breathed, taking a step back. He felt as though the floor was tilting beneath him. My mother. She stood in this room and told me to send Liliana to an orphanage because she was a blot on the family name.
"They paid me an exorbitant sum," Preston said, tears finally spilling over his weathered cheeks, cutting clean tracks through the mud.
"A private account, paid quarterly for decades.
I was to take the infant far away to Somerset.
I was to raise her as my own, and she was never, ever to know the truth of her blood.
They gave me the child wrapped in a Langley shawl.
The duchess couldn't bear to keep it, and they couldn't risk burning it. "
Orson made a sharp, breathless sound near the window. "The private account. The one closed the day your father died."
"I named her Yvette," Preston sobbed, his chest heaving. "She was beautiful. She was strange to the village, yes, but she was kind, and she was bright, and I loved her. We gave birth to Thelma a few years later."
Yvette.
The name Thelma had whispered in the dark nursery. I held her for fourteen hours. I watched her skin turn from red to white...
Roman’s hands began to shake. He looked at his own palms, at the long fingers and the shape of his knuckles. My sister. I had a sister, and she lived her entire life as an outcast, paid for by my father's silence.
"She married Ralph Gainsborough," Preston continued, forcing the words out through his grief.
"And they had Liliana. A perfectly ordinary, healthy baby girl.
The albinism did not pass down. Yvette was so happy.
And then... the carriage went over the embankment.
" Preston’s voice broke entirely, a terrible, shattered sound. "They died. My Yvette died."
Roman closed his eyes, a sharp, physical pain tearing through the center of his chest.
"Thelma took the baby," Preston whispered, wiping his face with the back of his sleeve.
"She loved her so fiercely. But I knew the truth.
I knew the money from the duke had stopped.
We were ruined. And Thelma... an unmarried girl with another woman's child would never find a husband.
She would spend her life in poverty, raising a girl who actually belonged to the richest house in the north.
So, when Thelma was sleeping, I took her. "
Preston looked up at Roman, his brown eyes pleading for understanding. "I brought her here. I left her on the steps in the shawl her mother was discarded in, hoping... praying... that the dowager would look at her grandchild and finally feel an ounce of mercy."
Mercy.
The word echoed in Roman’s skull, twisting into a grotesque mockery.
His mother hadn't felt mercy. She had felt terror.
She had recognized the shawl instantly. She knew that the ghost of the daughter she had thrown away had returned to haunt her in the shape of a gray-eyed infant.
And rather than claim her own flesh and blood, she had tried to send her to an orphanage.
When that failed, she had invited Daphne Vane into the house to clean up the mess.
"Earnest!" Roman roared.
The door opened instantly.
"Fetch my mother," Roman commanded, his voice vibrating with a lethal, icy calm that made the butler flinch. "Bring her to the study. Do not tell her who is here. Just bring her."
Earnest bowed and vanished.
Roman turned to the desk. He picked up the heavy, wrought-iron letter opener and drove it into the center of the mahogany blotter, the sharp crack of metal splitting wood filling the room.
"Orson," Roman said, not looking at his friend.
"I am already going to the stables," Orson replied, moving swiftly toward the door. "I will saddle the gray, and my bay. I will gather my pistols."
"We ride in ten minutes," Roman said.
The heavy oak doors opened again. His mother stepped into the study. She wore a gown of dark charcoal silk, her gray hair pinned in its usual severe knot, her posture as rigid and unyielding as a marble column. She looked annoyed at the summons, her eyes sweeping the room.
Her gaze landed on Albert Preston.
The change was instantaneous. The blood completely drained from her face, leaving her skin the color of parchment.
Her hand, resting on the ivory head of her cane, began to tremble violently.
The imposing, terrifying Dowager Duchess of Langley seemed to shrink, the rigid armor of her aristocratic pride shattering into a million irreparable pieces.
"Your Grace," Preston said softly from the chair.
She did not answer him. She could not speak.
Roman walked around the desk, stopping mere feet from his mother. He picked up the crude, jagged ransom letter and the folded, thirty-year-old cashmere shawl that Preston had brought back from the nursery, and he dropped them both onto the small table between them.
"Look at it," Roman said, his voice a low, vibrating whisper that carried more menace than a shout.
His mother stared at the shawl. Her lips parted, a small, breathless gasp escaping her throat.
"He told me," Roman said, his gray eyes locked onto his mother’s face. "He told me about the white hair. He told me about the night you paid him to take my sister away and pretend she was dead."
"Roman," she whispered, her voice cracking. She reached out a shaking hand toward him, but he stepped back, entirely repulsed by the gesture.
"Do not touch me," Roman sneered, the disgust rolling off him in waves.
"You stood in this room and told me Liliana was a blot on our name.
You told me she was a foundling. You looked at the face of your own granddaughter, the child of the daughter you threw away because you were too cowardly to love her, and you tried to send her to an asylum. "
"She would have ruined us!" his mother cried out, the severe mask finally breaking, her face twisting with thirty years of buried shame and terror.
"You don't understand what they would have said, Roman!
They would have called it a curse! A madness in the blood!
Your father's title, your future... it would have been destroyed by the whispers!
I did what I had to do to protect this house! And I was not sure…"
To protect this house.
The phrase made Roman sick. He thought of Thelma, sitting on the cold floor of the nursery, pressing a vinegar-soaked cloth to Liliana's wrists, fighting for the life of a child she had no legal right to, simply because she loved her.
Thelma had risked the gallows, risked ruin, risked everything to protect Yvette's child.
And his mother had thrown her own daughter away to protect a reputation.