Chapter 16
HELENA
The letter arrived on Friday, two days after the events at Almack’s.
Helena had not left the house. She had been supposed to go to Vauxhall Gardens to view a musical performance.
A prime opportunity for Gideon to introduce her to one, if not two, of the gentlemen on his list. However, she had sent him a note telling him she felt unwell.
He had come calling that same evening to see how she was, but she had had Mary tell him she could not come to the door. Fortunately, he had believed her. On Friday morning she had intended to send him another note saying she was still unwell, but she never got the chance.
The postman arrived at eleven, which was his customary time.
Helena was in the middle of feeding Lavinia a boiled egg when Mary brought in the letters.
Most were unremarkable — the landlord thanking her for paying another six months in advance with the money she had received from Huxley’s heir, a letter from an old neighbor — until one caught her attention.
She did not recognize the handwriting. Immediately she told Mary to leave her and broke the seal.
You should be ashamed of yourself, it said.
To pretend to be a relation to a great family when you are nothing but a commoner — a commoner with no notable relations.
To pass yourself off as a lady in order to snare a husband is not only poor form, it is genuinely horrid.
Everyone will know what you are soon enough.
She let the letter drop. Mary, drawn by the sound, hurried inside.
“What has happened?” She picked up the letter and read the words quickly, her hand flying to her mouth. “You were right, my lady. The whispers you heard at Almack’s were not simply your imagination.”
“No,” Helena said. “They know. Someone knows my secret. It is all over. I shall never find another husband. We shall have to leave Bloomsbury. Go somewhere else where nobody knows us.”
“Now, now, do not work yourself into a pother quite so fast. You do not know that yet. There is no need to pack up and leave. Not just yet. This is one letter and a few whispers.”
“You know how it is. People whisper and whisper, and the whispers grow louder, and then before you know it they are no longer whispers but a chorus repeated everywhere.”
“I am in a very great quandary, Mary. I do not know what to do.”
“Egg!” Lavinia called. “Egg, egg.”
Helena nodded and fed her another spoonful.
“You must tell Gideon,” Mary said. It was of course improper for her to refer to him by his first name, but in the privacy of their own home neither of them bothered with titles.
“I cannot,” she replied. “He will only think that I am no better than Cassandra. And I do not want him to think poorly of me.”
She was well aware that the mere fact that she cared what Gideon thought of her — that she was afraid of inadvertently hurting his feelings — meant that she had come to feel for him far more than she had ever thought she would.
But the truth was it made her feel ill to think that once he knew the truth, he would turn away from her, as she knew he must.
She had made her peace with the fact that their friendship — or whatever this was — would end once she married again, that she would only speak to him politely at balls or dinners once or twice a year thereafter.
She had not relished the thought, but she had accepted it. This was something else altogether.
Another thing that troubled her was that she did not know who had sent the letter. Who had started the rumours.
A knock at the door interrupted her thoughts and Mary went to answer it. She heard Gideon’s voice and quickly scooped up Lavinia. They made their way to the back of the house, to the little kitchen.
“Oh no, Your Grace,” she heard Mary say. “She is still too unwell. She cannot receive visitors.”
Bless Mary, she thought. It wasn’t right to make her lie, but in a way it wasn’t really a lie — not entirely.
She took a slow breath. Lavinia squealed in her arms.
“Giddy-on?”
“No,” Helena said, and shook her head. She placed a finger against her own lips, then held it in front of Lavinia, which only made the little girl laugh. “Not today,” she whispered. “Not Gideon today.”
The front door closed. She waited a few minutes longer — she did not want to walk back into the drawing room only to have him pass by the window and perhaps see her.
She leaned against the kitchen counter. Buns were cooking in the oven, filling the air with the warm yeasty scent that had been absent from their home for some time, because they had not been able to afford all the ingredients for fresh bread regularly.
She took a slow breath and was just about to make her way back to the drawing room when the door opened behind her.
“Mary, you frightened—” She stopped. “Gideon.”
He stepped through the door.
“There you are. I could scarcely believe it when Mary told me you were hiding in the kitchen.”
“She should not have done that,” Helena said, and an unusual wave of irritation toward her maid washed over her.
“She absolutely should have. You should not have been hiding from me.” He looked at her steadily. “I take it you have not been ill at all.”
“I have been unwell,” she said. “Perhaps not in the way I led you to believe.”
“I see. Then why are you hiding from me?”
She shifted Lavinia to her other arm. The little girl immediately reached out toward Gideon. He took her, but crossed to the door. “Mary — will you take the child?”
Mary appeared and took Lavinia, who protested loudly at being carried away.
Gideon turned back and pointed at the kitchen chair. “I will not leave until you tell me.”
“There is nothing to tell. I have changed my mind. I do not think you ought to find me a husband. I think I ought to leave London. I cannot simply take French leave of the whole business, I know — but London has not brought me much fortune. We have not found a single eligible gentleman. I ought to relocate.”
“Did you not just pay your rent in advance for another few months?”
“I can speak to the landlord. I am certain he will return it.” She was, of course, not certain of any such thing — in fact she was almost certain he would not return a single penny. And exactly how she was intending to relocate she did not know. But she knew she had to leave London.
“Has something happened?”
“I just told you what has happened. We have had no luck. We must admit defeat.”
“I do not admit defeat quite so quickly. And I know you well enough by now to understand that something else is the matter. What is it?”
She looked at him, then looked away, and crossed her arms. “There are rumours afoot. About me. Or there will be. I believe they already are, and they will only get worse.”
He looked at her steadily. He did not seem suspicious or confused — not yet.
She reached into the drawer where she had placed the letter earlier and held it out to him. He read it.
“I see,” he said. “And you understand what it is they are speaking of?”
“Yes,” she said. “I do. It is — that is—” She took a breath. “You do not know everything about me. About my family.” Her shoulders rolled forward, her head dropping. A groan escaped her. “I am not who you think I am.”
“You are not Helena Vale? Have you been impersonating someone? Who are you really — a French countess fleeing Napoleon?”
“You must not jest at a time such as this. This is serious.”
“Serious indeed. Go on.”
“You understand that my father was merely a captain in the militia. That is not a grand position in itself. But you perhaps also know that his uncle was an Earl.”
“An Earl somewhere up north, yes. I recall.”
“And that is the trouble. He did not have an uncle who was an Earl. He did not have any uncles at all. He had an aunt, but she was married to a milliner. There was never an uncle. My mother invented him.” She swallowed.
“When they were young and searching for a home, they kept being turned down in favor of more well-connected people, and so she invented an uncle. She made up a title, trusting that most people do not know the titles of every member of the peerage. And it worked. They found a home, and my father continued to invoke this nonexistent uncle whenever it suited him — my mother more than my father. People believed it. People respected us more because they thought we were connected to nobility.”
She pressed on, her voice flat and steady, as though reciting something she had rehearsed many times alone.
“When it was time for my coming out, my mother made sure that everybody knew who my father was, and in turn who his uncle was. It helped me enormously. And it helped me make the match with Huxley. His family was still not thrilled that my father was only a captain, but they liked the idea of their son marrying someone connected to the nobility. As it turned out, Huxley’s father even claimed to know the Earl in question. ”
She leaned back, already exhausted from the telling of it.
“My mother had died by then, and my father had attempted to draw back from the story — to stop invoking this Earl so freely — so that people would not continuously associate us with a man who did not exist. She burned her fingers rather badly with this scheme, and it is I who have been paying the price ever since.”
“In the end, Huxley and I were married, and he was under the impression that he was marrying into a family with noble connections.”
“Did he ever find out that you were not?” Gideon asked. His tone was perfectly level. So level that it was as though she had not just told him the darkest secret she had kept for years.