Chapter 29
HELENA
She followed Heathcliff into the hall with her chin level and her hands folded, curios as to who might have come calling. The vicar’s wife had told her she’d come calling, but not when. And she’d only told her the previous day, indicating she’d see her in a few days.
“I have shown the gentleman to the drawing room, Your Grace. Shall I send for tea?”
She stopped short. “The gentleman?” she said. She had not known the caller was male. “Who is it? Did they not announce themselves?”
“He says he is a relative of yours, Your Grace.”
She stopped walking. She had no male relatives to speak of — none who would trouble themselves to travel to Blackthorne. The uneasy feeling that had started in the pit of her stomach when Heathcliff first appeared spread outward, slowly, until it reached every part of her.
Then she stepped through the drawing room doors, and that feeling turned to ice.
“Emmett.”
Sitting in the wing chair before the fireplace Huxley’s brother, Emmett Graham, the current Baron Vale. He rose and looked at her with the particular expression she remembered — that combination of contempt and calculation that his brother had perfected first.
“Helena,” he said.
“Her Grace, the Duchess of Blackthorne,” Heathcliff said from behind her, formally announcing her as though this were a social call of the ordinary kind. She glanced back at him and gave a small nod of gratitude before dismissing him.
Emmett blinked, and then apparently remembered both his manners and the relevant social protocol. He bowed — not deeply, but sufficiently. “Your Grace,” he said, when he straightened. “You look well.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Please sit.”
He did, though she could see how much he disliked being directed. She took the chair across from him and waited.
“Being a Duchess suits you,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“Especially given your background.” He smiled. It did not reach his eyes. “I never imagined I would be calling on you as a Duchess.”
“Life has a way of surprising us all.”
“Fate,” he said, flatly. “If you wish to call it that.” He settled back in the chair and folded his hands.
“I find myself wondering how you managed it. First my brother, whom you deceived about your background, and now this. Though I suppose I should not be too surprised by His Grace. He married a charlatan once before. It stands to reason he would do it again.”
“I would appreciate it,” she said, keeping her voice very even, “if you did not speak of my husband in that way.”
He sighed and rolled his eyes. “You can drop the pretense with me, Helena. I know this is no true marriage. It is some manner of arrangement, is it not? I would simply like to understand what it is you have over him. Whatever leverage you have managed to obtain would be rather useful to me in the House of Lords. These dukes all think themselves above the rest of us.”
She held her tongue. The irony of a man who had just dismissed her on account of her low birth now complaining that titled men looked down on him was almost more than she could bear quietly.
“I assure you,” she said, “I have no leverage over my husband. The only thing that concerns you is that we are married, and that I will not be writing to you for assistance again.”
That produced a short laugh. “Won’t you? You mean you will have your husband do it instead? As he did before?”
She went very still.
“You did not know,” Emmett said, and something shifted in his expression.
It was not quite pleasure, but close to it.
“How interesting, given how blissfully married the two of you are supposed to be.” He shrugged.
“Yes. He wrote to me. Shamed me into it, more or less. Said I was leaving a widow and an infant to live in squalor in Bloomsbury.”
The money. The unexpected funds that had arrived before she and Gideon had decided to marry. The money that had allowed her to settle her debts and begin to breathe again. She had never understood why Emmett had sent it, and she had not pressed the matter, too relieved to ask questions.
Gideon had done that. He had done it quietly and said nothing.
She said nothing, but would have to consider what she thought of this later on.
“In any case,” Emmett continued, “that was a trifle. What brings me here is rather more significant.” He paused. “The Laurendale property.”
She had wondered. The moment she saw him, she had wondered. The Laurendale property was a plot of land with a small manor house, left to Lavinia in Huxley’s will. It was nearly the only thing Huxley had left their daughter. It was a modest inheritance, but a real one.
“What of it?” she said.
“I would like it returned to the family holdings.”
“It is in the family holdings. It belongs to Lavinia. She is the daughter of the former Lord Vale.”
“She has everything she needs now.” He spread his hands. “Her stepfather will provide for her. Whatever arrangement you have secured, she will have a dowry, a future, connections. She does not need a small plot of land in the country. It is of no practical use to her.”
“But it is of practical use to you,” Helena said. “Do you have a buyer?”
He looked at his shoes. Then at the wall. Then shrugged in a way that confirmed it entirely. “That is beside the point.”
“It is precisely the point. You have come here to ask me to hand over my daughter’s only inheritance from her father so that you may sell it. Without offering any compensation whatsoever.”
“It ought to be in the family—”
“It is in the family. Lavinia is Huxley’s daughter. The land is hers.” She looked at him steadily. “No. You will not have it.”
His expression darkened. “You are hardly in a position to—”
“I am in exactly the position I need to be in,” she said. “I am her mother, and it is her inheritance, and I will not sign it over to you. Not for any amount of money, and certainly not for nothing at all.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then: “What if I were to tell your husband the truth about your background? There were certain rumors in London before you left, after all. Rumors he might have to have explained to himself. What would he say if he knew that you are a commoner with no pedigree, that your daughter’s noble heritage comes entirely from her father’s side, and that you have been deceiving your way through society since before you were out of the schoolroom? ”
“He already knows.”
“Does he now? Well, given how he became a duke, I should not be surprised that he is a part of your scheme. Does he also know what a horrible wive you were to my brother?”
Her anger rose but she swallowed it down. “Your brother was not exactly a good husband either.”
Emmett sneered. “He was the husband you deserved.”
A thought came to her then and she squared her shoulders. “Was it you who wrote the letter with veiled threat when I was still at Bloomsbury? Did you write it to scare me? Or because you were angry about Gideon’s request for funds?”
He shrugged. “I do not know what you are speaking of. You make no sense. As you never have. You were never able to express yourself properly. Shameful.”
Her nostrils flared. She was certain he’d written the letter. It didn’t’ matter now, of course.
“Baron Vale…” Gideon’s voice came from the doorway. She had not heard him enter. He crossed the room and came to stand beside her, and when he extended his arm toward the door his voice was very quiet — which she had come to understand was considerably more dangerous than when he was loud.
“You will leave, Lord Vale. And you will not trouble our family again.”
Emmett rose slowly. He looked at Gideon, seizing him up.
“What a sorry excuse for a family,” he said. “A wife who is a commoner, a stepdaughter with a bare inheritance, and you — who would be standing on my level in the Lords if not for a dead cousin and a carelessly driven curricle. You will never be what your predecessor was.”
He got no further. Gideon had taken him by the collar, not violently but with an absolute and immovable firmness, and was walking him toward the hall. Two footmen appeared at the top of the stairs. Heathcliff materialized at the front door.
“Heathcliff,” Gideon said. “Please see Lord Vale off the property.”
“Of course, Your Grace.”
The door opened. A shaft of afternoon light fell across the hall floor. Emmett was escorted out with the quiet efficiency of a well-run household, and the door closed behind him.
Gideon turned back to her.
She was standing in the middle of the drawing room with her arms wrapped around herself, and she knew from the look on his face that he could see all of it — the tension in her shoulders, the set of her jaw, the way she was holding herself together by main force.
“That,” he said, “was a thoroughly unpleasant man.”
But she could not reply. Her throat was tight.
She had watched him march Emmett out and she had felt it — the relief, the gratitude — and underneath both of those the thing she could not shake, the thing that lived in her bones regardless of what her mind told her.
The anger in his voice. The certainty and the force of it.
“I told you,” she said. Her voice came out very quiet. “I told you I do not want this. This anger. This kind of confrontation. I thought you understood.”
He looked at her, genuinely confused, she could see that, and she knew she owed him an explanation.
She knew she should tell him. The whole of it, properly, the way she had never managed to before.
The way Huxley had used that same voice.
The way she had learned, over three years, what came after it.
But she could not find the words. Not yet. Not with Emmett’s cruelty still sitting in the room and her own hands shaking inside the cage of her arms.
What she could feel was the warmth they had built over these last weeks — the breakfast table, the daisy chains, the market, the moment in the portrait gallery before Heathcliff’s footsteps had interrupted them — draining away.
And what was left in its place was a cold and familiar emptiness that frightened her far more than Emmett Graham ever could.
Because she knew now what she stood to lose. And that knowledge was almost worse than not having known it at all.