Chapter 23
“Tell Mrs. Taylor that I trust her judgment should any other issues arise,” I informed Bowcott. “That she needn’t waste precious time waiting for my approval.”
He had waylaid me on my return to the mauve drawing room after I’d gone upstairs to see to Emma.
My daughter’s schedule had been disrupted by our jaunt to the dower house earlier that day—had it truly been just hours before?
—so I’d had to postpone her evening nursing.
There were many details still to see to before the new guests arrived in two days’ time, and with them came numerous questions.
“The same goes for you,” I told the butler. “As does my order that you are both to seek your beds before the cock crows. I’ll not have you run off your feet no matter how much work is to be done.”
“Yes, my lady,” he replied dutifully, though I knew they would both do as they pleased. He was humoring me.
I smiled knowingly and shook my head in fondness. At least, Jeffers and most of the dower house staff would be arriving the next morning to relieve some of the burden.
“Though if it’s not too impertinent of me to say so…” Which meant it was highly impertinent, despite the gentle tone Bowcott used. “Perhaps you should take a bit of your own advice.”
“I would if I could,” I said with a sigh. “Though you might help me earn a temporary reprieve by standing here a moment longer and pretending to discuss some serious matter of household management.”
He chuckled. “A hostess’s work is never done, is it?” He gazed over my shoulder. “Even now, I see a young lady peering around the corner, waiting to assail you.”
I glanced over my shoulder to find Matilda hovering near the entrance to the drawing room, darting looks at us while pretending to embroider. I wasn’t certain I was prepared yet for another conversation with her, but if she was this anxious to speak to me, I decided I should hear her out.
I nodded to Bowcott resignedly and turned to make my way toward the chamber, where I was intercepted by Matilda before I’d even set foot inside.
She’d peered furtively toward the other guests before setting aside her needlework and hurrying over to me.
“Could I speak with you? Alone,” she added, in case her intent should be unclear.
I gestured for her to follow me down the corridor to the right, entering the music room.
This chamber was little used. My father-in-law had placed the Broadwood grand in the drawing room, leaving a pianoforte of lesser quality in this smaller space.
It stood near the window next to a harpsichord.
The drapes had not been pulled, allowing moonlight to spill across the instruments shrouded in their dust covers.
I considered returning to the corridor for one of the candles arranged across the console table adjoining the drawing room door, ready for the guests to light when they retired, but then decided moonlight might befit this conversation.
Matilda worried the ribbon trim at the waist of her pale blue gown now washed gray in the light from the window between her fingers.
She seemed to be waiting for me to speak, but rather than set the direction of the conversation, I elected to wait and see what she revealed.
She inhaled twice before finding her voice after the third attempt. “Have you spoken with Trevor?”
Even in my own preoccupation with avoiding my brother, I’d noticed that while polite, the pair had largely been eschewing each other’s company. So I wasn’t surprised when this was the first topic she addressed. “Not since earlier,” I answered honestly.
She lowered her head, but not before I saw that she was fighting tears. I thought it was distress over Trevor’s silence, but her next words proved me wrong.
“Father just told me…” She sniffed raggedly, trying to retain her composure. “He…he told me that Portia was my half sister.” She looked up at me, tears glinting in eyes raw with pain.
I pulled a handkerchief out of my sleeve and passed it to her. “You didn’t know?”
She shook her head, dabbing at her eyes. “I just thought…” She shrugged one of her shoulders. “He wished she was his daughter. But she already was.” She frowned. “And she was my sister.” She began to sob. “I always wanted a sister.”
Watching her weep, I did not doubt the sincerity of her grief or the fact that it was twofold.
That she’d lost a dear friend. Someone who had once been like a sister.
Someone who had wanted to be close again, but whom she’d rebuffed at her mother’s guidance.
And now discovering that friend had actually been a sister, that she would never have the chance to remedy the situation and come to know her better.
“They all knew, didn’t they? They all knew, and they lied to me.” She glared at me—bleakly but insistently—daring me to lie to her, too.
“I don’t know about Jemmy,” I confessed. “And I imagine Portia was only allowed in your home on sufferance for her silence.”
“Because Mother blamed her. Blamed her for Father and Portia’s mother’s indiscretion.
” She made a scoffing sound of disgust at the back of her throat as she turned away, resting her hands against the heavy brocade cloth covering the closed lid of the harpsichord.
Her profile was limned in the milky light of the moon.
When she spoke again, her voice softened to a throbbing whisper.
“Do you know what’s the worst thing about all of this though?
Father thinks I may have done it.” She seemed to choke on the final words, having to swallow harshly.
“He didn’t say it outright, but I saw the way he looked at me.
The way…” She broke off, shaking her head and leaving the thought unfinished.
She turned to look at me almost in challenge.
“He promised to protect me.” A promise she was now damaging by confiding this to me, but she appeared to know exactly what she was doing.
“He said that while I was misguided in wanting to marry Trevor, he approved of my willingness to go to such extreme lengths to get what I want. But I’m not like that.
I’m not like him!” Her facial features constricted in repulsion.
“I knew packing that bottle of vitriol was wrong the moment my portmanteau was carried out of my bedchamber. I wanted to take it out, to take it back, but I couldn’t get to it.
And then I didn’t know how to get rid of it without being seen. ”
It unsettled me to hear that Birnam’s reaction to the notion that one of his daughters might have killed the other was not grief or anguish or anger but an endorsement of her ruthlessness, but I tried to focus for the moment on Matilda’s actions.
“He’d told you he wasn’t going to let you marry my brother. That he wanted him to wed Portia.”
She nodded, bowing her head in shame. “It seems foolish now, but I…” She broke off, dabbing at her eyes again.
“I thought maybe if Portia wasn’t so pretty, Father would forget his stupid idea.
But then I realized that Portia’s prettiness had nothing to do with it.
That the problem was Father’s determination that I have a title.
But I don’t want a title, Kiera!” She turned to plead with me.
“I don’t want any of that. Not if it doesn’t involve Trevor. ”
“You love him?”
She blinked through her tears, holding my gaze. “I do. Please say that you believe me.”
“I do,” I answered honestly. She must have been in the deepest depths of despair to have contemplated such a reckless, terrible act.
The important thing was that she’d stopped herself.
That she’d not gone through with it. And I believed that, too.
If anything, her reaction to her father’s belief that she might have done it only further convinced me that she couldn’t have.
“Will you tell your brother that?”
Looking into her imploring eyes, I was reminded of a conversation I’d had with Trevor more than two years ago while standing over our parents’ graves.
I’d been despondent after refusing Gage’s first offer of marriage, believing that he wished to wed me for the wrong reasons.
But my brother had tracked me down and made me see the truth about everything that in my fear and vulnerability I could not.
If not for him, I might have missed out on all of the joy that marriage to Gage and motherhood to Emma had brought me.
Perhaps it was time to return the favor.
Though it wouldn’t entirely solve the problem, considering Mr. Birnam’s insistence that Matilda wed a nobleman. But perhaps that was an obstacle to be faced at a later date.
“I will,” I promised her.
Her shoulders slumped in relief. “Thank you.”
I rounded the harpsichord and sat down on the wide ledge below the window, thinking we both needed a few minutes’ reprieve before returning to the drawing room next door.
Even now, I could hear the low hum of voices through the wall as well as one of the ladies playing a sprightly minuet on the Broadwood.
But as the seconds ticked by, a new tension seemed to compress the air.
I turned to Matilda, finding it scored across her brow and in the taut line of her mouth in the moonlight.
“She came to see me.”
“Who?” I asked in confusion.
“Portia. She came to see me that night after I retired.”
I straightened. “The night she was killed?”
Her swallow was audible. “Yes. She came to my room.”
“When?” I demanded, struggling to hide my impatience.
“Sometime after ten, but before eleven. I…I don’t know the exact time.”
“Go on,” I urged, tempering my irritation.
“She told me she knew about Father’s plan for her to marry Trevor but that, even if he asked her, she wouldn’t go through with it. That she couldn’t. She said…she said she wanted me to know that.”
The phrasing of this struck me as odd. “She wanted you to know. That’s what she said?”
“Yes.”
I could tell that this now struck her as odd, too, even if it hadn’t at the time.
“Did she say anything else?”
“No. But then…I wasn’t particularly welcoming.” Her voice caught, indicating her regret.
I decided to try a different tack. “How did she behave?”
Matilda seemed flummoxed by this query. “I don’t…”
“Was she happy, sad, angry…?”
“Oh. Um. I suppose a bit sad. Her words were…sincere. I can see that now. She seemed concerned, worried even, for me. Or for herself.” She frowned. “I’m not sure.” She shook her head. “I should have asked questions. I should have tried to see beyond my own selfishness.”
Though I was still aggravated with Matilda for keeping this from us, I couldn’t allow her to stand there berating herself without saying something. “It sounds to me like Portia understood exactly how you felt. Understood and accepted it. Why else would she have come to see you?”
Matilda seemed affected by this, pausing in her self-recrimination to consider it.
“I’m more interested in why she felt the need to seek you out at that hour on that night to tell you.”
Was it because she’d learned that Mr. Birnam had told Trevor that he would not be allowed to wed Matilda but that he could ask for Portia’s hand? Or was there another reason for her urgency? A reason that led to her death?
Judging from Matilda’s widened eyes, she grasped why I was asking, but she didn’t seem to know the answer either.
—
In the end, I never returned to the drawing room that evening, for as Matilda and I were about to enter, I was intercepted once again. This time by my husband.
He greeted us both with a charming smile before addressing Matilda. “Might I steal my wife away?”
“Of course,” she replied, her cheeks flushing.
It wasn’t clear what she believed he was stealing me away for, but the manner in which she glanced back over her shoulder at us before disappearing into the room suggested it wasn’t entirely proper. I found myself wondering what Trevor had been stealing her away to do.
Gage guided me away from the drawing room with a hand on my arm. “What was that about?”
“I don’t know. But Matilda just told me something interesting.” I relayed our conversation in the music room, keen to hear his impression of her confessions, while we made our way across the great hall and into the south corridor.
“Her father actually indicated he believes she’s guilty?” He shook his head. “That’s cold. And cruel. To both his daughters.”
“Then you don’t believe she did it?”
“No.” He arched his eyebrows. “And neither do you.”
I didn’t dispute this, reassured we seemed to be on the same page.
He scowled. “But sadly, I think Birnam is capable of telling his daughter such things when he knows it isn’t true, just to place her more firmly under his thumb.”
It was my turn to be shocked. “You mean, you think he deliberately lied to her in order to better control her?”
“If so, it didn’t work.”
Because she’d directly confided in me.
“Do you think Birnam did it?”
His expression was troubled. “Let’s just say, I’m not convinced he didn’t.”
I pondered this a moment before registering our surroundings. “Where are we going?”
His frown turned to one of annoyance. “Father wishes to speak to us.”
“Now?” I asked incredulously, for it would leave our guests unattended.
“Yes.”
I supposed there was a great deal Lord Gage didn’t yet know, for there hadn’t been time earlier to inform him of all the afternoon’s discoveries. But there were also a great deal of people still to interview. Trevor, for one, though part of me was glad to postpone that confrontation.
“Were you able to speak to Mrs. Birnam?” I asked.
“She retired early,” Gage reported. “And I think we should wait to speak to Jemmy until we find out whether Anderley is able to learn anything useful from his valet.”
“The ball is in two days’ time,” I reminded him. And the day after, Lord Gage’s political cronies were supposed to return to London for several important debates on the floor of the House of Lords, as well as their upcoming votes. Philip would be traveling down with them for the same reason.
“I know,” Gage assured me as we reached the door to the study. “Don’t fret, Kiera,” he told me. “We must be close to the solution. We’re just missing one or two key pieces of information.”
All I could do was hope he was correct, for I would not be pleased with the alternative. And neither would his father.