Chapter 30
The vicarage was smaller than he had expected.
He did not know what he had expected precisely—some image assembled from the idea of a country vicar, a man of modest means and quiet life, but the reality of it was quieter still. A stone house at the edge of the village, a garden that had been carefully tended once.
James knocked.
The man who opened the door was perhaps sixty-five, with white hair and wary eyes. He was dressed plainly.
“Your Grace,” he greeted with a stiff bow.
“Reverend Bennett.” James removed his hat. “I am sorry to arrive without prior notice. The matter is urgent.”
“I know who you are,” the reverend said. “And I know why you’ve come.” He stepped back from the door. “You had better come in.”
James stepped inside and went to sit in the small chair the reverend indicated.
The reverend sat opposite and looked at him directly.
“You came to ask about the letters.” A statement, not a question.
“I want to know the truth about the letters Lord Mortimer has produced,” James said. “And I believe you are the person most likely to have it.”
The reverend was quiet for a long moment. He looked at the fire.
“The letters are false,” he revealed. “I will say that plainly, and I will say it first so that you do not have to sit here wondering whether I intend to say it at all.”
James went very still. “You know this.”
“I know my daughter.” The reverend’s voice was even, but underneath it was something older and more fragile.
“I know the woman she was. Whatever those letters claim, whatever arrangement Lord Mortimer has constructed around them, Clara was faithful to the former Duke for the entirety of their relationship. There was no other man. There was never another man.” He paused.
“The dates in those letters correspond to a period I can account for entirely.”
“Can you prove it?” James asked.
“I have letters.” The reverend said it with the resignation of a man who had been carrying something he had not yet known what to do with.
“From the Duke himself, written to Clara during that same period… from London. They wrote to each other every week.” He let that sink in.
“Dated letters, Your Grace. Addressed to this house. Received by me because Clara asked me to hold her correspondence when she could not.” He paused.
“I have kept them. I did not know why I kept them, but now I know.”
“You’ve had them this whole time,” James said.
“Yes.”
“Since before Lord Mortimer filed the petition.”
“Yes.”
A pause.
“Why did you not come forward?” James asked softly, genuinely wanting to understand.
The reverend looked down at his hands. “Because I was not certain that coming forward was my right.”
James frowned. “Your right?”
“Then I suppose I should tell you about my daughter first. She was twenty-two when she went to work as a companion to Lady Ellington,” he began.
“I had arranged it myself. I knew the Ellingtons—good family. Lady Ellington was a relation of a parishioner I had known for years. I thought it would be useful for Clara.” He paused.
“She was a clever girl. Too clever sometimes for a vicar’s daughter in a village like this.
She read everything. Argued with everything.
” Something moved through his expression.
“She reminded me of her mother, who died when Clara was twelve, and I had never entirely known what to do with that resemblance.”
“What happened at the Ellingtons’?” James probed.
“The Ellingtons were among the wealthiest families in the county—good people, generous employers, and well regarded by everyone who knew them.” The reverend paused.
“They entertained frequently during the Season they spent in the country. Your cousin was often among their guests. It was in their drawing room that Clara first met him.”
He turned his hat in his hands. James had not noticed until now that he was holding it.
“She wrote to me about him. Not immediately—she was always careful about what she told me, and I had given her reasons to be. But eventually, she wrote. She told me she had met someone. That it was complicated. That she wanted me to understand before I heard it from someone else.”
“What did you say?” James asked.
“I told her,” the reverend said carefully, “that a gentleman’s interest in a woman of her position was not the kind of interest that led anywhere respectable.”
Silence.
“She wrote back,” he continued. “She said she understood that. She said it was not… that the situation was not what I was imagining. That he was a good man who wished he could offer more than he could, and that she loved him, and that she had made her choices with a clear head. I wrote back and told her she was a fool.”
He paused. “She did not write again for three months. And when she did, she did not mention him. She talked about the Ellingtons and the weather and a book she had read, and I wrote back about the parish and pretended nothing had happened, and we continued that way for a while.” He exhaled slowly.
“And then she told me she was with child.”
A log popped in the fire.
“I see,” James murmured.
“I did not handle it well.” It came out with the flatness of an understatement so severe it had become honesty.
“I wrote things I cannot—I said things in that letter that I cannot read now. I have tried since she died, and I cannot seem to do it.” The reverend pressed his lips together.
“I told her that she had shamed herself and that she had shamed me and that she had shamed her mother’s memory, which was…
that was the cruelest thing. To put her mother in it. She had loved her mother.”
James said nothing. He was aware that this was not a conversation that benefited from being rushed.
“She wrote back once more,” the reverend continued, his eyes watering.
“A short letter. She said she was sorry to have disappointed me. She said she hoped I would understand in time. She said the Duke intended to see that she and the child were provided for, and that she did not… that she did not wish me to worry about her because she was cared for.” He paused.
“She said she hoped that I would come to feel differently when the child was born.”
“And did you?” James asked.
“I did not go to her,” the reverend choked out.
“When she wrote to tell me the child was born—a healthy little girl she named Violet—I did not go. I told myself I needed time. I told myself I would go when I had worked out what to say.” He looked at the painting on the wall, his tears falling freely now.
“I was still working out what to say when she died.”
The room was very quiet.
“I did not see my daughter for a year,” he sobbed. “A whole year, and then she was gone. The last communication between us was a letter in which I told her she had shamed her mother’s memory.” He sniffled. “I have had to live with that.”
“I am sorry,” James offered.
“It was not your fault.” The reverend took a deep breath and looked at him. “It was my fault. I believed certain things about how the world should work and chose my principles over my child. I lost her.” He paused. “One ought to think very carefully before choosing principles over people.”
James thought about Isadora and how she had looked in the nursery at midnight, and the words he had not said before her carriage disappeared down the drive.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “One ought.”
The reverend let out a shaky breath. “Violet… Clara chose the name herself. It was her mother’s middle name.
She wrote it in the letter.” He looked at the fire.
“I have thought of her constantly since Clara died. I do not know her. I have never seen her. She does not know I exist.” His voice thinned.
“She is all that remains of my daughter, and I am a stranger to her.”
“She is well,” James assured him.
The reverend looked up immediately with bright eyes, which told James everything about how long he had been waiting to hear those three words.
“She is very well,” James said. “She is… She has a strong will. She grabs people’s lapels when she wants their attention, which is frequently, and she has recently discovered that clapping and giggling gets people to smile at her and has been conducting experiments… a lot.” He paused. “She is doing well.”
The reverend looked at him for a long moment.
“You love her,” he noted.
“Yes,” James said simply.
Relief flashed across the reverend’s face.
“I was so afraid,” he breathed. “When Clara died, and when I heard what Lord Mortimer was doing… I was afraid she would end up in some institution. That she would grow up not knowing who she is or where she comes from. That she would be—” He choked up.
“That she would be what I made Clara feel. That she would feel unwanted.”
“She does not feel that,” James said.
“I can see that.” The reverend looked at him steadily. “I can see it in this visit. A man does not leave before dawn and travel a long distance for a child he is merely responsible for. She has someone who chooses her.”
“She has several people who choose her,” James emphasized. “And she is aware of it.”
The reverend pressed his lips together for a moment.
“Clara would have—” He stopped. Tried again.
“Clara would have been grateful. To you, and to your wife. All she wanted was for her child to be loved.” He looked at the painting again.
“That was what she said in the last letter I received from her. Not money, not standing, not respectability. Just love.”
“She has it,” James affirmed, and the reverend nodded.
They sat in silence for a moment. Outside the window, the village went about its quiet business. Someone crossed the street. A dog barked somewhere in the distance.
“May I see the letters?” James asked.
“I will do better than that,” the reverend said, standing up. “I will give them to you.”
He was gone for perhaps fifteen minutes.
James sat there and looked at the fire and thought about Mortimer sitting across from him in his own drawing room with his carefully prepared letters and his solicitor and his patient, practiced certainty.
He thought about Violet in the nursery at Ashbourne, entirely unaware that her inheritance had been the subject of legal challenge, that men had sat in rooms and questioned whether she belonged where she was.
He thought about Isadora saying, Don’t let anyone take her away.
The reverend returned with a carved wooden box. He set it on the table between them and opened it.
There were several letters, bundled by month and tied with plain cord. Beneath them was a sheaf of financial documents. James could see the headings from where he sat—records of provision stretching back to almost a year before the child’s birth.
“This is everything I have,” the reverend said.
James looked at the box. “This ends it,” he uttered.
“It should never have begun,” the reverend sighed.
“Lord Mortimer knew the truth, but he chose to construct an alternative.” He sat back down.
“I should have come forward the moment he filed the petition. My silence allowed it to continue longer than it should have.” He hung his head. “I am sorry for that.”
“The petition will be withdrawn within the week,” James said. “With this documentation, his case would not stand.” He paused. “Rest assured that Violet is well. She is loved. She has…” He considered his words. “She has a home.”
The reverend’s expression did something it had not done since James had arrived—it brightened briefly.
“A family?” he asked.
James thought about Isadora at Blackmoor.
“Working on it,” he replied.
The reverend looked at him with the assessing directness he had deployed since the moment he opened the door, and this time something in it shifted.
“You love her? Your wife.”
James looked at the box of letters. “Yes.”
“Does she know?”
He was quiet for a moment.
“Not yet,” he admitted. “There were… issues. I managed them badly. I am going to Blackmoor to manage them better.”
“Mm.” The reverend looked at the fire, then at him. “May I ask something of you?”
“Yes.”
“Violet.” He said it simply. “I know I have no right to—I know that I am not…” he trailed off.
“She is my granddaughter. She is the last thing I have of Clara. I would only ask that you allow me to see her. Not frequently, if that is not… Not publicly, if the circumstances make it complicated. But occasionally. If you and your wife will permit it.”
James studied him. He thought of a child who had lost everything in an afternoon and a grandfather who had lost a daughter before he had made things right between them.
He thought of the terrible grief the reverend was carrying, which was not the clean grief of loss but the complicated grief of a missed opportunity.
“She will know her grandfather,” James assured him. “I give you my word.”
The reverend looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded once with the dignity of someone receiving a gift they had not been certain they would be given and intended to be worthy of.
“Thank you,” he said quietly.
James began to close the box.
“Your Grace.”
He looked up.
The reverend was eyeing him with the expression of a man who had been thinking about something for a long time and had decided that this was the right moment to address it.
“Blood may make a father,” he said. “I have learned that late, and at a huge cost, but I have learned it.” He paused. “Love is what makes a family.”
The room was very quiet around them. The fire had burned down to embers.
“Yes,” James agreed. “It is.”
He said it with the ease of a man who had just understood something he had been approaching for a very long time. Not as a revelation exactly, more like the arrival at the end of a road and understanding what had led there.
A family.
He had inherited a duchy and a ward and a household, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, he had acquired something he had not known he was missing and could not now imagine living without.
He wanted to go home.
He wanted to go home and find Isadora and say everything he had been carrying for days, and he wanted to say it without the management or the careful distance or the years of habit that had kept him from saying it for far longer than made any sense.
He stood and shook the reverend’s hand. He walked to the carriage with the box of letters under his arm.
“Ashbourne,” he told the driver.
He climbed in, and the carriage lurched into motion.
He looked out at the passing countryside and thought about how love was what made a family, and thought about how much he wanted to see Isadora, and thought about everything he intended to say and the many ways he might say it badly and the fact that he was going to say it regardless.
I am coming home. Both homes. But first, he needed to do something.