Chapter One #2
The question landed with the weight of everything she could not say. She could not say yes without burying Helena under a falsehood she would never retrieve. She could not say no without exposing her sister’s name to every servant in this hall.
She said nothing.
“Your silence is an answer, Lady Beatrice.”
“My silence is a protection, Your Grace. They are not the same thing, and I would ask you not to confuse the two.”
Ravenshaw watched her silence and drew his conclusion. His jaw tightened.
“I see.”
“You do not. You see what the silence allows you to assume, and the assumption is wrong.”
“Then correct it.”
“I cannot correct it without risking someone who deserves protection more than you deserve satisfaction.”
“That is remarkably forthright for a woman who has just refused to answer my question.”
“I have not refused. I have explained why I cannot comply. The distinction matters, Your Grace, even if it does not satisfy you.”
“Very little about this evening has satisfied me, Lady Beatrice, and I expect the trend will continue.”
Beatrice held the duke’s gaze. “I have walked two miles through a storm with a child who has not been properly fed since yesterday. My maid has carried everything we own in a single valise. We left my father’s house in the night, and we did not leave because the accommodations were lacking.”
“You left the Earl of Wycliffe’s household.”
“I left a house that was no longer safe for the child.”
“And you came here.”
“My deceased sister told me to come here.”
Something changed in his face. The interrogation sharpened into genuine attention.
“Told you?”
“In a letter. The only legible line that survived the rain.”
“Do you have this letter?”
“I have been holding it against my body since we left the carriage, which you have already observed and which I see no reason to pretend otherwise.”
She drew it from her cloak. The paper was warped and soft; the ink bled until most of the words were gone. One line remained, stubborn and clear.
Go to Ravenshaw.
She held it out. He took it with two fingers, careful with the damaged paper, and angled it towards the nearest candle. His eyes moved across the ruined text and settled on the surviving line.
“This is not your hand?”
“No. It is my sister’s.”
“Why would Lady Helena send you to me?”
“That is a question I have been asking myself for two miles in the rain, Your Grace, and I confess I have not arrived at a satisfactory answer.”
“Do you expect me to supply one?”
“I expect you to consider the possibility that a woman in the final stages of a decline, who wrote your name as her last instruction, had a reason for doing so, and that the reason may concern both of us.”
He set the letter down with a care that surprised her, placing it on the side table as though the damaged paper were a document he intended to preserve.
“You said the child has not been properly fed.”
“Since yesterday.”
“And you?”
“I am not the priority.”
“That was not my question.”
“It was the only answer I have.”
“It is an evasion disguised as selflessness, and I have had quite enough evasions for one evening.”
Martha said: “She has not eaten since a bread roll that we split outside the village, Your Grace. If you are taking an inventory of our deprivations, I can provide a comprehensive list.”
“I do not require a list.”
Martha lowered her eyes, but the set of her mouth said the list existed and was comprehensive.
“There is something else,” Beatrice said.
She reached into the folds of Ned’s shawl and withdrew the signet ring.
Gold with a dark stone, heavy for its size, with a crest she had learned to recognise only after Helena’s death, when she had found it wrapped in a handkerchief beneath a bundle of letters her sister had hidden where no one was ever meant to look.
She held it out in her open palm and said nothing of the hands it had passed through to reach hers.
The reaction was immediate. Ravenshaw’s eyes went to the ring, and his mouth compressed into a line so tight his face looked as though it had been struck.
“Where did you get this?”
“From a place its owner believed was safe, hidden among letters that were never meant to be read. That is as much as I am able to tell you tonight, Your Grace.”
He did not take it from her at once. He looked at it the way a man looks at a thing he had hoped never to see again, and when at last he reached out, it was only to turn it a half circle in her palm with one finger, as though confirming a suspicion he already disliked.
“I recognise this crest as well as I recognise my own.”
“I entertained the hope that you might,” she responded weakly.
“Then you know whose hand this ring belongs on, and you know that a man like him does not part with it for sentiment or as a gift to anyone outside his own family, unless a promise has been made and an announcement is being arranged.”
“I know what the ring was meant to purchase, and I know that the purchase was never honoured, and I would rather not say the name aloud in a hall full of servants for the same reason you have gone so still at the sight of it.”
The name neither of them had spoken seemed to gather in the air between them all the same.
One of the footmen’s eyes went wide. Martha’s breathing stopped and restarted.
The housekeeper, halfway up the stairs, paused without turning, and the quality of her stillness suggested that the man this ring belonged to meant something in this house that went well beyond ordinary dislike.
“Adrian Voss,” Ravenshaw said, and the saying of it changed the temperature of the room.
“You have spoken his name. I notice that I did not.”
“You did not need to. You have come to my door in a storm with his ring, a child, and a letter written in a dying woman’s hand, and you have spent the quarter hour since telling me, with great precision, almost nothing. I am capable of arithmetic, Lady Beatrice.”
“Then I would ask you to be careful which figure you settle on, Your Grace, because the obvious answer and the correct one have a way of parting company, and I have given you nowhere near enough to tell which is which.”
Ravenshaw closed his hand around the ring. When he spoke, his voice had gone quiet in a way that was considerably more alarming than his earlier coldness.
“How long have you been carrying this?”
“Since we left my father’s house.”
“And the letters?”
“I could not carry everything. Martha has some. The rest are hidden where my father will not find them.”
“Your father does not know about the ring?”
“My father does not know about any of it, and I intend to keep it that way until I understand what it means and what Lord Voss proposes to do regarding the infant who is the living testament to their indiscretion.”