Chapter 16
Chapter
Sixteen
Revelations at Midnight
The gate yielded without a sound as I stepped into the dark garden of Everly House.
A single lamp burned in a ground-floor window, casting a pale oblong across the flagstones of the terrace. I followed it as a mariner might follow a harbor light—warily, and with the knowledge that what lay beyond might prove more dangerous than the open sea.
A door opened before I reached it. Not Lady Larkspur, as I had half expected, but a middle-aged woman carrying a lantern. Its light caught the set of her jaw before it found mine.
"Good evening, Lord Everthorne." She did not appear happy to see me. "I am Mrs. Selwyn. Lark's cousin."
And resident dragon, by the look of her. She held the lantern high enough to examine my face with the unhurried thoroughness of a woman deciding whether to admit me or set me alight. Whatever she found there did not improve her mood.
"This way, my lord. Quietly, if you please."
I followed her through a narrow passage and said nothing, which seemed the safest course of action available to me.
The drawing room was smaller than I had imagined.
I had pictured something grander for the woman whose literary salons were spoken of in every corner of London—or at least every corner that troubled itself with poetry and radical opinions.
But the room was intimate, lined with books and furnished for comfort rather than display.
A fire burned low in the grate. Two armchairs had been drawn close to it, and between them a small table bore a decanter of what appeared to be brandy and two glasses.
Two glasses. Not three.
Lady Larkspur stood near the mantelpiece. She wore a dark teal gown, high-collared, with no ornament save a brooch of jet at her throat. Her black hair was loosely pinned, as though she had begun to prepare for bed and then thought better of it. The effect was—I set that thought aside.
“Good evening, Lord Everthorne.” Her voice carried the same composure I remembered from our previous encounters, but there was an alertness about it tonight.
“Lady Larkspur.” I inclined my head.
“You’ve met my cousin, Mrs. Selwyn.” She gestured to the lady.
I turned to her relative. “I have.”
“She will be joining us this evening, for propriety’s sake.” She didn’t appear entirely happy with that statement. “With your approval, of course.”
I had rehearsed how I would say what needed saying, how much to reveal.
What I hadn’t planned for was a chaperone, although in retrospect I should have.
Regardless, we needed solitude for the conversation we were about to have.
“What I have come to discuss,” I said, “is of a private nature. I would prefer that it remain between the two of us.”
Mrs. Selwyn’s expression hardened. “My lord, you must understand that I cannot in good conscience—”
“Are you planning to ravish me tonight, Thorne?” Lady Larkspur interrupted.
Fighting back a smile, I said, “No. Not tonight at any rate.”
Something changed in Lady Larkspur’s expression. Her lips pressed together, and for a moment I thought she might laugh. Whatever she had expected—gravity, perhaps, or scandalized deflection—it was not what I said.
Mrs. Selwyn, on the other hand, was not amused. “Really, Lark.”
Lady Larkspur turned to her cousin. “Miriam, would you be so kind as to wait just outside? The door will remain unlocked.”
Mrs. Selwyn rose with the dignity of a woman making clear that her compliance was not the same as her approval. She paused beside me, looked up—she barely reached my shoulder—and said, “I shall be immediately outside that door, my lord. Immediately.”
“I would expect nothing less, Mrs. Selwyn.”
When the door had closed behind her, I became acutely aware it was midnight and Lady Larkspur and I were quite alone.
Never mind a brandy decanter and two glasses rested on a nearby table, and her hair was charmingly disarranged.
And I was about to share with her the most shameful secret my family possessed.
"Please," she said, gesturing to one of the armchairs near the hearth. "Sit."
As I did so, she poured brandy into one of the glasses and handed it to me. And then she settled into her own chair and waited for me to speak.
I set my glass down untouched and withdrew my grandmother's journal from my coat.
It was a small thing—bound in green morocco, the leather cracked and darkened with age. My grandmother's hand had been elegant once, but had grown uncertain in her later years, the letters listing like ships in heavy weather.
"This belonged to my grandmother," I said. "The Dowager Marchioness." I paused. "It was among the items my estate manager sent to me. It covers the weekend gathering at Everthorne, the autumn of 1847.”
Lady Larkspur's gaze sharpened at the mention of the journal, but she said nothing.
“My father had invited several families of consequence. My brother invited several of his Oxford friends. Among the guests was a young woman named Emily Driscoll."
“Go on.”
“This journal does not begin with that weekend. It begins earlier. In it, my grandmother wrote about my brother, William.” The name felt like a stone in my mouth.
"She had observed him for years. His behavior with the housemaids.
His way of finding one alone in a corridor, a stairwell, a linen closet.
My grandmother intervened where she could, but William was the heir, and the heir's conduct was not her province to govern. Not according to my father."
“And you knew nothing of this?”
“I was away at Oxford and then encouraged to remain in London. I preferred it, to tell you the truth. There was more…gaiety to be found in the city than the wilds of Yorkshire.” Gaiety meant rowdy gatherings, licentious women, getting drunk most nights. I’d earned my rakish reputation honestly.
She raised a brow but otherwise did not comment.
"During that weekend, my grandmother caught William making advances toward one of the maids. She put a stop to it. She believed that was the end of the matter." I paused. “Apparently, it was not."
Lady Larkspur's hands had gone still in her lap. She was watching me the way I imagined she read a poem—attending not only to what was said, but to everything that surrounded it.
"The following morning, Emily Driscoll was taken from the house.
My grandmother did not describe the details of her departure.
What she described was the conversation she had with William afterward.
" I could feel my jaw tightening, the old discipline of the regiment holding my voice level.
"She confronted him. He did not deny it.
He told her that Miss Driscoll had come to Everthorne to catch a title, and that she had got more than she bargained for. "
Something passed across Lady Larkspur's face—not surprise, but a kind of recognition, cold and precise, as though she had heard such words before, or words near enough to make no difference.
"And then," I said, "my grandmother describes what my father did."
I reached for the brandy and drank.
"I had been at the gathering. I had drunk a great deal that evening—more than I should have, more than I can account for.
I remember very little of the night." I met her eyes.
"My father knew this. He came to me the following morning and told me that I would be made responsible for what had happened to Miss Driscoll. That I was to take the blame."
Lady Larkspur drew a sharp breath. It was the first sound she had made.
"I knew it was a lie," I said. "I knew I had not touched her.
But I could not prove what I had not done, and I could not say who had.
My father informed me that he would purchase a commission for me.
I was to go and never return home. I left Everthorne that same day.
" I turned the journal over in my hands.
"My grandmother never saw me again. She died shortly after she learned I had been sent to the Crimea. "
The room was very quiet. Somewhere in the house, a clock struck the half hour.
“Your father enlisted you in the army, exiled you from your home,” Lady Larkspur said. Her voice was barely above a whisper, but there was nothing soft in it. "To protect William."
"To protect the heir," I said. "Yes."
She rose from her chair and crossed to the window.
I watched the line of her shoulders, the tension held there—the fury of a woman who understood precisely what I was telling her, not only about my family but about the machinery of the world in which we both moved.
A world in which a young woman could be assaulted, removed, and forgotten, and the man who did it could stand in his grandmother's drawing room and talk about what had been done to her without remorse.
When she turned back to me, her composure had reassembled itself, but her eyes were bright with anger.
"And now you know it was William," she said. "You have the proof."
"I have my grandmother's account. Whether that constitutes proof is another matter entirely.
" I looked at the journal—a small, cracked, green thing that had probably cost my grandmother many sleepless nights to write.
"Who believes the private writings of a dead woman against the reputation of a rake?”
“I do,” Lady Larkspur said fiercely. “I bloody well do.”