Chapter 24 #2
A broken laugh escaped her. It was such a perfectly ridiculous thing for him to say that for an instant he sounded exactly like her father again, not the exhausted man she had found imprisoned beneath a house in Wales.
Edmund reached through the bars and caught her face between his hands as best he could. His thumbs brushed clumsily over her wet cheeks.
“How are you here? How did you find me?”
“We found your letter.”
“My letter?”
“The one you supposedly left before you disappeared.”
Confusion crossed his face. “I left no letter.”
“I know. Isabella realized it was forged.” Rosalind covered one of his hands with hers, unwilling to surrender the contact even for a moment. “Then William found another letter mentioning this place.”
Her father’s expression changed so abruptly that Rosalind’s relief faltered.
“William?”
She looked over her shoulder.
For several moments she had forgotten anyone else existed. William had remained near the outer door, the lamp still in his hand, giving them what little privacy the cellar allowed.
“He came with me,” Rosalind said.
Edmund followed her gaze, and something in his face seemed to collapse. “William.”
William turned toward them.
Edmund’s fingers tightened around Rosalind’s before his head bowed. A sob escaped him, raw enough that her relief vanished beneath a fresh rush of alarm.
“Papa?”
William crossed the cellar immediately. “Lord Eastmere?”
When Edmund lifted his head again, tears stood openly in his eyes. He looked at William with an expression Rosalind could not understand, grief and fear tangled together with something that looked almost like guilt.
“You should not be here.”
William stopped several feet from the bars. “I rather think I should.”
“No.” Edmund shook his head. “You do not understand.”
Rosalind looked from her father to William, suddenly aware that something had changed. Only moments ago she had been consumed by the simple miracle of finding him alive. Now the dread that had followed them all the way from London was creeping back in.
William set the lamp down. “Then explain it to me.”
For a long moment, Edmund merely looked at him. Rosalind had never seen her father struggle so visibly with words, and when he finally spoke, his voice was quieter.
“There is something you must know.”
William’s expression tightened.
Edmund drew a slow breath, still holding Rosalind’s hand through the bars. “It concerns Algernon.”
The name settled heavily into the silence between them.
“What about him?” William asked.
Edmund closed his eyes briefly, and Rosalind tightened her fingers around his, bracing herself for whatever came next.
“Your father told me something many years ago that he had concealed from everyone.” Edmund paused, his attention fixed upon William. “Algernon was not the duchess’s son.”
For a moment, Rosalind was certain she had misunderstood him.
William appeared to think the same. He stared at Edmund without speaking, his expression strangely blank.
“Your father had an affair with a young woman employed in the household,” Edmund continued carefully. “A maid. She bore him a son, and that child was Algernon.”
“That is impossible.” William shook his head slowly. “My mother gave birth to him.”
“She presented him as hers. I do not know every detail of how it was arranged, only what your father eventually confided in me. The truth was concealed from the beginning, and Algernon was raised as his legitimate heir.”
Rosalind watched William struggle to absorb it.
Only days ago, he had discovered that the childhood he remembered was not the childhood his brother had endured.
Now Edmund was asking him to reconsider something even more fundamental, to somehow fit this impossible truth into a family history he had believed he understood.
“Why would my mother agree to such a thing?”
“I do not know,” Edmund admitted. “Your father never told me, and I never asked. By the time he confided in me, it had been done for decades. For most of those years, I believe he intended the secret to die with him.”
William’s gaze sharpened. “But something changed.”
“Yes. Toward the end of his life, your father began to question what he had done. Algernon’s temper frightened him.
There were incidents he would not fully describe to me, but he had begun to wonder whether allowing Algernon to inherit everything had been another wrong he was leaving behind for others to bear. ”
“My father was considering exposing him?”
“Not publicly, so far as I knew. But he was considering telling you the truth.”
William looked almost ill. “Why me?”
“Because the truth about Algernon’s birth concerned your future as much as his. Your father believed you had a right to know what he had done and what it might mean for your place in the family.”
Rosalind’s heart ached at the bewilderment on William’s face. She wanted to reach for him, but her father’s fingers remained wrapped around hers through the bars, and she could not bring herself to surrender the contact she had spent weeks fearing she might never have again.
“There was another problem,” Edmund said. “Algernon overheard us.”
William’s attention snapped back to him.
“I do not know precisely how much he heard, but it was enough. He knew that your father had told me the truth and that there had been some discussion of telling you. After your father died, I assured Algernon that I had no intention of exposing a secret that was not mine to expose.”
“And he believed you?”
“For a time, I think he did.”
Rosalind heard the qualification. “What changed?”
Edmund looked at William. “You did.”
William frowned.
“You and I became closer over the last two years. We dined together more often. We spoke about books, politics, whatever happened to interest us. Occasionally you came to me for advice. None of it seemed remarkable to me.”
“But Algernon noticed,” Rosalind said.
“Yes. And the more time William and I spent together, the more suspicious he became. He began to see every conversation between us as another opportunity for me to tell William what I knew.”
William’s jaw tightened. “So he took you.”
Edmund turned his gaze toward Rosalind, and she felt his hand close more firmly around hers.
“Yes. I was seized after leaving White’s and brought here before I properly understood what was happening.”
The words sent a fresh wave of anger through her.
Rosalind had known much of it already, or at least suspected it, but hearing her father describe his own abduction made it horribly real.
Someone had taken him from a London street, carried him hundreds of miles from his family, and locked him beneath this house because of a secret he had never intended to reveal.
“Was Algernon there?” William asked.
“Not when I was taken.”
“But you knew it was him.”
“I knew why I had been brought here, and there are very few people who knew this place existed and had reason to fear what I knew.”
William was silent for a moment before asking the question Rosalind suspected he already dreaded answering.
“Did he come afterward?”
Her father hesitated. “Yes.”
Whatever hope William had still been holding seemed to disappear.
Rosalind watched it happen in his face, and despite everything Algernon had done to her father, her heart hurt for him.
There could be no explanation now. No misunderstanding involving a carriage. No innocent reason for Edmund’s boots in Algernon’s study or a letter discussing a prisoner at Bryn Hir.
His brother had known. Worse, he had come here and seen Edmund imprisoned, yet had chosen to leave him behind.
William looked away, and Rosalind’s heart tightened at the devastation he could not quite conceal. She wanted to reach for him, to offer some fraction of the comfort he had given her so many times over the past weeks, but before she could move, her father spoke again.
“Algernon was not here most of the time,” Edmund said. “There was another man here. A guard, I suppose, although he never seemed particularly eager to be one.”
Rosalind looked at him more closely. “What do you mean?”
“He brought my meals and water and made certain I remained where I was told. But I heard enough of his arguments with Algernon to know he was becoming increasingly unhappy with the situation.” Edmund’s gaze shifted to William. “You said you found a letter mentioning me?”
William nodded. “It was addressed to Algernon. The writer complained that his temper made it impossible to reason with him. He said the prisoner at Bryn Hir could not remain here indefinitely.”
Recognition crossed Edmund’s face.
“That would have been him.”
“The guard?” Rosalind asked.
“I cannot be certain, but it sounds very much like him. Particularly the arguments over what was to be done with me.”
William frowned. “Where is he now?”
“I do not know. He stopped coming several days ago.”
Rosalind’s gaze dropped over her father again, taking in the hollows beneath his eyes and the way his clothing hung from his frame. “How long have you been alone?”
“Two days. Perhaps three. I had enough water, but little else.”
Her fingers tightened around his. The thought of her father locked beneath this house while the only person tending him simply disappeared made anger rise hot beneath her fear.
“Why would he leave?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” Edmund glanced toward the cellar stairs. “But if he was the man who wrote that letter, I doubt he simply forgot I was here.”
A strange sound drifted faintly through the house above them.
Rosalind turned toward the stairs.
For an instant, she could not place it. Then she remembered Isabella disappearing around the rear of the house and the plan they had made before separating.
The call of a bird.
Long and low, it carried through the walls before fading into silence.
William’s head lifted sharply, his attention fixed upon the stairs.
Rosalind waited, scarcely breathing.
The call came again.