Chapter 16
Chapter
Sixteen
Noon was slipping away by the time Hugh found Stone Hollow House in the village of Wanstead.
Located in a bucolic corner of Epping Forest, Wanstead Park was studded by grassy flats, marshes, islands, and ponds fed by the River Roding.
A mere ten miles northwest of London, it had long drawn wealthy city dwellers to its serene pastures, Lord and Lady Gibbons among them.
If his suspicion held true, he would find April Barlow here as well.
The previous night, Carrigan had slipped him into a vacant horse stall in the Violet House stables, away from the other servants.
A bed of hay, a blanket, and some ale and food had restored him before he’d fallen into a shallow sleep.
Just before dawn, Carrigan roused him, warning him to be gone before sun-up.
“The lad too,” he’d added, and with a start, Hugh realized he wasn’t alone in the stall.
Sometime during the night, Sir had found his way in and bedded down in the hay. He woke, groggy, his stomach rumbling audibly.
“Saw Bones found the lady you was looking for,” he announced, referring to Thornton’s search for April’s younger sister, who turned out be Lady Gibbons.
When Sir recited the address, Carrigan had been listening; he said he’d have a mount ready for Hugh to take.
The duchess insists, he added before Hugh could try to reject the offering.
However, he wouldn’t have. Getting to Wanstead efficiently and securely had, for once, trumped his pride.
Stone Hollow House was not a grandiose country estate.
It was a two-story brick home, the bricks a cascade of differing buff and rose hues.
The home appeared cozy and modestly refined, with bare vines climbing the exterior, and smoke billowing from the dual chimneys.
Hugh stopped his borrowed mount at the head of the short drive.
Other than the old painting in Sir Roberts’s study, he had never laid eyes on his birth mother.
Why did he feel so reluctant at the possibility of doing so now?
He dismounted and looped the reins through a brass hoop on a hitching post. There were no servants here to rush outside and take his horse, and he also felt no eyes upon him as he approached the front entrance.
London was not a truly safe distance away, but at least here, he didn’t feel the urge to look over his shoulder.
He brought down the knocker and only then did his pulse jump over what he might say.
How he would introduce himself. When the door opened, a maid in a mob cap looked blankly upon him.
Hugh cleared his throat, still deliberating if he should give his true name—if uttered as servant gossip, it might lead Bow Street officers here.
“Sir, what is your business?” the maid asked impatiently, and Hugh couldn’t fault her for it. Here he stood, looking like a gaping fool.
“I am looking for Lady Gibbons.”
“Is the baroness expecting you?”
“No, but it is imperative—”
“Alice?” a woman said from behind the maid. “Who is at the door?”
Then she appeared at the maid’s shoulder. A woman in her late forties, with brown hair streaked with gray. Hugh recognized her from the painting. This was Lady Gibbons.
Their eyes met, and instantly, recognition smoothed her lined brow. She appeared several years younger as she stared up at Hugh, her lips parting. With misty eyes, she shooed the maid, Alice, aside and told her to fetch tea.
“Come in,” Lady Gibbons said to him, waving him forward in a flustered manner. Hugh doffed his hat as he stepped into the entrance lobby.
She closed the door and turned to look upon him again, her expression a curious amalgam of excitement, sadness, and uncertainty.
“You know who I am,” he said.
“I do. You look very much like your father.”
Sir Robert had said the same thing. It occurred to him that a letter might have arrived from his grandfather, alerting Lady Gibbons that her sister’s secret had been aired out.
“Is she here?” Hugh inquired.
He did not know which answer he wanted more. No, and he would not have to face her or her rejection of him. He should not have wanted that reply as much as he did. Lady Gibbons unknowingly chastened him when she nodded primly.
“If you will allow me a moment,” she said, before then disappearing into what was most likely a drawing room.
Hushed voices. The thump of something being knocked over.
A chair, as his mother shot to her feet in surprise?
He held his breath, listening. Wondering what she felt right then.
Panic? Anger? Guilt? Hell, he had not a clue what kind of woman she was.
The kind that gave you up.
Lady Gibbons reappeared in the drawing room entrance and nodded, the signal to approach.
He’d like to have said setting eyes upon his birth mother for the first time was a momentous occasion. That he saw her, and, without warning, everything fell into place. He wanted to feel a natural connection, an instant, unexplainable bond.
Instead, he stood within the room looking upon a woman of middling height and weight, her age beginning to show upon slackened jowls and in streaks of gray in her hair.
She looked every inch a school headmistress, wearing a tweed dress of muted brown, with a good amount of lace ruffle at the neck.
Had they passed each other by on the street, Hugh would not have known her.
He wouldn’t have looked twice. April Barlow felt as unfamiliar to him as a stranger.
She looked up at him with a wavering expression, much like her sister had worn.
“You did not expect me to come,” he said awkwardly. “I apologize.”
She shook her head tightly. “I did expect it,” she said. At his frown of confusion, she explained. “One day. I expected you one day. I always did.”
A burst of frustration leaped to his tongue. “And would you have done something to bring that day about? Or would you have simply placed the responsibility into the hands of fate?”
At her stricken look, Hugh felt a prickling of guilt. Only just. Lady Gibbons clasped her hands before her and said she would go check on the tea. He barely heard her. The questions he had for Miss Barlow were so many in number they produced a din of clamor in his mind.
“Let us sit,” she suggested once they were alone.
He was too restless. The idea of sitting made him feel trapped. “I would rather stand.”
She nodded and remained standing as well. Hugh removed his greatcoat, which, due to Lady Gibbons’s surprise at the front door, had not been taken; he now tossed it upon a chaise longue. He flexed his fingers as an unnamable irritation assailed him.
“Why?” he asked. His question, large and unwieldy as it was, needed no elaboration. She knew what he meant.
“There is much to say,” she replied. Then, glimpsing at the chair behind her, the one Hugh suspected had been overturned in her surprise, she sighed. “I think I will sit.”
She did, and then calmly, with a detached sort of directness, Miss Barlow began.
“I’ve imagined this moment countless times over the last twenty-eight years, and so I’ve had time to put together an answer for you. One I hoped would address all the possible questions you would have.”
“One that is also truthful and not riddled with self-preserving lies, I trust,” he said, refusing to feel badly for his temper.
She did not take offense, however. With a pert nod, she replied, “I think it only fair I provide you with the truth. And the truth is this: I loved you enough to realize that I did not love you enough to keep you.”
Hugh stared at her, the statement slowly making sense in his mind, like a riddle and its answer coming clear.
“I see,” he murmured, even though it wasn’t true. She knew it.
“I don’t believe you do. I will start at the beginning, and then perhaps you will.
You see, my father wasn’t part of London society.
We were not financially sound enough to afford the lifestyle, and he certainly couldn’t fund my coming out.
So instead, my aunt offered to host me. The season turned out to be utterly unremarkable, except for one afternoon when my aunt secured us invitations to Almack’s.
There, I met your father for the first time.
It was a brief introduction, and nothing came of it, but then, the next autumn, I met him again at a country dance near Chatham Park.
He remembered me.” Miss Barlow smiled wistfully.
It cut into her wooden expression. Hugh suspected that to smile was unnatural for her.
She spoke plainly, directly, as if instructing a classroom of her pupils.
“He was patient with me. I didn’t socialize easily, and would speak directly, without artifice. It caused many others to avoid me, but Fitzgerald assured me he appreciated my candor. I knew he was a good man, and it didn’t take long for us to fancy ourselves in love.”
Fancy. As if now, looking back, she knew it hadn’t been true.
“But as I’ve stated, my father was impoverished.
I had no dowry to speak of, and Fitzgerald’s father, the viscount, secretly had his own dwindling coffers to concern him.
He required his heir to marry well, for the sake of their title and fortune.
It was all very predictable, and I suppose our decision to run away together was as well. We went to Gretna Green.”
The need for a seat now overtook Hugh, drowning out his restless agitation. Audrey’s suggestion had been correct. He lowered himself to the edge of the chaise longue.
“You married.”
“We did. Though, not over the blacksmith’s anvil. No, Fitzgerald insisted on a church wedding, so we applied to Reverend McClure at the old parish church.”
The sitting room’s walls absorbed the confession, the enormity of it. This was what Eloisa had known. What Joanna, the viscountess, had known. And someone else had as well. Someone desperate to bury the secret Eloisa had exhumed.
“Then what?” he asked.