Chapter 18 #2
The Duchess of Newbury put her hand over her mouth.
And made the sound she had been holding back for fourteen years.
It was some time before anyone could speak.
Dorothea poured the tea that had gone cold and replaced it with something stronger from the decanter on the sideboard, because she was Dorothea and she had apparently planned for this contingency along with every other.
She pressed a glass into Margaret’s hand and another, after a moment’s consideration, into Megan’s.
Megan sat with the glass in her hands and looked at the Duchess of Newbury, and the Duchess of Newbury sat with her glass in her hands and looked at Megan, and between them was the most extraordinary quality of air, thick and bright and terrible, the air of a room in which something had broken open that had been sealed for fourteen years.
“Megan,” the Duchess said. She kept saying it. Just the name, over and over, in the way you said the name of something you had thought lost. “Megan.”
“I didn’t know,” Megan said. “I didn’t know I had a mother.
” She stopped. The sentence was wrong somehow, insufficient, a completely inadequate description of everything she didn’t know, everything she’d been systematically prevented from knowing, everything she’d spent fourteen years being told didn’t exist. “I didn’t know I had anyone. ”
The Duchess reached across and took her hands.
Her grip was very strong. Her eyes were very bright, and she was not quite managing to hold herself to the composed stillness she had spent a lifetime perfecting, and Megan did not think she had ever seen anything both so difficult and so right as watching a woman’s careful composure fail for good reason.
“Your father,” Margaret said, and then stopped.
“My husband. He—” A breath. “Edward died four years ago. He spent the last ten years of his life looking for you.” Her voice was even.
She had clearly decided to be even. “He never stopped. There was not a single year that passed without letters, enquiries, investigators. He believed, he always believed, you were alive.” Her grip tightened slightly.
“I should like to tell him he was right.”
Megan thought about a man she had never known, who had spent so many years looking for her, who had died not knowing.
“What is my name?”
Her mother looked at her and said, “Hope. You are Lady Hope Fairfax. I never gave up hope you’d be found.”
She thought about her name. Lady Hope Fairfax, daughter of the Duke of Newbury.
She had always been someone’s daughter. She had always had a name, a house, a history, a father who had spent years trying to find her.
She had been born into something, belonged to something, and Penharrow had looked at a six-year-old child and decided she was his instead.
That is when tears finally fell.
“Who took you?” her mother asked as Dorothea handed her a handkerchief, her mother’s face a picture of fury. “They will pay. When your brother learns of this…”
She had a brother.
Dorothea told her Megan’s story, well not all of it, because Megan just couldn’t. And the Duchess cried some more.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and she heard her voice break on it, the clean snap of something under too much weight, and she was not quite fast enough to stop it. “I am so sorry that I didn’t—that I couldn’t—remember you.”
“No.” The Duchess’s voice was very firm. “No. That is not yours to carry.”
“But—”
“Megan.” And there was something in the way Dorothea said it, in the particular quality of that word in that voice, that reached into some part of her she had spent fourteen years guarding and did something to it without asking permission.
“You were so young. You were six years old and a man with more power than conscience stole you, and you survived.”
Megan pressed her lips together.
She would not cry. She had not cried properly since Penharrow’s house and she would not start now, in a London drawing room, with her hands in a stranger’s who was apparently her mother and her life rearranged beyond recognition in the space of fifteen minutes.
She was absolutely going to cry.
She put her face in her hands and wept, which she had not done in a long time, which was apparently something her body had been banking against the day it would be safe, and it turned out it was not a small amount.
The Duchess pulled her close. She hugged her as if she would never let Megan go and she said nothing, nothing at all, just held on, and Megan thought distantly that she had no idea what the correct emotional response was to suddenly be acquiring a mother at the age of twenty-one but that this was apparently it.
And finding out your real name. Hope.
Dorothea sat across from them with her untouched brandy and the expression of a woman who has arranged things and found them arranged correctly and is allowing herself a private moment of satisfaction.
The crying did not last long because Megan had trained herself out of it for too many years and her body had not forgotten.
She sat back and found a handkerchief, which turned out to have been placed on the arm of her chair at some point by Dorothea, because of course it had, and she pressed it to her face and breathed carefully until the visible evidence of it was manageable.
The Duchess was still holding her hand.
She did not appear to be in any hurry to stop.
“I have something I need to tell you,” Megan said.
It was the wrong thing to say. She heard it the moment it was said, heard the shape of it, the weight that came with it, and saw the Duchess go still with the particular stillness of a woman who has spent twenty years braced for the worst news and found good news and is not yet finished being afraid.
“Not about now,” Megan said quickly. “I am well. I am more than well. Oliver—Lord Astor, he…” She stopped. “There is a plan. I am protected. I am going to be the Marchioness of Astor.” She felt the strangeness of the sentence even now, the clean surreal fact of it. “I am not in danger.”
Margaret closed her eyes for one moment. Opened them.
“But there are things,” Megan continued, “that happened in that house. Things that were done. That you deserve to know.” She looked at her mother’s face, which was the most extraordinary thing, her mother’s face, and tried to find the right words for what she was about to say and could not.
“I need you to know so that you understand why we are going to make him pay. But I am also afraid of what it will cost you.”
The Duchess looked at her steadily. “You think it will hurt me.”
“I know it will hurt you.”
“Megan.” Dorothea spoke. Her voice was perfectly level, and she had the quality she always had when she had thought something through completely and was delivering the conclusion. “Look at your mother.”
Megan looked.
“She has spent fourteen years imagining every possible thing that might have happened to you,” Dorothea continued.
“Every night for fourteen years she has had those thoughts. The not-knowing is its own injury. Whatever the truth is, whatever Penharrow did—” She paused.
“It will not be worse than what her mind has made in the dark in the absence of information. You will not spare her pain by protecting her from facts.”
Megan was quiet.
The Duchess was still looking at her with those eyes that were her eyes, calm and steady and absolutely certain.
“She is right,” Margaret said. “And I will tell you something else.” She released Megan’s hand and sat back slightly, straight-backed, and became quite precisely the woman who had walked into the room, all composure and bone and contained iron.
“I am not the woman who needs protecting in this room. I am the woman whose daughter was stolen from her by a man who apparently decided he was above the law and above God and above every article of human decency.” Her voice was very quiet.
“Whatever he did to you, I want to know it. Not because I will be broken by it.” Her eyes were extremely dry now.
“Because I want to be accurately informed when I decide how to end him.”
Dorothea made a sound that was extremely short and also, unmistakably, satisfied.