Chapter 18 #3
“Now,” said the Dowager Duchess of Saxton, setting down her glass, “we are in agreement, the three of us. The first order of business is making Megan’s identity irrefutable.
Not merely claimed but documented, verified, beyond any legal question.
I have already been in conversation with a solicitor, and I intend to speak to him again this afternoon. ”
“The birth records,” Margaret said immediately.
“We have birth records and there are parish records, christening records. I remember the day as if it were yesterday, holding you in my arms. I remember the vicar, I remember exactly which church. There were witnesses. Nanny Wilson is still alive. She can attest to the birthmark which is a family trait. Your brother has it too. We had friends present; half the county was there.” Something moved through her expression. “He won’t win.”
“That is precisely what I have been working from,” Dorothea said. “And there is the matter of Lady Megan herself, whose resemblance to her mother is sufficiently striking that I recognized her without being told, and a birthmark, well documented in the family records I intend to summons.”
“The family Bible,” Margaret said. “My husband’s grandmother wrote every birth in the family Bible. Megan’s birthmark is recorded there. She wrote it down herself.” A pause. “The Bible is at Newbury Park in Wiltshire. It has been there for forty years.”
Dorothea looked at her over her spectacles with an expression of pure appreciation.
“Margaret,” she said. “I have always thought well of you.”
“And I of you.” The Duchess folded her hands in her lap.
“Now. Oliver Sommerset is a good man. I remember his father. He has been working to protect my daughter, and I am grateful for it, and I intend to support him in whatever way I can.” She paused.
“But I want it made clear that I am not a bystander in whatever comes next. Penharrow has been living his life as if what he did has no reckoning coming. I have been waiting a long time to give him one.”
“We had rather thought,” Dorothea said, with a serenity that had iron underneath it, “of making the reckoning comprehensive.”
“Tell me what you have in mind.”
“The petition he has brought in Chancery with Megan’s identity established, it collapses entirely.
But that is a legal outcome. It is tidy.
It restores what was taken.” Dorothea’s dark eyes were very direct.
“I want more than restoration. I want him ruined. I want him investigated under the criminal law for what he did. I want him excluded from every room he has ever been in, and I want every man who ever showed him courtesy to understand what they were courteous to.” She paused.
“He is a Welsh earl. His influence in London is limited and his debts are considerable. I have been making enquiries.”
Margaret was listening with the focused attention of a woman receiving military intelligence.
“He has enemies,” Dorothea continued. “Men he has wronged in the past decade. Men with standing who have been waiting for the correct alignment to act against him. My son the duke has more weight in Parliament than Penharrow can dream of, and he is—” She glanced at Megan. “Significantly motivated.”
“As am I,” Margaret said. “As well your brother the Duke of Newbury. God help me, I’ve never said this about anyone, but I want that man dead. He cost me…he cost me my daughter, and I will have my revenge.”
Megan looked at the two of them. Her mother and Dorothea, one in lavender and grey, one in black silk, both with the identical quality of composed and terrifying resolution, the particular quality of women who had spent too long being patient.
She had spent fourteen years surviving Penharrow alone.
She looked at her mother’s face, which was her face, which had been looking for her for years, and she thought about what Dorothea had said in the blue sitting room at Saxton House about not just escaping and not just surviving but thriving.
She thought about Penharrow knowing it. She thought about his face, which she would never have to see again, when he understood what had come for him, not from Oliver, not from the law, but from two duchesses and the daughter he had stolen who turned out to have been the daughter of a duke the entire time.
She thought about her father, who had looked for her until he died.
She thought, I will tell him. Not by speaking, but by winning.
“I want to help,” Megan said.
Both women looked at her.
“I am not a bystander either.” She looked at her mother, then at Dorothea.
“I know things about him. About his finances and his household and the men he has dealings with and the things he has done that he doesn’t know I witnessed.
” She thought of fourteen years of listening through walls, hearing staff talk, and understanding, very early on, that knowing things was the only power available to her.
“I have been memorizing him since I was a child. I know where the bodies are.” She paused. “Figuratively. Mostly.”
There was a brief silence.
“Good,” said Dorothea.
“Excellent,” said the Duchess of Newbury.
And in the pale blue drawing room in Grosvenor Square, with the afternoon light going gold across the carpet and the tea cold in its cups, the three of them leaned in and began.