Chapter 27 #2
Seraphina stared at her, utterly speechless. She felt as though the air had been knocked from her lungs. “A test... You put me through weeks of terror, you made me think my life, my reputation, my very identity was about to be destroyed, to test me?”
“You passed, did you not?” Lady Byron remarked coolly. “You did not burn your manuscripts. You did not cease writing.”
“That cannot be the entire truth,” William interjected, stepping between Seraphina and Lady Byron. “If this was merely a trivial trial of her character, why was my family’s signet ring involved? Why drag my name and my estate into your game?”
Lady Byron looked up at William, her eyes hardening.
“Who is Amanda Higgins?” Seraphina also asked. “I take it that part is true as well? You are not who you say you are?”
“I was Amanda Higgins,” Lady Byron corrected and let out a sigh. “Over two decades ago, before I buried that pathetic, foolish girl in the shadows of the countryside and assumed the title of a dead Earl’s widow. I stripped away that name, that identity, and every miserable memory attached to it.”
“Why?” William demanded. “Why abandon your name entirely?”
“Because your father ruined me,” Lady Byron snapped, her composure suddenly shattering into a venomous spark.
She stood up from her chair, her hands fisted.
“Your father ruined my name, my standing, and my future. He whispered promises of marriage while I was a young, naive girl in society. He used me for years; he disgraced me, and then he tossed me aside like a worn glove. I was cast out of society. My own family could barely look at me. I could not remain in London as Amanda Higgins, a ruined, pity-object for the ton to mock.”
She took a shallow breath, her chest heaving before she forced her composure back over her features. She sat back down, turning to the window.
“I found an elderly, dying Earl who needed a caretaker and was willing to leave me his title and this forgotten estate in exchange for my companionship in his final months,” she continued. “I changed my name. I rebuilt my life out of the ashes your father left behind.”
Silence fell over the room. Seraphina looked from Lady Byron’s face to William, whose jaw was set in a tight line.
“So when I began sending those letters...” Lady Byron murmured, looking down at her hands. “...it was not you I was targeting, Your Grace. When I first embossed that paper with your father’s signet ring, which I had kept for years, I believed your father was still alive.”
Seraphina’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“I thought the old Duke was still breathing his privileged air in London. I thought he was alive,” she revealed.
“I knew Seraphina’s nature, or at the very least, I thought I did.
I raised her. I figured that if a mysterious threat appeared seemingly...
accidentally stamped with the Duke of Norwyn’s crest, she would not cower.
Seraphina does not hide behind sentiment or emotional vapors; she seeks the truth.
She lays things bare. I thought she would use her column, her intellect, and her quill to investigate the crest, expose the man behind it, and drag the Norwyn name into the public mud. ”
She looked at Seraphina with a faint smile.
“I saw myself in you, Seraphina. You were the only one of my girls with the ruthless, logical mind required to expose a powerful man. I intended to use your column as the instrument of my revenge against the man who destroyed my youth. It was only after I sent the third letter that I learned the old Duke had died years ago, and that his son had inherited the title.”
William let out a mocking laugh. “Sounds like a flawless scheme, Lady Byron. I take it you failed to anticipate that Seraphina would break into my private study at Norwyn Manor in the middle of the day to search my desk for evidence and confront me.”
Lady Byron’s head snapped toward Seraphina. “You... you did what? You broke into a Duke’s residence? Have you lost your mind entirely? That is how you met him? I have always wondered how you got married so quickly. What happened in that study?”
“Nothing!” Seraphina blurted, still trying to make sense of everything.
“Is that how I raised you?”
“You raised me never to fail,” Seraphina shot back, her voice rising as the suppressed anger and frustration finally broke through her reserve.
“You raised me never to disappoint you! Did you truly think I would sit by and watch our column, the work we spent years building, be burned to the ground by a blackmailer? Did you think I would fold up my parchment and run away? You taught us to be relentless. You taught us that knowledge is power. I did what was necessary to solve the mystery and protect what was ours.”
She began pacing the length of the rug again.
“I cannot believe this,” Seraphina said, shaking her head in disbelief.
“I cannot believe you were willing to risk everything: our reputation, our security, the entire future of the column just to launch a petty, vindictive ghost-strike at a man who has been in his grave for years! It is not like you. The column was making us independent. It was providing for this house. It was ensuring that my sisters and I would never have to rely on the whims of men, and you were ready to burn it all to ashes.”
“You think that was all it was about?” Lady Byron snapped back. “You truly believe I reignited my hatred for the Duke of Norwyn after so many years, just because I felt like it?
“You just said — Then what was it about?” Seraphina demanded, stopping in her tracks. “Why else would you do something so monstrously irrational?”
Lady Byron glared at her, her hands gripping the wooden arms of her chair tightly.
“Because I missed my girls!” Lady Byron blurted, the fierce volume of her voice echoing.
The drawing room fell instantly, deafeningly silent.
William did not move. Seraphina froze, her breath catching in her throat as she stared at the woman who had been an unemotional monolith for her entire life.
Lady Byron closed her eyes, breathing heavily, a weary crease appearing between her brows.
“I missed you,” Lady Byron whispered, her voice cracking with a vulnerability that looked utterly terrifying on her face.
“I am a bitter, lonely old woman. I sat in this empty house and watched all three of you march off to London. I was certain that the ton would be cruel to you like it had been to me for years. I thought society would mock you, that Mayfair would reject you, and that you would come running back through those doors where I could protect you, where we could continue our life together.”
She opened her eyes, looking at Seraphina.
“But you didn’t come back,” Lady Byron said, then scoffed.
“Euphemia married and then fell in love. She is raising a big family now. Leonora doesn’t let me know what she is doing with her time, and you...
you were the one who was supposed to be like me.
You were the one who cared only for books and for science.
You were my companion, and then you went to London, and you married a Duke.
Your letters grew fewer and fewer until they stopped altogether. ”
She looked away, staring into the empty fireplace.
“I thought that if a scandal threatened you, if you were faced with the notion of ruin in London, you would have no choice but to abandon that place and flee back home to me,” Lady Byron admitted softly.
“I knew it was wicked. I knew it was selfish. But I wanted my daughters back. London took everything from me. My name, my honor, my happiness. Then London took you.”
Seraphina stood frozen, her mind struggling to reconcile the stern matriarch of her youth with the lonely, broken woman sitting before her.
The anger that had been burning so fiercely in Seraphina’s chest began to cool, replaced by an ache.
She knew what it was to be terrified of abandonment.
She knew what it was to build an impenetrable fortress around one’s heart to keep the pain of loss at bay.
Lady Byron had done the exact same thing, until the fear of losing her girls had driven her to a desperate, irrational act.
Seraphina took a step toward the armchair.
“You could have simply written to me,” Seraphina said gently. “You could have told me you were lonely.”
Lady Byron let out another scoff. “I don’t beg for company, Seraphina. You know that as well as I.”
“It would have been much better if you did,” William chimed in and crossed his arms. Seraphina looked at him then, seeing the annoyance plastered all over his face.
“Seraphina could not sleep peacefully for a long time. You tormented her. If she wasn’t so terrified of failing you, she never would have taken the risk of sneaking into my home.
What if something awful had happened to her simply because you couldn’t just write a letter asking your daughters to visit you? ”
Before Lady Byron could retort, Seraphina stepped forward, placing herself between the both of them. She gave William a look, the particular kind she reserved for moments when he was entirely right and entirely unhelpful at the same time, and then she turned back to Lady Byron.