Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty-Two
“Is it true?” Frances demanded the moment she barged in through the door to his study.
Andrew looked up from the papers spread across his writing table.
She was standing in the doorway of his study, pale and very still, with one hand closed around a folded sheet of paper.
The sight of her there, so composed in outline and so plainly shaken beneath it, struck him with immediate unease.
He rose at once. “Frances?”
She came into the room and shut the door behind her.
The sound was soft. It might as well have been a pistol cocking.
“Is it true?” she asked again.
Andrew’s gaze dropped to the paper in her hand. “What have you there?”
“A letter.” Her voice was calm in a way that made him distrust every inch of it. “Given to me by Lady Ravenshaw.”
At that, something cold moved through him.
“Lady Ravenshaw?”
“Yes.” Frances crossed the room and held the letter out. “She asked me to meet her in the park. She said she was concerned for me.”
Andrew did not take the letter immediately.
He was looking at Frances’ face: the set mouth, the colorlessness beneath her eyes, the effort it cost her not to tremble. There was anger there, certainly. He knew her anger well enough now to recognize it. But beneath it lay something worse.
Hurt.
He took the letter. The paper was worn, folded and refolded, the ink faded in certain places. He did not sit to read it. He remained standing behind his desk, his eyes moving quickly over the lines. The line with his name had been smudged.
Not by age, he thought. The damage is too convenient.
He read it once, then again, and with every word his blood cooled further.
“It is a lie,” he said at once.
Frances flinched, though she covered it quickly. “All of it?”
His fingers tightened around the paper. “Enough of it.”
“Enough?” she repeated.
He looked up. “This has been arranged to deceive you.”
“Then tell me how.”
He said nothing.
Her eyes searched his face, fierce now in their desperation. “Tell me what part is false.”
“The implication.”
“The implication?” She gave a small, incredulous laugh. “Andrew, that letter claims the child is yours.”
“No,” he retorted, his voice sharpening. “It encourages you to believe the child is mine. That is not the same thing.”
“But is she?”
“No.”
The answer left him with absolute certainty. It was the one truth he could give without betraying anyone. For a moment, Frances seemed to sway on the strength of it. Her lips parted slightly. He foolishly thought that it might be enough. Then, she looked at the letter still in his hand.
“Then whose child is she?”
Silence entered the study.
Outside the windows, London moved on in dull afternoon grey. A carriage passed in the street. The fire gave a low crack in the grate. Somewhere in the house, a servant’s footfall crossed the hall and faded.
Andrew placed the letter upon the writing table with great care.
“I cannot tell you.”
Frances stared at him.
The words had been wrong. He knew it the instant they were spoken. They were necessary and honorable, but wrong for her, wrong for this moment and wrong for the woman standing before him with betrayal already gathering behind her eyes.
“You cannot,” she echoed.
“No.”
“Or you will not?”
He drew in a slow breath. “The truth is not mine to give.”
Her face changed then. Some light in her expression went out, and the loss of it struck him harder than tears would have done.
“Mary is dead,” she said quietly.
His jaw tightened. “That does not give me leave to speak her story.”
“She has left a child in your care, a scandal at your door, and a wife who knows nothing.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” Her voice rose at last. “Do you truly? Because you stand there and tell me only what you will not say, as though secrecy is some noble virtue and I am unreasonable for wanting the truth.”
He felt as if someone had stuck a knife to his heart and was now twisting it.
“I am not trying to wound you.”
“And yet you manage it with remarkable consistency.”
He came around the desk. “Frances–”
“No.” She stepped back, and the movement stopped him more effectively than a hand against his chest. “No more of that. No more half answers. No more solemn declarations that I must trust you while you trust me with nothing.”
“That is not fair.”
“Is it not?” Her eyes flashed, though he saw the brightness in them now and hated himself for causing it.
“I entered this marriage because scandal left little room for refusal. I accepted your arrangements, your silences, your rules, your insistence that everything must be managed. I defended you when I scarcely knew what I was defending. I cared for that child while knowing there was a history beneath her cradle that no one would speak aloud. And now, when I ask for the truth, you tell me it is not mine to have.”
Andrew felt every word as a blow because too many of them were deserved.
“The child is not mine,” he told her. “That is the truth.”
“It is not enough.”
“It must be.”
“No.” Frances shook her head. “It cannot.”
The word settled between them. Something inside him went very still. She straightened, and it was a composure he disliked more than any anger, for it seemed to come from a place beyond his reach.
“I cannot stay in a marriage without truth,” she said.
Andrew’s chest tightened. “Frances.”
“I am leaving.”
The room altered around him. He had heard men speak of fear in war, in sickness, in the fragile hours before death.
He had known fear himself, though he had spent most of his life refusing to call it by name.
But nothing had ever moved through him quite like the sound of Frances saying that she would leave him.
She turned toward the door. He moved before thought could interfere, crossing the distance in two strides and placing himself between her and the way out.
“No.”
She stopped short. “Don’t.”
“You will not leave.”
Her eyes widened with fury. “You cannot forbid me.”
“I am not forbidding you.”
“You are standing in front of the door.”
“Yes,” he said, and then hated himself for the helpless stupidity of it.
Frances looked at him as though she hardly knew him. Perhaps she did not. Perhaps he had given her nothing to know but walls and commands and the occasional moment of tenderness stolen between them like contraband.
He forced himself to step aside. The instant he did, he felt as though he had opened the door upon ruin.
“You will not leave,” he whispered. “I will.”
She stilled.
Andrew made himself continue before he could reconsider. “I will take the child and return to Sinclair. You may remain here. The house is yours for as long as you wish it.”
Frances did not answer. Her gaze remained fixed on him, and for a moment he saw everything she would not say: the hurt, the disbelief, the grief she was too proud to give him. Her eyes shone, and the sight of it nearly unmade him.
He had seen her angry, amused, defiant, tender over the child when she thought no one watched.
He had seen her flushed from dancing and pale from shock.
But he had never seen her look as she did then, as though he had placed something precious in her hands only to tell her she had imagined possessing it.
“Frances,” he spoke her name more softly than before.
She blinked once. No tear fell. That was worse.
She moved past him without another word, opened the door, and left the study. Andrew stood where she had left him and listened to her footsteps retreat along the corridor. Each one seemed determined not to break before it reached safety. Then there was nothing.
For some time, he did not move. Then he picked up the letter again. This time, he read it not as a man defending himself, but as one searching for the shape of a trap.
The phrases were careful. Mary’s fear was there, or something close enough to it to wound. Each line was fashioned so that a woman in Frances’ position would see what she had been meant to see.
Yet one fragment drew his eye again and again. The ink had been blurred across his name, but not wholly erased. A curve remained after the letter. Perhaps the beginning of a D. Perhaps nothing. His mind supplied what caution had, until now, refused to consider.
Daniel Carrington, the Viscount of Ravenshaw.
Andrew lowered the letter. Mary had said the father was a married viscount.
She also said he was dangerous. She refused to give his name, even with death so near, because fear had held her more tightly than pain.
Andrew remembered it with perfect clarity: the dim room, her white face against the pillow, her fingers twisting in the coverlet, her plea that the child be protected from anyone who would come for it.
Lady Ravenshaw had sought out Frances. Lady Ravenshaw had delivered a letter. Lady Ravenshaw, whose husband was a viscount.
The thought arrived cold and fully formed.
Could it be?
Andrew crossed to the window, though he saw nothing of the street beyond. His reflection stared back at him in the darkening glass, the very image of the man who could endure anything because he had taught himself never to need comfort.
What a magnificent lie that had been.
He could not give the baby up. That truth remained fixed in him, deeper than fear. Whatever blood had made the child, she had been placed in his keeping. He had given his word. He would not abandon her to convenience, gossip, or the cruelty of a man who had already left Mary to die afraid.
Nor would he betray Mary’s memory merely because the truth would make his own life easier. He had sworn to protect her child. He had sworn to silence when silence meant safety.
But silence had become something else now. It had become a weapon in another person’s hand. It had struck Frances.
His eyes closed briefly.
Frances, who had stood in his study with a letter trembling between them and asked him for the truth. Frances, who had trusted him farther than prudence allowed and received only barriers in return. Frances, who had said she was leaving.
He loved her.
The realization did not come like lightning.
It came like the last candle in a darkened room, revealing what had been there all along.
He loved her sharp tongue and her merciful heart.
He loved the way she lifted her chin when wounded and the way she softened over the child when she thought herself unseen.
He loved her courage, her impatience with hypocrisy, her laughter when it escaped unwillingly.
He loved the woman who challenged him, unsettled him, saw too much, demanded more, and had somehow made his carefully ordered solitude feel like a punishment.
He loved Frances.
And he had nearly lost her because he had mistaken secrecy for honor and distance for safety.
Andrew opened his eyes. Losing her was not a possibility he could accept.
For the first time in his life, love did not appear to him merely as ruin waiting in a cradle, a bedchamber, a grave.
It appeared as a woman walking away from his study with tears she would not shed, because he had not trusted her enough to keep her.
He looked down at the letter again. He would find the truth not only to clear his name, not only to protect the child, not only to honor Mary, though he would do that too.
He would find it because Frances deserved truth, and because if there remained any path back to her, it would have to begin there.