Chapter Thirty-One
“…you were in love with him?”
Margaret’s voice cracked sharply enough to make her own husband flinch. “Mother, this is, this is outrageous. Absolutely outrageous.”
The room froze, the entire family suspended like guests at a séance who’d suddenly realised the ghost was real.
Caroline had gone paper-white, both hands pressed flat against the table as if she needed to physically hold the world still.
“Grandmother,” she whispered, voice thin, “I… I don’t understand.
” James shifted closer to her without a word, jaw tight, one arm hovering protectively behind her chair like he expected the crockery to start flying.
Emma, meanwhile, sat bolt upright, sunglasses perched on her head, eyes huge and sparkling like she’d stumbled into a live royal scandal. “I’m sorry,” she breathed, already fanning herself with her hand. “But this is basically the most romantic story I have ever heard.” Her voice trembled.
Elaine placed a hand over her heart, eyes moist. “It’s tragic,” she murmured. “And beautiful. And utterly heartbreaking. My goodness, Victoria…”
Sophie seemed ready to dissolve into tears, her curls slipping out of their pins, her sketchbook lying abandoned on the table.
Richard was blinking very slowly, like someone had unplugged his brain and it was now running on emergency power.
Noah stood completely still beside me, looking like a man trying to reassemble his worldview one LEGO block at a time.
Lady Beaumont closed her eyes.
“I loved Edward,” she said at last, her voice wobbling even though she clearly wished it wouldn’t. “I never stopped loving him.”
A collective inhale circled the table.
“But…” she continued, steadying herself in that queenly way she has, “that is not the whole of it.”
Margaret made a gurgling sound, half disbelief, half dread. “There’s more?”
“Of course there’s more,” Lucas muttered, delighted.
Emma elbowed him hard.
Lady Beaumont drew in a breath that appeared to age her by a decade.
“What I have shared,” she said slowly, “is only the beginning of the truth.”
The air tightened. Several people leaned forward without meaning to.
Margaret shook her head, her voice thin. “Mother… how could there possibly be more than this?”
Sophie’s hands fluttered towards her sketchbook, as if she needed something to hold onto. “What else could there be?”
Lady Beaumont smoothed her trembling hands over the tablecloth, lifted her chin, and said:
“It is time you knew the truth about Thomas.”
The effect was instant.
Sophie looked up at once at hearing her father’s name, her green eyes widening. “Dad?”
Lady Beaumont put her lips together before speaking again.
“Thomas,” she repeated, “was not the duke’s son.”
The silence deepened, sharp, electric.
“He was Edward’s.”
Sophie’s mug slipped from her fingers, clattering onto the table and splashing tea across her notebook. She gasped, a sound so raw it felt ripped from her chest and reached blindly for Lucas. He caught her instinctively, holding her trembling shoulders.
“What?” she whispered. “What do you mean?”
Lady Beaumont closed her eyes, as if bracing herself against the pain her confession was causing.
“Thomas was Edward’s child,” she said again, firmer this time. “Conceived before I was forced to end our relationship.”
Margaret screeched so sharply it echoed. Her hand pressed against her throat, pearls shifting beneath her fingers.
“Oh my God. No. No, that can’t— mother, what…”
Caroline’s eyes went as wide as saucers. “Oh my god!”
Richard blinked rapidly, as though someone had just spoken in another language. “But… but the duke…”
“Raised Thomas as his own,” Lady Beaumont said. “We married quickly. Discreetly He agreed to the arrangement because it benefitted him financially.”
Her voice broke.
Across the table, Sophie’s entire body was shaking. “You… you never told him? My father died thinking—” She cut herself off, pressing both hands to her mouth. Tears pooled and overflowed between her fingers. “He never knew?”
“No,” Lady Beaumont whispered. “I could not bear to shame him, or you. Or myself. And by the time I found the courage to speak the truth, the window had long closed.” She glanced down at the table.
“When my husband passed, I found myself standing in a life that had never belonged to me. A life built on duty, expectation, and performance.”
Her attention flicked briefly to Margaret.
“I wanted… silence,” she admitted. “A life not constantly observed by society or my own family’s relentless standards. I wanted my children to be allowed to breathe without the suffocating weight of titles and scrutiny.”
She clasped her hands lightly in her lap, remembering.
“So I gathered you all,” she continued, voice stanch, “and I left England. I left the estates, the expectations, the never-ending scrutiny. I told myself I was choosing a simpler life, an existence where the past could not corner me at every turn. Australia seemed far enough away to make reinvention possible.”
Her eyes lit up with something like relief at the memory.
“I did ask around about Edward,” she said. “It was foolish, I know. But some part of me needed to know he had found happiness. That my disappearance had not destroyed him.”
She blinked, tears glinting despite her composure.
“When I learned he had remarried, that he had become a celebrated winemaker, a man admired and respected… I felt something I had not felt in years.”
She paused, hand pressing briefly to her chest.
“Relief,” she whispered. “Deep, aching relief. He had built a beautiful life for himself. One without scandal. One without me.”
Her composure slipped for a heartbeat, her voice thinning.
“I was so happy for him. Truly. And I could not, would not, disrupt his life. I had already upended it once. I vowed I would never do so again.”
Margaret stared at her mother, eyes rimmed with disbelief. “How could you keep something of that magnitude from us? From me? Thomas was my brother!”
“I know.” Lady Beaumont’s expression crumpled. “And I am so very sorry.”
But Margaret was too stunned to register the apology. Her expression flickered between shock, grief and fury.
“Everything we thought we knew about our family… all of it was…”
“Not false,” Lady Beaumont interrupted. “Just incomplete.”
Sophie shook her head, curls falling from her bun. “But…this means… this means… I’m…”
She trailed off as she tried to make sense of it all.
Caroline squeezed her cousin’s hand. “Take your time, Soph.”
Sophie closed her eyes tightly. When she opened them, they were wet and luminous.
“I’m his granddaughter,” she whispered. “Edward’s. Which means…”
All eyes turned to Noah.
He had not spoken. He had not moved. He stood at the end of the table like a statue carved from disbelief, his broad frame rigid, his jaw clenched so tightly the muscle ticked visibly.
Sophie faced him apologetically, heartbreak written clear across her face. “Which means… I’m a Langston. By blood.”
The words settled over the table before anyone could react.
Noah’s breath hitched, so subtle most people missed it.
Caroline stared at Sophie, then at Noah.
“Bloody hell,” she breathed.
“Does that mean…”
James finished for her, voice low. “This raises questions about the vineyard, doesn’t it?”
A beat of absolute stillness.
Like the universe itself paused.
Lucas pressed a hand over his heart. “I need a whisky.”
When Noah finally spoke, his voice was low, almost calm, but I could hear the emotion beneath it.
“For all of these years … the Estate, Langston Estate, belonged to my family. To my father. To me.”
Lady Beaumont’s eyes met his.
“Yes.”
“And now,” he whispered, “everything is different.”
The steadiness in him, even now, broke something in me.
Noah had poured years of grief, loyalty, and love into this place. He had walked every inch of the land with reverence.
This place was his heart.
And now the ground had moved beneath him.
Sophie shook her head frantically. “Noah, I didn’t ask for this. It’s too much…”
“It’s not about want,” Noah said briskly. “It’s about truth.”
His hands curled into fists at his sides.
“Truth,” he repeated, the word like a sharp stone in his mouth. “Something everyone else seemed to know except me.”
“That’s not fair,” Lady Beaumont said painfully.
He turned slowly towards her. “Isn’t it?”
She bowed her head.
Finally, Noah asked the question I had felt building in him from the moment James said the word ‘questions’.
“Why didn’t Edward leave a will?”
Lady Beaumont closed her eyes. “I don’t know.” Her voice cracked.
“It is something I have been hopeful of finding these past few days,” she confessed.
“Desperately. Hoping to find some written clarity. A confession. A statement of intent. But Edward… he kept too much. He wrote things by hand. On scraps. In notebooks. In old drawers. So much that it has been hard to go through it all.”
Noah stared at her. “You think he hid it?”
“I think,” she whispered, “he wrote one. I think he meant to tell you. I think he meant to put things right. But life…” Her throat bobbed. “Life took him too soon.”
Noah stood rigid, staring at the vineyards through the window as if they were suddenly foreign soil.
I couldn’t stand it anymore.
I stepped closer, just enough for him to feel me. Slowly, I reached out and laid a hand on his arm.
He didn’t look at me, but his muscles loosened under my touch, the smallest sign of surrender.
Lady Beaumont’s gaze dropped to where my hand rested on him.
“Well, now you know everything,” she said.