Five years after cruelly casting out his wife in disgrace, the Duke of Sliff saw her across the ballroom—with a boy who had his eyes and family birthmark, clutching a wooden horse carved by another man he called “Papa.”

 PART 3

Sliff House was silent when Leof returned that night.

The great hall was lit only by a single branch of candles left burning for him. He stood in the middle of the black-and-white marble floor for a long while without moving, still wearing his greatcoat, still hearing the boy’s voice in his ears.

Papa carved it.

He climbed the stairs at last and did not go to his own chamber. He went instead to the long gallery, where the Sliff portraits hung in their gilt frames down a hundred feet of darkened wall. He stopped before the one of his own father, painted in his thirtieth year. The same crescent mark was just visible where his father had chosen, in some private vanity, to have the artist include it on his bared wrist.

He had not thought of that mark in years. He had certainly never thought to look for it on a child.

Sleep did not come. He sat instead in the library with a single lamp and a decanter he did not touch, and let the memory come at last. The one he had spent five years refusing.

He had met Isolt Rycroft in the spring of his thirty-third year. At a country assembly he had attended only because his aunt had badgered him into it. A village near his smaller estate in the north, where no one expected a duke, and therefore no one performed for one.

She had been standing at the edge of the dance floor in a gown clearly turned twice. Her father was a baronet of modest and dwindling means. She was, by any measure the ton would recognize, entirely unsuitable. She had laughed at something her sister said. A real laugh. Unguarded. And Leof, who had spent a decade being courted for his title by women who had learned to arrange their features into whatever expression a duke seemed to want, had found himself crossing the room before he had decided to do any such thing.

Exactly as he would find himself crossing another ballroom five years later.

They had married within four months. Over the strenuous objections of nearly everyone he knew. His mother had been dead a decade. There was no one to forbid it outright. Though his cousin Silas — his father’s sister’s son, and heir presumptive to the dukedom for the simple reason that Leof had reached thirty-three without producing a legitimate child — had argued against the match with a persistence that Leof had mistaken at the time for family loyalty.

He saw it now, sitting alone in his library with the fire burned to embers, for what it must actually have been.

The wedding had been small. At her father’s parish church. Orange blossom in her hair. And Leof had stood at the altar and thought himself, for the first and only time in his adult life, entirely and uncomplicatedly happy.

Eight months later it had all come apart in a single afternoon.

He remembered the letter Silas had brought him. A letter purportedly in Isolt’s hand, addressed to a Mr. Pellinger — a name Leof had never heard before or since — arranging a sum of money and speaking in terms too warm for mere friendship. Of a debt owed. Of an old understanding renewed.

He remembered Silas’s careful, sorrowful face as he laid it on the desk.

He remembered the second blow that had followed three days later. A veiled woman, produced at Silas’s arrangement at a garden party, who claimed in a low voice meant only for Leof’s ears to have seen Isolt meet secretly with a gentleman in the shrubbery at her father’s house before the marriage. And she implied, with careful delicacy, things that had never happened.

That was the part that sat in him now, like a stone swallowed whole.

He had not asked Isolt a single direct question. He had gone home in a fury so total it had felt at the time like clarity. And he had told his wife of eight months that he knew what she was. That he would not be made a fool of. That she was to leave Sliff House by morning and never use his name again.

She had not wept. He remembered that most of all. How she had stood very straight and asked him only once whether he intended to hear her account of the matter. And how he had said no. That he had heard enough. That her silence in the face of his accusation was answer sufficient.

She had gone still and pale and said, “Then there is nothing more for me to say to a man who has already decided what I am.”

And she had walked out of the room and out of the house and out of his life. And he had let her go without once asking her to stay.

He had told himself it was pride that stopped him from writing to her afterward. He understood now, staring into a dying fire, that it had been cowardice. A fear that if he wrote and she did not answer — or worse, if she answered and confirmed nothing he had been told — he would have to face the possibility that he had destroyed the one true thing in his life on the word of a cousin who stood quite literally to inherit everything he threw away.

He had written letters in the years since. Dozens of them. In the black hours after midnight, when the house was silent and his guard was down. He had never sent one. They sat now in a locked drawer of this very desk. A record of five years of a grief he had refused to name even to himself.

And he understood, with the particular clarity that comes only at three in the morning after a catastrophe, that he had been a coward twice over. Once in casting her out without a hearing. And once in every year after, when he had known where to find her, and had written into silence, and had lacked the courage to send a single word.

He slept in the end for perhaps two hours. And woke with the gray light already at the windows, and a single thought driving him from his bed.

Marfleet House. Nine o’clock. He would not wait for a civilized hour.