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 4
Lady Marfleet received him in a small morning room at nine, her expression carrying none of the deference his rank usually commanded. She looked at him, in fact, the way a woman looks at a debt she has long expected someone to come and collect.
“She is not here,” Lady Marfleet said before he had fully crossed the threshold. “She has taken the children to the park, as she does every morning, rain or shine, because she says London air does them no good. I did not tell you that so you might follow her, Your Grace. I told you so you would understand that whatever else has been taken from that young woman, her habits, at least, remain entirely her own to keep.”
Leof sat — because his legs required it — in a chair upholstered in faded chintz that told him more about the state of Isolt’s circumstances than any account could have.
“I would ask you to tell me what you know, Lady Marfleet. All of it. I have spent the night discovering how little I actually understand of my own history.”
Something in his voice must have satisfied her, because the old woman’s face softened by degrees, and she rang for tea before she spoke again.
“I found her three years ago,” Lady Marfleet said, “in a village called Fenwick Cross. She had gone there under her maiden name, with a story about a husband lost at sea. A story, I might add, that half the village saw through within a fortnight. Because no woman grieves a drowned sailor with quite that particular silence. The silence of a woman grieving a man who is not dead at all. Merely lost to her in some other, crueler way.”
She paused, folding her hands in her lap.
“I was traveling through on my way to my sister’s. My carriage threw a wheel, and I took shelter at the village inn for two days while it was mended. In that time I watched a young woman with two infants and no husband and precious little money teach herself to take in fine needlework and translation work for a bookseller in the next town, who paid her a pittance and knew it. An elderly carpenter in the village, Mr. Aldous, took a grandfatherly interest in the twins almost from the day they could sit up — taught Edmund to whittle before the boy could properly walk, and never once let a week pass without some small carved trinket appearing on her doorstep. I collect that is the innocent explanation behind the word that so unsettled Your Grace at the ball. And I watched Isolt do all the rest of it without once complaining. Without once asking anyone for charity. Though God knows the village would have given it gladly, because everyone who met Isolt Rycroft came away wishing to protect her.”
“Why did you take her in?”
“Because she nearly died that winter.”
Lady Marfleet’s voice did not waver, but her hands, folding in her lap, tightened a fraction.
“The winter Edmund and Beatrice were not yet two years old. She had given the last of the coal to keep the children warm and kept none for herself. By the time the village doctor was sent — for she was speaking of things that made no sense, a wedding, a man she called by a name I did not then know was yours — she barely survived.”
Leof found he could not speak for a long moment. The tea sat untouched between them, steam curling upward into the cold morning light.
“She has never told me the particulars of what drove you apart,” Lady Marfleet went on, more gently now. “She will say only that she was accused of a thing she did not do, and that you believed the accusation over her word. And that she has made her peace with never being believed. I do not think that is entirely true, Your Grace. I do not think a woman makes peace with a thing like that. I think she simply learns to carry it in a place where it will not stop her from rising each morning and feeding her children.”
She paused, watching his face.
“There is a locket. She wears it beneath her gown always. It holds a lock of hair the same color as yours, and a very small, very worn piece of paper folded so many times it has gone soft as cloth. I do not know what is written on it. I have never asked. But I do not think a woman keeps such a thing for five years unless some part of her heart never fully believed what the rest of her had been made to believe.”
Leof rose from the chair because sitting still had become in that moment entirely impossible. He walked to the window, where a thin morning rain had begun to fall over the square. He thought of a boy with his own eyes, carving nothing, only holding a horse someone else had carved, calling another man “papa” in the unthinking way of a child who has simply learned the word for the person who is kind to him.
“I must speak with her,” he said. “Today. Whatever it costs.”
“It will cost you a great deal,” Lady Marfleet said, not unkindly. “If you go about it wrongly. That young woman has spent five years learning to survive without you. And survival, once truly learned, is not a thing given up lightly. Even for love. If you go to her with demands, or with a duke’s certainty that his rank will smooth whatever needs smoothing, you will lose whatever chance you have. Go to her instead as the man who failed her. Because that is the only man she has any reason left to listen to.”
He left Marfleet House with the rain soaking through his coat before his carriage could be brought round. He did not call for it. He walked instead, three streets and into the park, because Lady Marfleet had told him without quite meaning to exactly where he would find her.
And some things, he understood now with a clarity that felt almost violent in its suddenness, could not wait for a more proper hour. Or a more proper invitation. Or five more years of a courage he had never quite managed to summon when it mattered.