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 5

He found her on a gravel path beneath a stand of plane trees. The rain had softened to little more than mist. Beatrice’s small hand was tucked into hers, and Edmund was some ten paces ahead, crouched over a puddle with the single-minded concentration only a four-year-old boy could bring to the study of a floating leaf.

Isolt saw him before he had gone three steps toward her. He watched her whole body change. Not fear exactly. A bracing. The way a woman braces against a wind she has learned not to be surprised by.

“Your Grace.” She did not curtsy. He noted that and understood it and did not blame her for it.

“I asked you to call at Marfleet House.”

“I could not wait.” He stopped a few feet from her. Close enough to speak without raising his voice. Far enough to leave the choice of closing that distance entirely to her. “Forgive me. I have spent the night discovering that I do not know my own history as well as I believed I did. And I found I could not sit in a morning room a moment longer, waiting for a civilized hour to ask you to forgive things that are not, I think, forgivable in any civilized fashion.”

Something flickered across her face. Surprise, perhaps, that he had not opened with some ducal certainty. Some assumption of the outcome. She glanced toward Edmund, still absorbed in his puddle, toward Beatrice, who had gone very quiet and was regarding Leof from behind the shelter of her mother’s skirts.

“What is it you wish to know?” she said finally. “That you did not wish to know five years ago.”

The rebuke landed exactly where she intended it. He accepted it.

“Everything. But I will begin with this. You said last night that you wrote to me. That I did not answer. I received no letter from you. Not in the weeks after. Not in five years. I would have kept it. I have kept letters far less important than any word from you would have been to me. Even furious ones. Even ones I could not bring myself to answer. I am telling you — I never had the chance.”

She studied him for a long moment. He made himself stand still under that study. Made himself not fill the silence with excuses. Because he had learned in one long sleepless night that excuses were exactly what had broken them the first time. His refusal to hear anything but his own conclusions, dressed up as certainty.

“I wrote three letters,” she said at last, quietly. “The first within a fortnight of leaving Sliff House. Before I fully understood what my own body was telling me. I told you I still hoped we might speak. That I believed some misunderstanding lay beneath the accusation. That I would answer any question you cared to put to me honestly, if only you would ask it directly instead of through —”

She stopped herself.

“Through whom?”

“It does not matter now.”

“It matters a very great deal, Madam. And I think you know it.” He kept his voice gentle, but there was iron beneath it. The iron of a man who had spent a night staring at a mark on a portrait and understanding at last precisely how thoroughly he had been made a fool of.

“Tell me what was in the second letter.”

Her jaw tightened, but she went on. “The second came some six weeks after the first. I told you I was with child. I sent it to Sliff House directly, by a servant I trusted. A girl who had been my own maid before — before I was dismissed along with myself, though she had done nothing but attend me faithfully. I paid the last of what money I had to ensure it reached your own hand.”

Leof felt something cold settle into his chest.

“I never received it.”

“I believed, when months passed with no answer, that you had received it and simply did not care.” Her voice had gone very careful now. Very controlled. The voice of a woman who has rehearsed a grief so many times in solitude that she can recite it without breaking. “I told myself that was worse than any accusation. Not that you believed me guilty of some indiscretion. But that you knew I carried your child and found the knowledge did not move you even to a single line of acknowledgment. I do not think, Your Grace, that I have ever fully recovered from believing that of you. Even understanding now that perhaps it was not the truth.”

“And the third?”

“After the twins were born. I wrote to tell you that you had a son and a daughter. That they were healthy. That I asked nothing of you, but wished you to know they existed. In case you should ever wish —” Her voice caught. The first crack he had seen in five years of composure. Quickly mastered. “In case you should ever wish to know them. I never received a reply to that letter either. After that, I stopped writing. I told myself a woman who continues writing to a man who will not answer is a woman who has not yet learned her own worth. And I determined I would learn it, whatever it cost me.”

Leof closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, he found he could not look away from her. From the two children now watching the strange tall man who had upset their mother’s careful calm.

“I received none of those letters,” he said. “I swear it to you on whatever remains of my honor — which I understand may not be a great deal in your accounting. But I swear it nonetheless. Someone intercepted them. Someone has been intercepting a great many things, I begin to suspect, for a very long time.”

“Who would do such a thing?”

He did not answer at once. He was watching instead the small maid he could dimly recall from his own wedding. A slight, dark-haired girl named Sarah, who had wept when Isolt was turned out, and who had vanished from Sliff House’s records within a couple of months. Dismissed. He had been told at the time for insolence toward the housekeeper. He had not questioned it. He had questioned nothing in those months beyond the shape of his own fury.

“Tell me about the letter that was shown to me,” he said instead. “The one purportedly in your hand, addressed to a Mr. Pellinger. Do you know that name?”

Isolt frowned, drawing Beatrice a little closer against the damp morning chill. “I have never in my life heard that name, Your Grace. I have never written to any man save my father and my sister, before we were married. I do not know who Mr. Pellinger is or was. And I cannot account for a letter I never wrote.”

“And a garden party. Three days after the forged letter was shown to me. A veiled woman claimed to have witnessed you meeting secretly with a gentleman in your father’s shrubbery before our marriage. She suggested —”

Isolt’s face went white. Then flushed with a fury Leof had never seen in her before. Quick and total.

“There was no such meeting. There was no gentleman. I was a girl who spent her unmarried years reading in her father’s garden and helping her sister with her Italian. And if some veiled woman told you otherwise — she lied. And you believed a stranger’s word over nearly a year of knowing me.”

“I know.” He held her gaze. “I have known it since roughly three o’clock this morning, staring at a portrait of my own father. I am not defending what I did, Isolt. I am trying to understand how it was done to us. Because I believe now it was done deliberately. By someone who benefited from our ruin. And I mean to find proof of it, if proof exists to be found.”