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 6

She was quiet for a long moment, searching his face with an intensity that made him want to look away. He did not let himself.

Edmund had abandoned his puddle and come to stand at his mother’s other side. Small and solemn. Looking up at the tall stranger with an unreadable child’s gravity.

“Who would benefit?” Isolt said slowly. “From the ruin of our marriage.”

“My cousin. Silas Vain.”

Saying the name aloud, in the gray morning light of the park, with his son’s eyes fixed upon him, felt like setting down a weight he had carried without knowing its shape for five long years.

“Who was, until last night, heir presumptive to the dukedom. On the plain and simple fact that I had — so far as the world knew — no legitimate children to inherit it instead.”

Isolt’s breath caught audibly.

“The letter,” she said. “The one shown to you — was the hand a close copy of my own?”

“Close enough that I did not think to question it. I am ashamed to say I did not examine it with any care at all. I saw what I was shown, and I believed the worst. Because the worst confirmed something I had already begun to fear. That a man of my rank had been fool enough to fall in love with a woman below his station, and had been made to pay for the foolishness.”

“Then you are as much a victim of his lie as I am.” But there was no forgiveness yet in the way she said it. Only a kind of weary fairness. The fairness of a woman determined to see a thing clearly, even when clarity did not comfort her. “Except that I paid for it with five years of my life, and the health I nearly lost to a fever. And you paid for it with what, Your Grace? A quiet house, and no one to answer to.”

The words landed with the precision of a blade. He did not flinch from them, because he had earned every one.

“You are right to say it,” he said quietly. “I will not pretend our suffering was equal. It was not. You raised two children alone in poverty, believing yourself abandoned by the one man who owed you his protection above all others. And I sat in a house with forty servants and told myself I was the wronged party. I do not ask you to forgive me today, Isolt. I am not certain I have earned even the right to ask it. I ask only that you allow me to prove what I have told you. That the letters were intercepted. That the accusations were false. That whatever ruin came to our marriage was built by another man’s hand, and not by any failing of yours.”

Beatrice, emboldened perhaps by the long stillness of the adults, or simply tired of standing quiet in the damp, tugged at her mother’s skirt and said in a small, clear voice that seemed to ring louder than any bell: “Mama, is the tall man cross with us?”

Isolt looked down at her daughter. And something in her face broke open in a way it had not broken for Leof in five years. A tenderness so complete it made his chest ache to witness it. Proof of everything she had given these children in his absence. Everything he had not been there to give.

“No, my darling,” Isolt said, crouching to smooth Beatrice’s hair back from her face. “He is not cross with us. He is only remembering something he wishes very much he could change.”

She rose again and looked at Leof with an expression he could not fully read. Not forgiveness. Not yet. But not the flat wariness of the night before, either. Something had shifted between them in the space of this rain-damp conversation. Some ground gained that he understood might yet be lost again in an instant if he mishandled what came next.

“Prove it,” she said.

“Prove every word of what you have told me, Your Grace. With evidence I can see with my own eyes — and not merely your certainty, which I have learned at great cost not to trust unquestioned. Do that, and I will hear whatever else you wish to say to me. Until then, I ask you not to seek me out again. For my children’s sake, if not for mine. They have known enough uncertainty. I will not have them grow attached to a man who may yet prove once again to have been mistaken about what he believes.”

She gathered her children and walked away down the gravel path.

And Leof stood beneath the dripping plane trees and watched her go, understanding that she had just handed him both a sentence and a chance. And that he had, from this morning forward, no excuse left in the world for failing to earn the second.

Hollis had served the Sliff family for eleven years as secretary and general keeper of the estate’s countless small mysteries. In that time, Leof had never once seen the man’s composure crack. It cracked now, standing in the library with the locked drawer of unsent letters open on the desk between them, and the whole sordid history of the past five years laid out in Leof’s flat, controlled recitation.

“You suspect Mr. Vain,” Hollis said when Leof had finished, “of forging a letter in the Duchess’s hand, of arranging a false witness to a fabricated indiscretion, and of intercepting no fewer than three letters sent to you by her over the course of several months.”

“I do not suspect it. I am certain of it. What I require is proof that will satisfy Isolt. Because my certainty alone has already cost her five years. She will never recover — and I do not intend to ask her to trust it a second time — without evidence she can hold in her own hands.”

Hollis was quiet for a moment, turning a pen over in his fingers with the particular stillness of a man calculating the shape of a very large problem.

“There was a maid,” he said slowly. “Sarah Comb. Dismissed some five years ago for insolence to Mrs. Pettis, if I recall the housekeeper’s account correctly. I have wondered once or twice over the years why so devoted a girl should suddenly turn insolent in the very months her mistress was sent away. I did not think to wonder harder at the time. I am ashamed of that now, Your Grace. As I imagine you are ashamed of a great many things.”

“Find her,” Leof said. “Whatever it costs. Whatever it takes.”