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 9

Isolt was quiet for a long moment. Looking at him with an expression he could not read. He made himself hold still under it. Made himself not fill the silence. Because he had learned in the weeks since the ball that the silences between them mattered as much as anything either of them said into them.

“I loved you very much once,” she said finally. “More than I think I have ever told anyone. Even myself, in the years since. I do not know if what remains of that love can be rebuilt into something whole again, Your Grace. I only know that I have watched you these past weeks with my children. Carving nothing. Only sitting on the floor with wooden soldiers. Learning the particular way Beatrice likes her hair plaited, though you have never once been shown. And I find I am no longer entirely certain of my own answer. When a month ago I would have told you without hesitation that the answer was no.”

“That is more than I hoped for,” Leof said. “And far more than I deserve.”

“Perhaps.” And for the first time in five years, something that was almost a smile touched the corner of her mouth. “But I have learned, Your Grace, that deserving and receiving are not always the same thing. In either direction. You did not deserve to lose us. I do not know that you yet deserve to have us back. But I find I am willing, for the first time, to let you try to earn it.”

It was two days later that Hollis arrived at Sliff House with news that changed the shape of everything again. A woman calling herself Mrs. Pettis — the very housekeeper who had dismissed Sarah Comb five years before — now retired to a small cottage on the estate’s northern boundary. And it seemed, troubled enough by conscience or by age to have finally decided to speak.

“She says she has something to give you, Your Grace,” Hollis said. “Something she has kept hidden in her own possession for five years. Unable to bring herself either to destroy it or to hand it over. And she wishes to unburden herself of it before she dies. Which her physician, having told her so plainly, will not be very much longer.”

Leof was in his carriage within the quarter hour. Understanding without being told that whatever Mrs. Pettis had kept for five years was very likely the last piece of proof he needed.

Mrs. Pettis’s cottage sat at the edge of a small orchard gone wild with untended blossom. The woman who answered Leof’s knock was smaller and grayer than he remembered. Though her eyes, when they met his, held the same sharp, unbending quality that had made her such an effective housekeeper for two decades of Sliff service.

She did not seem surprised to see him. She stepped back from the door and let him in without a word. As though she had been expecting this exact visit for five years, and had simply been waiting for the courage to invite it.

“I will not waste your time with excuses, Your Grace,” she said, once she had settled him into the single good chair her small parlor possessed and taken the wooden stool for herself. “I did a great wrong five years ago. And I have known it every day since. And I am too old and too tired now to carry it any further without setting it down before someone who has the right to judge what ought to be done with it.”

“Tell me,” Leof said. And found his voice steadier than his heart, which had begun to hammer the moment he crossed her threshold.

“Mr. Vain came to me some weeks before the Duchess was sent away,” Mrs. Pettis said. “He told me he had cause to believe correspondence unbecoming a married woman was passing through the house. And that it was my duty as housekeeper to intercept any letter that came for you from her, should one ever arrive by a road other than the one he already had watched, and bring it to him directly. I did not like it. I want you to know that, Your Grace. Whatever else you think of me after today — I did not like being asked to spy upon a mistress who had never once given me cause to distrust her. But Mr. Vain held over me a debt my late husband owed him. A small sum, but one I could not have repaid on a housekeeper’s wages. And he made it very plain what would happen to that debt should I refuse him.”

She paused, her hands trembling.

“For a long while no such letter came, and I let myself believe the matter had ended with the Duchess’s own maid, who I understood had already been made to serve Mr. Vain’s purpose before she was found out and sent away. Then, many months later — long after I imagined Mr. Vain had ceased to expect it — a letter arrived at Sliff House addressed in the Duchess’s own hand to yourself. Forwarded on, I think, from some village post office, by whatever means she still had of reaching you. Mr. Vain had warned me long before that such a letter might one day come, and instructed me to bring it to him the moment it did, just as he had instructed the girl before me. But something in me could not bring myself to hand it over a third time — a third theft, if you will permit the word — without at least reading what I was suppressing.”

“I read it, Your Grace. And I have regretted reading it every single day since. Because it told me the Duchess had borne your children — a son and a daughter — and that she asked nothing of you but the chance to tell you so honestly. And I understood in that moment precisely what I had helped Mr. Vain accomplish.”

She rose, moving slowly to a chest beneath the cottage’s single window. She drew from beneath a folded stack of linens a letter, soft and yellowed with age, its seal long broken, its creases worn nearly through from handling.

Leof’s hands shook as he took it. The hand was unmistakably Isolt’s. Small and neat. Entirely without artifice. Nothing like the looping, deliberate hand of the forged letter Silas had shown him five years before.

He read it there in Mrs. Pettis’s small parlor. And by the time he reached the final lines — I ask nothing of you, Leof, but the truth, whatever it costs either of us. Because I find I cannot live in a marriage built on anything less. Even a marriage that has already ended in everything but name — he found his vision had blurred entirely. He sat for a long moment with the letter pressed to his chest, unable to speak.

“Your Grace,” Mrs. Pettis said very quietly. “I know it does not undo five years. I know a letter kept hidden and finally surrendered is a poor thing to offer against what was taken. But it is the truth, at last. And I thought you and the Duchess both deserved to have it.”