She Vanished After the Duke Rejected Her—But When He Found Her Working as a Maid at Another Lord’s Estate, the Eight-Year-Old Boy Beside Her Revealed the Secret She Had Hidden for Nearly a Decade

PART 3

He had written to Elizabeth and asked her to meet him at a posting inn halfway between their estates. And he had sat across from her in a private parlor while the rain fell outside the windows. And he had told her that he could not marry her.

He had expected her to cry. He had expected her to argue, to plead, to demand an explanation. But she had done none of those things. She had simply sat very still, her hands folded in her lap, and listened to him with an expression that gave nothing away.

When he had finished speaking, she had looked at him for a long moment. And then she had said, in a voice that was perfectly steady, “I understand.”

She had risen from her chair, and she had walked out of the room, and he had let her go.

That had been the last time he had seen her until now.

He spent the first several days at Norland Park in a state of restless agitation, avoiding the servants’ quarters and the kitchen garden and anywhere else he might encounter her. He told himself that he was being foolish, that she would not want to see him, that any attempt to approach her would only cause her further pain.

But the memory of her face in the rain haunted him.

On the third evening, as he sat in the library with Lord Harrington after dinner, the Earl mentioned that his wife had recently engaged a new maid. “Sarah, her name is,” Harrington said, swirling his brandy. “Came to us with a recommendation from Lady Westmorland, of all people. Quiet sort of woman. Keeps to herself. But she’s been a great help to my wife.”

Everly kept his face carefully neutral, but his mind was working rapidly. Lady Westmorland was a distant cousin of the Marlos. If Elizabeth had spent several years in her household, that would explain how she had come to be recommended to the Harringtons. But it did not explain why she was working as a maid at all. What had happened to her family? Why had she not married? And whose child had she been carrying on her hip?

The following day, he saw the child.

It happened entirely by accident. He had gone for a walk through the grounds, and his path had taken him past the kitchen garden, where a boy was sitting on an upturned bucket, picking at the dirt with a stick. The child looked up as he approached, and Everly stopped short.

The boy had brown eyes and dark hair, and there was something about the shape of his face that was achingly familiar.

“Are you a duke?” the boy said.

Everly blinked. “Yes. I am.”

The boy considered this information with apparent gravity. “My mama says dukes are very important. She says I must be polite to them.”

“Your mama is very wise.”

The boy nodded, apparently satisfied, and returned his attention to the dirt. He was about eight years old, sturdy and quick, with a smudge of dirt on one cheek and a hole in the knee of his breeches. His hair was dark and slightly curly, and his hands were grubby. Everly found that he could not look away from him.

“What is your name?” he asked, surprised by the roughness of his own voice.

“Tom. Tom Bailey.”

“Bailey?” The name meant nothing to him. Some part of him had been braced for a different answer, though he could not have said what answer he had expected. The relief that flooded through him was followed immediately by shame at his own suspicion.

“Tom,” he repeated. “That is a good name.”

The boy grinned, revealing a gap where one of his teeth was missing. “Mama says it was my papa’s name.”

Everly felt something twist in his chest. “Your papa,” he said carefully. “Is he—”

“He’s in heaven,” the boy said with the matter-of-fact acceptance of a child who had been told the story many times. “He died before I was born. Mama says he was a soldier.”

Everly stood there for a moment longer, looking down at the child. And then he turned and walked away without another word. His chest felt tight, and there was a pressure behind his eyes that he refused to acknowledge.

She had named her son Thomas.

It meant nothing, he told himself. Thomas was a common name. It did not have to mean anything at all.

And yet it did.