Her Sisters Were Presented to the Duke—But He Asked About the Daughter They Overlooked

Chapter 20

“The late Duchess of Thornbury,” said Atticus Vale, “was named Marguerite. For the last eleven years of her life, my father hid her from society.”

Wren did not interrupt.

“She was the daughter of a Bristol merchant — enormous money, no name. My grandfather permitted the marriage because Thornbury was drowning, much as Ashmoor is drowning now. And then my grandfather died, and my father discovered that the ton would not receive her. Not because of any fault of hers. Because of her father. Because of the smell of trade on her dowry. Because she had, at a dinner in her third year of marriage, said something clever and slightly wrong in French, and Mrs. Somebody-Fitzherbert repeated it for six years.”

He spoke with the flatness of a man reading a document he had read a thousand times.

“So my father stopped taking her into society. Then he stopped taking her to the house in London at all. By the time I was nine, she lived in the east wing of Thornbury and ate alone, and did the accounts — every ledger, every estate, every tenant’s rent roll — because it was the one room where nobody could see her do it. She was the cleverest person I have ever known, and she was invisible, and my father was very kind to her in private, very attentive, very affectionate, and never once took her anywhere.”

Wren felt something cold at the base of her spine.

“And the scar,” she said.

Atticus touched the tail of his left eyebrow with one finger.

“Christmas dinner, six years ago. The cousin I dismissed.” He let his hand fall. “Julian. He was drunk and he had found out that my mother had drawn up the settlement that saved his estate, and he said — in front of thirty people, with my mother three rooms away, where she could not hear it, which was the whole point of saying it — some nameless person has been doing your arithmetic for you, Atticus; you might at least let her sit at the table.”

The hall had gone very still.

“And you struck him,” Wren said.

“I struck him and he went into the table and I had my glass in my hand when I did it, and it broke, and I have a mark over my eye for the rest of my life.” Atticus’s mouth was not quite a smile. “I dismissed him the same night. I was quite proud of myself for about four hours, and then I went up to the east wing, and I told my mother what he had said, and she looked at me for a long time and said, and what will you do about the part of it that is true?”

“What did you do?”

“She died the following March. So,” said the Duke of Thornbury, “nothing. I did nothing at all, and then she was dead, and I found out afterward from the housekeeper that she had written three hundred and forty letters about Thornbury’s affairs in nineteen years, and that my father had not opened a single one, and that she had kept every copy in a box under her bed like a woman committing a crime.”

Wren’s hands had gone to her mouth.

So that was it. That was why he had looked at her as though he had lost a page and found it. That was why he had asked have we met before on the carpet of her father’s drawing room — not because he knew her, but because he recognized her, the way one recognizes an old wound on someone else’s body.

“You thought she was your fault,” Wren said.

“Yes.”

“It wasn’t.”

“No,” said Atticus. “And neither is your father yours. Which is why I have brought this up now, in a hallway, with a hired coach waiting outside, instead of somewhere pleasant later.”

Wren looked at the case by the door. She looked at the gray light. She looked at the man in front of her, who had spent twenty years being told he was cold, and had spent twenty years declining to explain.

“Atticus.”

“Yes.”

“Ask me properly.”