She Forgot the Duke Who Broke Her Heart… Then Fell in Love With Him Again

Chapter 20

She came in without knocking, which was itself the whole of her character.

Dowager Lady Ashford was seventy-two and did not look it. She was small and straight and dressed in grey so exact that it seemed to have been cut from stone, and she came into the morning room with the confidence of a woman who had run a house for forty years and had not yet been informed that she had stopped.

She looked at Cecily the way a housekeeper looks at a damp patch.

“So it is true,” she said. “You are alive.”

“I am.”

“Walked out of the wreck without a scratch and forgot your own name.” Lady Ashford’s lip moved very slightly. “How convenient.”

“Sit down, Mother,” Adrian said.

“I shall stand.”

“Sit down,” he said, “or leave the room. Those are the two things available to you.”

For one long moment the two of them looked at each other, and Cecily stood between them and understood that she was watching two decades of something being settled in silence.

Lady Ashford sat down.

Adrian did not.

“There is a box on this table,” he said. “It contains fifty-eight letters written by my wife to me in the two years of our marriage, and sixty-one written by me to her. Not one of them was delivered. Mrs. Whitlow tells me that every letter in this house goes to your ladyship’s rooms at nine o’clock in the morning and is sorted there before it comes back down. Jackson carried the salver to your door for eleven years.” He paused. “And you left this house four years ago and your secretary did not.”

“It is a post bag,” Lady Ashford said. “A post bag is not a policy.”

“Then explain the policy.”

Her hands folded in her lap, very neat.

“You know very well what the policy was. This family commands enormous influence and ninety thousand acres, and one bad marriage can cost a dynasty. Your father was a fool who married for affection and I spent thirty years repairing what that cost us.” She glanced at Cecily, without heat, without malice, with something far worse than either — the cool appraisal of a woman measuring timber. “You brought home a country parson’s daughter with no connection, no fortune, and no understanding of what she had married into. I did my duty by the estate.”

“By the estate.”

“I did nothing to her person.”

“No,” Adrian said. “You did worse. You made sure she was alone, and then you let her believe she had chosen it.”

Cecily stepped forward.

“What did you tell my aunt’s address?” she said.

Lady Ashford looked at her for the first time properly.

“There is no aunt,” she said. “There never was. You invented her, girl, the night you left. But I did not invent the rest of it.”

“What rest of it?”

The old lady sat with her hands folded and told her.

That the marriage settlement the Marches had signed had a clause in it about issue. That after three years with no child, Lady Ashford had begun pressing the family solicitors to explore whether any lawful ground existed to challenge the marriage or force a separation. Non-consummation had been discussed, though it was false; desertion was the other possibility she hoped to manufacture. A physician had been sent to Cecily in the second year and had written a report. The report had been filed with the family’s solicitor in London.

“That is a lie,” Cecily said.

“It is a document,” Lady Ashford said. “It has a seal on it.”

And Cecily — standing in the morning room of a house whose rooms she had once drawn for Hannah four years earlier — felt the last floor of her life fall away beneath her, because she remembered the physician. She remembered the cold hands and the questions and the smell of camphor, and she remembered being told something afterward, in a soft voice, at a table in a room with the curtains shut.

She had been told she would never have children.

She had believed it for two years. She had believed it with her whole heart, and she had written a letter at midnight and packed a case and walked out a west door in the dark because she had been told it by a man with a seal.

“Adrian,” she said, and could not go on.

He was at her side in two steps, and he took her elbow, and he said, over her head, in a voice she had never heard him use:

“Get out.”