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

Chapter 21

Lady Ashford went. She went with the same even tread she had come in with, and stopped in the doorway, and said one more thing, because she was the kind of woman who could not leave a room without the last word.

“Your wife walked out of your gates of her own accord. Whatever you have persuaded yourself of tonight, do not forget that. Nobody made her go.”

Then she was gone, and the hall doors closed, and in the morning room the fire went on burning with the terrible ordinary cheerfulness of fires.

Cecily sat down on the sofa because her legs had stopped being reliable.

“I remember him,” she said. “The physician. Dr. Ainsley. He came in the March of the second year, and he had a case with a brass catch, and he asked me questions for an hour, and afterward he told me —” She stopped. “He told me it was unlikely. He said unlikely, Adrian. I remember the word, because I held on to it. And then he wrote a report, and I never saw the report, and by the summer I had stopped hoping and started packing.”

“Did he tell you he had filed a report?”

“No. I found out —” she frowned, chasing a fragment — “I found out because Lady Ashford’s woman brought me a copy of the solicitor’s letter. Not the whole letter. A page of it. It said the grounds appear sound and it said desertion may be preferable to publicity.”

“And you believed a page of a letter in the hands of my mother’s maid.”

“I believed,” Cecily said, “that my husband would be relieved.”

Adrian sat down on the sofa beside her — not close, but on the sofa, and not in a chair across the room, which she noted and would remember.

“Do you know what was in the actual report?” he said.

“No.”

“Nor did I, until four minutes ago, when I began to wonder whether a document exists.”

He got up, took the lamp, and left the room, and was gone long enough for the fire to burn down and for Cecily to hear him, somewhere above her, in the flat of the house, opening and shutting drawers.

He came back with a folder, and a letter, and a face like a man who has been up a mountain.

“Dr. Ainsley’s report was filed with our solicitor in the March of that year. I have never read it, because I never knew it existed.” He sat down and opened the folder on his knees. “It says here — I am reading it exactly, so listen — that the Duchess’s constitution shows no defect, that there is no evident reason she should not bear children, and that he has informed her it is unlikely only because he was instructed to prepare her for the possibility with the family’s history in mind.”

Cecily sat perfectly still.

“You are not barren,” Adrian said. “You were never barren. You were told a soft lie by a hired man and a hard lie by a woman who wanted you out of a house with ninety thousand acres behind it.”

She did not cry. She would think about that later and be surprised by it. What she did was put her hand flat on the folder and hold it there, as though it were a wall she was checking for the door.

“Two years,” she said.

“Two years.”

“I wrote to you fifty-eight times.”

“And I wrote to you sixty-one.”

“My first letter was four pages long,” she said. “I asked you to walk in the west garden. There were roses going in, and I had ordered them in the wrong colour, and I wanted to tell you it was my fault before the gardener did.”

“The west garden roses,” Adrian said slowly. “There are roses there. They are the wrong colour. I noticed them every summer for four years and never once asked why.”

“I asked you to walk with me.”

“Yes.”

“In the letter that never came.”

“Yes.”

They sat there with the folder open on his knees and the box of letters closed on the table, and Cecily understood that the thing she had been mourning for three weeks — the marriage that had failed her — had never actually happened.

What had happened was something else entirely. Two people had been kept apart in a house they both lived in, by a third who had the keys.

“That is a worse crime than cruelty,” she said.

Adrian looked at her.

“I have spent two years,” she said, “believing I was not wanted in my own house. Do you know what that does to a person? You stop asking for things. You start closing doors behind you without noticing. By the end I could not have told you what I wanted for breakfast, because I had taught myself not to want anything at all.” She drew a breath. “And it was not done to me with a whip or a locked room. It was done with a post bag and a staircase.”

Adrian closed the folder.

“I would like,” he said, “to show you something.”