THE DUKE CHOSE THE PLAIN GIRL AT A MAYFAIR AUCTION — THEN THE VEIL CAME OFF

Chapter 11

She could have lied. It would have been easy, and it would have been sensible, and for a moment she considered it — because the habit of protecting her father was fifteen years deep, and habits are cruel things that outlive the reasons for them.

She did not lie.

“Because my mother is there,” she said.

There was a silence in which Evelyn heard the house settle, one long timber moving against another, far away.

Then Sebastian said, “Come into the light,” and took her by the elbow — not roughly, but without any of the ceremony he had used with her before — and brought her out of the west corridor, down the stairs, into the library, and shut the doors behind them.

The fire had burned down to embers.

“From the beginning,” he said.

And so she told him, in the small hours of the fifth day of her marriage, in the lamplight of the house that was now hers.

She told him about the attic trunk with the bright new lock. The green ribbon. The letters written from a house in Norfolk by a woman who had been buried in eighteen thirty-one. She told him about the matron who permitted paper on Sundays. She told him about the phrase declared the product of a disordered mind the day she arrived, and about the doctor who came twice a year and never examined her, and about the way her father had gone white when she asked for her mother’s shawl.

She told him about the grave with a year on it and no date, which was cheaper to cut.

She told him that she had climbed the north slope that morning before the wedding and put her hand on the stone and said I know.

She did not cry. She had promised herself she would not cry in front of him about this, and she kept the promise with the same grim competence with which she had kept every other promise she had ever made to herself.

At some point while she spoke, he had risen and gone to the window and stood there with his back to her, one hand flat against the glass.

When she finished, he said, “Where are the letters?”

“In the lining of my trunk. I brought them.”

“Bring them.”

She brought them.

He did not sit down. He read them standing, at the window, with the lamp brought close, and he read every one of the seven, twice, and he did not speak once. Evelyn watched his face in profile and learned something about grief: that in some men it does not flood, it freezes, and what you see is not water but a surface held unnaturally still.

When he reached the seventh letter, the one in the cramped hand, he stopped and read it three times and then set the bundle on the windowsill.

“Eighteen thirty-two,” he said. “Lady Emmeline was taken from her home on the fourth of November and brought to Marlbrook.”

“Yes.”

“Which means she was at Marlbrook when these letters were written. My mother had been there before her. It is the same house, the same physician, the same machinery.”

Evelyn’s breath caught.

“You believe she is alive,” he said.

“I do not know.” Her voice was low, and steady, and careful, because it was the truth and the truth deserved care. “The letters cease in eighteen thirty-two. That is either because she died, or because she was moved somewhere letters were truly not permitted, or because the woman who was sending them was dismissed.” She paused. “But there has never been a death record. There is only a stone with a year on it that my father paid a mason to cut. And my father is not a man who does a thing for one reason when he can have three.”

Sebastian turned around.

“And you married me,” he said, “because I am the only man in England capable of finding her.”

She met his eyes fully.

“I married you,” she said, “because you had already bought my father.”

“Which is not an answer.”

“It is the answer. You had bought him before you ever spoke to me. You were already inside my life, Sebastian, whether I like it or not, and I would rather have my hands on the reins of the horse than stand in the road.” She lifted her chin. “And because the man who owns my father’s debts is also the only man in England whose mother died in the same house. That is not sentiment. That is arithmetic.”

He regarded her for a long moment, and she saw something move behind his eyes that she had not seen before.

Then he said it. Not loudly. Not dramatically. The way a man states the terms of a thing he intends to do.

“Then I will find her.”

The fire cracked in the grate and threw one red pulse of light across the room.

“Not tomorrow,” said Evelyn quietly. “There are things to be done properly. We need the order, we need the records, we need—”

“We need nothing that I cannot buy by Friday.” He was already moving, already reaching for the bell. “Mr. Finch will draw the application. I own three peers who owe me their seats and a judge who owes me his. A man may not commit his wife without judicial oversight — that is the law, and every certificate Penn ever signed is void on its face. When I have the order, I will ride to Norfolk with forty men if I must, and I will pull that house down around its matron’s ears if a single door is locked against me.”

He stopped. He looked at her. Some of the heat went out of his face.

“You are looking at me as though I have already done something wrong.”

“I am looking at you,” said Evelyn, “as though you have not yet asked me what I want.”

The clock struck three.

And somewhere below them, in the dark of the hall, a bell rang — the hard, urgent ring of the night bell at the servants’ door, the one that meant a messenger and not a guest.