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

Chapter 16

The orchard was a hundred yards of old, crooked apple trees going to moss, and the wall behind it was nine feet of brick with glass set along the top, and the house at the end of it had once been a keeper’s lodge and had been made into something else.

One window. One door. A chimney that smoked.

Mrs. Grice walked ahead of them with a key and did not speak. At the door she stopped and turned, and Evelyn saw, in the flat grey light, that the matron’s hands were trembling slightly, and that she was angry about it.

“She does not always know people,” she said. “Some days she is well. Some days she is forty years back in her own girlhood. She has been in this room for four years and I am the only person who has spoken to her, and I will tell you now what I have told no one, which is that I have written twice to the Commission about her and received no reply either time.”

“Why?” said Sebastian.

Mrs. Grice looked at him with an expression that was almost contemptuous.

“Because she is not mad,” she said. “And I have spent six years in a house full of women who are. I know the difference the way you know the difference between a shilling and a sovereign.” She put the key in the lock. “She asked me, on the fourth day I knew her, to bring her paper. She has written to every magistrate, every bishop, and every Member of Parliament in Norfolk, and I have posted every letter myself, and not one answer has come back, and I have wondered for four years whether the letters ever left this village or whether something in the post office in Swaffham has been paid to lose them.”

She opened the door.

The room was clean, and small, and cold, and on the sill of the one window there was a tin jug with three sprigs of dried lavender standing in it.

There was a woman sitting in a chair by the window with a plaid shawl around her shoulders and a piece of paper on her knee, and she was writing.

She was thin. Her hair was white at the temples and brown at the crown. Her hands were the hands of a woman who had once been strong, and there was a wedding ring on the fourth finger that had never been taken off, and it had grown too tight, and the flesh had swollen around it.

Evelyn had spent fifteen years with an image behind her eyes of a woman in a grey gown with a green ribbon at the waist, painted at the top of a staircase.

She had not expected her to be old.

“Lady Emmeline,” said Mrs. Grice. “You have visitors.”

The woman looked up.

Her eyes were brown. That was the first thing. They were, precisely and unmistakably, Evelyn’s own eyes, and they went first to the matron — with the flicker of habitual recognition a person gives an old ally — and then to the tall man in black, and then, finally, to the young woman in travelling dress who was standing in the doorway with her hand over her mouth.

The pen stopped moving.

For a long moment nothing happened at all. And then Lady Emmeline Ashby’s face began to come apart in the way a face does when something too large is trying to enter it: not grief, not joy, but the two of them at once and fighting.

“Evelyn,” she said.

The name broke in the middle.

Evelyn crossed the room in two steps.

“Mama.”

They collided in an embrace that erased walls, and years, and lies, and the legal fiction of a stone in a churchyard with a single year cut into it. Lady Emmeline wept first — a thin, ragged, furious weeping, the weeping of a woman who had trained herself out of it and had just now, catastrophically, forgotten how. Evelyn followed, helplessly, with her face pressed into her mother’s shoulder, which smelled of lavender and paper and coal smoke.

Sebastian did not move from the doorway.

When Evelyn reached back with one hand, silently, without turning — the gesture of a woman asking a man to come closer — he came.

“This is my husband,” she said, into her mother’s shoulder. “Mama. This is my husband.”

Lady Emmeline lifted her head.

She looked at the Duke of Halstead, and the tearing in her face reversed itself and became something harder — because this was a woman who had been taken from her children by a man with power, and she had learned, in fifteen years, exactly what a man with power looks like when he walks into a room where a woman is being kept.

Her hands tightened on Evelyn’s arms.

“You believed her?” she said. “About me. You believed her?”

Sebastian Vane looked down at his wife’s mother.

“Yes,” he said.

That was all. No boasting, no explanation, no soft words about how he had known they were lying. Just the one syllable, in the coldest voice in Devonshire, and it was the truest thing he had ever said.

Lady Emmeline’s hand came up, shaking, and touched his sleeve.

“My son’s name would have been Sebastian,” she said. “If I had had a son.”

Evelyn felt her husband’s arm go rigid under her hand.

“Mama—”

“I lost him,” said Lady Emmeline, calm now, matter-of-fact, the way one speaks of a thing carried for a very long time. “Eighteen twenty-nine. He was born at seven months and he lived eleven hours and my husband did not come to the house until the Tuesday.” She looked up at the Duke. “I have thought about it every day for eighteen years. I hope you will not mind if I use your name for it.”

Sebastian’s jaw worked once.

“I would be honoured,” he said.