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

Chapter 6

Evelyn did not read them all at once. That would have been the act of a woman who wanted to be destroyed, and she had already decided, somewhere between the nursery and the attic stairs, that she intended to survive this.

She read the first one twice.

My darling Evelyn,

If you are reading this, then you have grown older than I was permitted to see, and you have grown clever enough to find what your father hid. I am sorry for both. I had hoped you would be dull and happy.

I am not ill. I have never been ill. I am writing this from a house in Norfolk where the windows do not open and the doors are kept locked, and where a man I have never met before signs a paper each quarter declaring me of unsound mind.

I am not of unsound mind, my love. I am inconvenient.

She read on. The second letter was dated three weeks later. The third, a month after that. They were calm, careful letters, written in her mother’s slanting hand — the hand that had written recipe lists and Christmas verses and the note tucked into Evelyn’s Bible that said be braver than they expect, my darling, it unsettles them.

The letters spoke of a garden with high walls and a lime tree she could see from her window. Of a matron who was kind on Tuesdays. Of a doctor who came twice a year and never examined her, only sat across a table and wrote.

He asks me nothing; he writes everything. Last year he asked me whether I heard voices. I said I heard my children. He wrote down: auditory delusions. I laughed, and he wrote that down too.

And then, four letters in, the thing that made Evelyn put her hand flat against the floorboards and press until her knuckles hurt:

I have asked your father to let me come home and he has written back to say that if I attempt to write to you again he will have me moved to a place where letters are not permitted. So I write now, and I shall hide what I write, because he does not know that one of the attendants permits me paper on Sundays and that I have never once told her no.

Evelyn, you must not hate him. That is the only instruction I will give you. Hatred is a fire that will not warm you. But you must not trust him either. Those are not the same command, and one day you will understand why I wrote both.

The sixth letter stopped mid-sentence.

The seventh was in a different hand. A woman’s, cramped and hurried.

Lady Emmeline was removed from her home on the fourth of November by order of her husband and brought to this house. I am sorry. God forgive me. I have kept her paper and I send these on because she asked me to and because no one ever asked me anything in my life before.

There was no signature. There was a smear of wax where a seal had been pressed and then scraped away.

Evelyn sat back on her heels in the cold of the attic and looked out at the grey rectangle of the dormer window, and she made herself breathe, and count, and breathe.

Two feet beneath her, her father slept in the room he had shared with that woman for eleven years.

She gathered the letters and tied them back in the green ribbon, and she did not put them back in the trunk.

She heard the thirteenth stair creak.

Evelyn had grown up in this house with a step that announced everyone who climbed it, and she had spent her childhood learning precisely how much time that gave her. She had the bundle inside the front of her dress and the trunk lid closed and her hand on the candle before Sir Percival’s lamp came over the top of the stairs.

They looked at each other across the attic. He was in his dressing gown. His hair, thin now, stood up on one side.

“What are you doing up here?” he said.

“I could not sleep. I was looking for Mama’s shawl. The grey one with the—”

“Get out.”

She rose. She moved toward the stairs with the unhurried dignity of a woman who had done nothing wrong, because that was the only armour that had ever worked in this house.

Her father did not move aside. He stood on the landing at the top of the attic stairs, and Evelyn had to pass within a foot of him, and he watched her the entire way with the lamp held low.

At the last moment, he spoke.

“You were always the one who asked questions,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Your mother asked questions.” His voice was quiet, and very even, and it made the hair rise along Evelyn’s arms. “You know what happened to her.”

She stopped. The lamp lit the underside of his chin and nothing else.

“She died,” said Evelyn.

“Yes,” said Sir Percival. “She died.”

He said it as though he were closing a ledger.

Then he added, in the same mild tone, as though remarking on the weather:

“And if you are thinking of asking anyone else about it — remember, girl, that a father may do with his daughter as he pleases. There is no law that says otherwise. There is no law that ever has.”