Sea of Secrets: A Novel of Victorian Romantic Suspense (26 page)

My father’s gratitude was touching; at least, I imagine it must have been to those who knew him less intimately. He had Lord Claude promise to send one of the servants to procure a bottle for me. By that time Father had probably convinced everyone at the table, excepting Lord Claude and myself, of his heartfelt concern for his daughter’s welfare. I forced down my breakfast over a rising tide of nausea.

At last some respite from the charade came. Lord Claude rose, saying, “Good morning, my dear,” sounding so nervous that I looked up. The duchess had entered and was regarding my father with astonishment, and not a trace of pleasure.

“Good morning, everyone,” she said. “Mr. Pembroke, you must forgive me; I was not informed of your arrival. I would have made sure of being there to greet you had I known.”

He bowed, with a courtesy finely shaded between sincere respect and mocking subservience. Clearly he was no more fond of her than she was of him. “You have nothing to apologize for, Your Grace,” he said, but the silken undertone of the words implied just the opposite. “I arrived very late, and I could not expect you to disturb your rest for my sake. I was treated most hospitably by your husband.”

As the words were calculated to do, they instantly shifted her attention to Lord Claude. Under her inquiring gaze he seemed to shrink, and hurried to defend himself.

“I did not have the chance to tell you, my dear, that Pembroke unexpectedly found himself able to join us. I had the servants put him in the Bavarian Room. I trust that will not upset your arrangements, Gwendolyn, but that was the only room that suggested itself to me at the time. There was no chance to consult with you, you see. I’m certain Pembroke won’t mind shifting to another room if—”

Mercifully, she cut off the flow. “The Bavarian Room sounds like a perfectly acceptable arrangement, Claude. As long as our guest is satisfied with it, of course.” She allowed a pause just long enough for my father’s assurances, and then said sweetly, “I believe I would like a pastry, Claude, if you wouldn’t mind.”

At once her husband moved to the sideboard. She took a seat gratefully, and regarded my father as she poured tea. “We will have the pleasure of your company for the ball, I hope?”

“Indeed,” said my father, “I would hate to miss it.”

This was as close as she could come to ascertaining how long he would stay, I saw. Abandoning that line of inquiry, she deftly turned the conversation to the plans for the ball and kept it there while she broke her fast. She behaved as graciously as if she had been awaiting my father’s arrival, but I was now certain that she had been as unprepared for his appearance as I was. As soon as she was through with her meal—a greatly abbreviated one, I suspected—she confirmed my thoughts.

“You will excuse me, friends, but I have some final arrangements for the ball that I must attend to. Will you be so good as to assist me, my dear?” she asked me, and I assented at once. Lord Claude rose to hold her chair as she stood, and my father, to my great discomfort, performed the same service for me.

Following her from the room, I was not surprised when she proceeded not to the long gallery but to the morning room.

“We may speak here without risk of interruption,” she said briskly. Once the door was shut, she turned to me. “My dear child, what can I say? I had no idea of your father’s arrival. I have never been so astonished in my life as when I saw him at the table. Please believe that I had nothing to do with his coming here. Knowing, as I do, your unfortunate history with him, I would never have subjected you to such a painful meeting.”

“I never doubted that, ma’am.” I was surprised that she did not take a seat, but hovered restlessly by the windows that overlooked the terrace, twisting her rings. She seemed more upset than I; but, then, I had had some warning of his presence this morning. “I could tell you were as surprised as I was at his arrival.”

“Surprised? Appalled is more accurate. What on earth was Claude thinking, to ask him here without consulting me? The guest list has always been my domain, just so that such disastrous mistakes should not happen. It was inevitable that we should have to deal with the man, but not here, not now.”

I felt a twinge of sympathy for Lord Claude, who would surely face her indignation later.

“Perhaps Lord Claude had a good reason for asking him here,” I said, and then the realization struck. He had in fact sent for my father; I had heard that much last night. But why would a man send for his own blackmailer? Now too I recalled the sense that both were involved together, however unwillingly on one side, in whatever urgent business it was. My father had deliberately misled me. Was he too being blackmailed, and dependent on his hold over Lord Claude to protect himself? But what was the nature of that hold, if he had invented the story of Lord Claude’s indiscretion for my benefit?

I was so startled by these reflections that it took me a moment to realize the duchess was speaking again.

“I beg your pardon?” I apologized, dragging myself with an effort back to the matter at hand.

She had stopped pacing, but she was still twisting her rings in agitation. Her face wore such a strange combination of pity and hesitancy that my heart gave an apprehensive thump. She must have something awful to impart.

“My dear girl, I think it is time you were told the truth,” she said.

“The truth about what, ma’am?”

She took a deep breath and came to sit by my side on the divan. The sunlight streaming through the broad windows picked out her golden hair in a fiery halo, and she looked like an angelic messenger forced to impart tidings, not of great joy, but which she would rather have kept to herself. She took my hands, which had gone clammy with dread, and looked into my eyes with great tenderness.

“I have something to tell you that may be very terrible to hear,” she said softly. “Believe me, I do not wish to cause you pain” (had I not said that, or something like it, long ago?) “but, circumstances being what they are, I feel it best that you should know this. It is about your father.”

I let out my breath. “Oh,” I said, without meaning to, and she smiled ever so slightly at the relief in my voice.

“I frightened you. I’m sorry, child. But what I have to tell you concerns you as well as him. Otherwise, it is something best never spoken of. It is, after all, in the past…

“You may have wondered why, in all the years since your infancy, the Reginalds have made no attempt to contact you or your father; why you grew up in isolation from your mother’s relations; why, to be plain, your father was cut by the family.” She permitted herself a tiny, un-duchesslike grimace. “Besides, of course, the innate undesirability of his company.”

The conversation was taking a stranger turn than I had expected, but I was eager to hear more. “Yes,” I said, marveling; “I suspected there must have been some breach between you, since Father never even admitted to the existence of this side of the family; and Father is not one to keep silent about connections to the peerage.”

She gave a sad little nod. “Yes, he always was slavishly devoted to rank. It was something that worried my father; he was not wholly certain that Hugo wanted your mother for herself, and not just her family. She had no rank, of course; but by that time I was married to the duke, and I could give her
entrée
into the highest circles… along with her husband.”

My mother was part of this. I realized with amazement that I had not thought to question the duchess before about her, when one of the reasons I had been so overjoyed to be taken under her wing was the hope that from her I might at last learn more of the mother I had not known. How could I have forgotten about my quest so completely in so short a time?

But the answer was not difficult to find. Herron had seized my heart and mind so strongly and suddenly that there was no room for anyone else; he had become all in all to me before I was aware of it, and had supplanted all other loves. How much I had changed in so short a time, and how poorly the change reflected upon me, to be so easily distracted from what had been so important to me. At once all my wistful eagerness for knowledge of my mother came thronging back to me, so swiftly that words rushed to my lips and threatened to stifle me.

“Is it something to do with my mother? Will you tell me more of her? Did your parents disapprove of her marriage, and was that why they denied the connection?”

“Nothing that simple, I am afraid.” She still held my hands in hers, and I waited in bewilderment for what she was having such difficulty in bringing herself to say. “I know you have little love for your father, child, and less reason to love him, but what I am going to tell you cannot be easy for any daughter to hear. You know that your mother drowned, here at Ellsmere, less than a year after your birth.”

“Yes,” I whispered, a terrible vague dread creeping over me.

“You were just a tiny baby, of course; you could not remember what your mother was like. I am certain she married your father in the full confidence that he returned her love. For she did love him, foolish girl, for all his arrogant vanity and ambition.” Her voice had died to a thread, and her eyes were squeezed shut, but she gave herself a little shake and seemed to collect herself. When she spoke again there was steel in her voice. “None of us knows for certain. That is the dreadful thing, and it is one of the reasons I did not turn him out of doors this morning. In the end we had no proof.”

Again, no proof, I thought fleetingly.

“Nor were there any witnesses. But I knew my stepsister.” She flung up her head now, and her jaw was set, her eyes hard as flint through her tears. “Before her marriage she was a happy girl. She would never have drowned herself. But something happened after the marriage to change her. I would never have thought she could abandon the baby girl she loved so much. I would have thought her capable of enduring anything for the sake of you and Lionel.”

“What did my father do to her?”

“Oh, child, if only we knew. I know he was unkind to her. She would not tell me what passed between them; she was too loyal. Loyal to him! But she changed so after the marriage, became so melancholy and nervous. And he—it was plain he was not satisfied with her income. He was always so profligate, always in need of more money.” I thought suddenly of the endless supply of fine cigars and brandy in my father’s house, of his elegant suits and collection of fine cravat pins. He still had expensive tastes.

“How did it happen?” I asked, and was surprised that my voice was so steady.

“That afternoon we were having tea outside, on the terrace. Hugo and your mother had taken you for a walk; you were just beginning to be able to toddle around on your own, and she was so proud of you. She always regretted that Papa had not lived to see you and Lionel; but he died not long after your mother married. I always wondered if he might have known something was wrong, and if he was too grieved to find the heart to rally when he fell ill…. Your nurse went after the three of you, but in less than a quarter of an hour she came hurrying back in great distress: when she came in sight of you and your father at the edge of the cliffs, your mother had vanished. Pembroke told the girl that she had suddenly let go your hand and run to fling herself off the cliff before he could reach her. We sent for the fishermen from the village for assistance. All that night there were lights moving back and forth on the water, as the men in their boats searched for her body.”

“But they did not find her.” That much I knew.

“No. That is what led some to claim that Hugo had invented the story and that she had run away from him.” Her voice had regained some of its strength and resolve. “But I knew your mother, and how well she loved you and Lionel. She would never have abandoned you. That is what convinces me that only some terrible torment could have driven her to take her life and leave the two of you in Hugo’s care.”

“You mean my father deliberately drove her to her death.”

She rose abruptly from the divan as if she could sit still no longer. “We were never certain of it, but that is what I think all of us felt in our hearts. Ambrose—my husband—was sure enough to ban your father from the house. He told Hugo that we would not recognize him and did not wish to see him again. It sounds harsh”—she turned to gaze at me with a kind of defiance, even though her husband was well out of reach of my disapproval—“but Ambrose would never have acted so had he not excellent reason. In the family it was accepted as the most likely explanation that your father was responsible for her death.”

My silence seemed to prick her conscience. “Should I not have told you?” she asked anxiously, drawing closer and reaching out to me. “It is a dreadful story, I know, and one that I do not relish having to tell—”

“You did right.” I stood, gently putting her hands away from me, and made my way slowly to the door. I could feel her eyes following me, and I knew I should reassure her, but at that moment I could not spare any words for her; my mind was too wholly taken up with recovering from the series of shocks it had been dealt, and trying to rebuild what I knew to be true of my past.

For all of my remembered life he had cast her death up to me. And now to find that not only was I without blame, but that he himself, thinking perhaps of the legacy he expected, had probably provoked her suicide.

If it was true. It might not be. The duchess, for all her reliance on her late husband’s judgment, still had no proof but her own instinct for her theory. But from what I knew of his character I could believe him quite capable of driving my mother to take her life, baiting her in so hateful and punishing a manner that it drove her at last from him, to run to the oblivion of the waves.

At least I knew now that she had loved me, I tried to tell myself. But the knowledge almost caused more pain than consolation: now I knew the true magnitude of my loss.

“Are you all right?” came a voice, and I found that I had wandered unseeing out to the front terrace. I realized that I was cold, and that Charles was standing before me. He had not been at breakfast, I recalled dimly. He was regarding me with concern. I must have looked peculiar, to say the least.