Elizabeth had both hands to her mouth. Lily merely looked calmly into the duke’s eyes and knew that she had heard everything that he was prepared to tell. She knew that although Mr. Dorsey had probably killed her mother and Mr. William Doyle, that although he had tried three separate times to kill her and had almost killed Neville, it might have been difficult to prove any one of those murders or attempted murders in a court of law. She was not sure if it was carelessness that had left a gun within Mr.
Dorsey’s reach. Perhaps they had wanted him to have that gun. Perhaps they had wanted him to try to use it so that there would be a perfectly good excuse to shoot him in self-defense.
The duke himself would never say, of course. Neither would Neville. And she would never ask. She did not really wish to know.
“I am glad he is dead,” she said, almost shocked to realize that she spoke the truth. “Thank you.”
“And that is all we need say on the topic of Calvin Dorsey,” he said. “You are safe, Lily. Free.”
She nodded.
“Well,” Elizabeth said briskly, “I am due to meet with my housekeeper. It is our day for going over the accounts. You will excuse me for half an hour, Lyndon? Lily?”
Lily nodded and the duke bowed.
He looked wary when he turned back from seeing Elizabeth out of the room, but Lily smiled at him.
“Will you have a seat, your grace?”she asked.
He took a chair quite close to hers and looked at her silently for several moments.
“I will understand,” he said at last, sounding as if he were delivering a well-rehearsed speech, “if you feel yourself unable to acknowledge the relationship, Lily. Kilbourne told me a good deal last night about Sergeant Thomas Doyle. I can understand your pride in him and your affection for him. But I beg you—please!—to allow me to settle a considerable portion of my fortune on you so that you may live in comfortable independence for the rest of your life. At the very least allow me to do that for you.”
“What would you wish to do,” she asked him, “if I said I was willing to accept more than the very least?”
He leaned back in his chair and drew a deep breath, looking at her consideringly as he did so. “I would acknowledge you publicly,” he said. “I would take you home to Rutland Park in Warwickshire and spend every available minute of every day getting to know you and allowing you to get to know me. I would clothe you and deck you with jewels. I would encourage you to continue with your education. I would take you to Nuttall Grange in Leicestershire to meet your grandfather. I would…What is left? I would try in every way available to me to make up for the lost years.” He smiled slowly. “And I would have you tell me every single thing you can remember about Thomas and Beatrice Doyle and your growing years. That is what I would wish to do, Lily.”
“You must do it, then, your grace,” she said.
They stared at each other for a long time, it seemed, before he got to his feet, came closer to her, and extended a hand for hers. She stood up, gave him her hand, and watched as he raised it to his lips.
“Lily,” he said. “Oh, my dear. My very, very dear.”
She withdrew her hand, set her arms about his waist, and rested her cheek against his shoulder. “He will always be my papa,” she said. “But from this day on you will be my father. Shall I call you that? Father?”
His arms were like iron bands about her. She was a little alarmed when she heard the first painful-sounding sob, but she closed her arms more tightly about him when he would have pulled away.
“No, no,” she said. “It is all right. It is quite all right.”
He did not weep for long. Men did not. She knew that from experience. They saw it as a sign of horribly embarrassing weakness, even if they had just watched a close friend smashed to a thousand pieces by a cannonball or had just had a limb sawn off by the surgeons—or had just discovered a daughter after almost twenty-one years. He drew away from her after a couple of minutes and moved off to the window, where he stood with his back to the room, blowing his nose in a large handkerchief.
“I am so very sorry to have subjected you to that,” he said. “It will not happen again. You will find me strong and dependable, I believe, Lily—a good provider and a good protector.”
“Yes, I know, Father,” she said, smiling at his back.
She heard him draw an inward breath and hold it for a few moments. “I could, I suppose,” he said, “have remarried any time during the past twenty years. I could have had a nurseryful of children and been called that a thousand times and more before now. I believe, Lily, it has been worth waiting to hear it first from your lips.”
“When will we leave for Rutland Park?” she asked. “Is it a large house? Will I like it…Father?”
He turned to look at her. “As soon as possible,” he said. “It is larger than Newbury Abbey. You will love it. It has been waiting for you all these years. We had better see if Elizabeth will come with you. Today is Thursday. Shall we say Monday?”
Lily nodded.
He smiled at her and strode to the bell pull. He told the servant who answered the summons to ask Lady Elizabeth to return to the drawing room at her convenience. Then they both sat down again and gazed at each other.
It would be more accurate, Lily thought, to say that he was beaming at her. Despite the battered look of his face, he appeared very happy. She deliberately kept her own expression bright—not that it was all pretense. But a part of it was. She was stepping into the unknown again as she had done so many times, it seemed, during the past couple of years.
She remembered traveling down to Newbury Abbey from London and hoping that the long journey was almost ended. She remembered seeing Neville for the first time in almost a year and a half and experiencing, despite the difficulty of the circumstances, a feeling of final homecoming. But she had not been home. And she still was not. She wondered if she ever would be. Would the time ever come when she would feel at last that she had arrived, that she could settle in peace to live out the rest of her life?
