“She adored those girls,” Havell said, “if it is any consolation to Lady Ponsonby when you tell her of this visit. Both of them, the older one and the little child. Sheadoredthem.”
But not enough to sacrifice her own happiness for their sakes, Flavian thought as he drove back out into the world—as though for the past hour he had somehow stepped right out of it. But who was he to judge? A mother ought never to abandon her children. It seemed a fundamental truth. A woman, once owned by a man, ought never to seek her own freedom and happiness, if that man would not help her to achieve both. Yet it was unfair, unjust. Debbins, it seemed, had publicly humiliated his wife and threatened worse. What would her life have been like if she had defied him and stayed and renounced the one man who had seemed to offer her a bit of happiness? What would Dora Debbins’s life have been if she had stayed? And Agnes’s? One thing was for sure: he would not have met her if her mother had stayed with her husband all those years ago.
How strangely random a thing life was.
And now he had the problem of what to do with his knowledge. Tell Agnes, when she had specifically told him she did not want to know? Withhold it from her? He might have been tempted to do the latter if there was not the risk that someone else would unearth the details and spring them on her without any warning in some very public manner.
Anyway, he thought as he made his way closer to home, if this week of his marriage had taught him anything, it was that openness and truth between partners were necessary if the marriage was to have a chance of bringing them any sort of happiness.
Now that he knew, he must tell her, even if only the fact that he had found and visited her mother.
He did not look forward to telling her.
He wished suddenly that Lady Darleigh had not asked him last autumn to grant her the favor of dancing with her particular friend at the harvest ball, lest she be a wallflower. He wished he had not gone back without any coercion at all for the after-supper waltz and had not therefore allowed himself to be enchanted. And hewishedVince could have waited six months or so before proving to the world how fertile he was, so that the Survivors’ Club gathering this year might have been at Penderris Hall, as usual.
And he might as well carry this line of thinking to its logical and absurd conclusion. He wished he had not been injured in the war. He wished he had not been born. He wished his parents had not...
Well.
***
Agnes was dressed in one of her new evening gowns—white lace over silk of a deep rose pink. She had been dubious about it until Madeline had given it the nod of approval, though she had directed Madame Martin to abandon the large pink silk bows that were to have caught up the lace skirt in deep scallops and to replace them with tiny rosebuds and far shallower scallops. Agnes thought the neckline was a little too revealing, but her maid laughed at her misgivings.
“That’s notrevealing,my lady,” she said. “You just wait till you see some.”
She had just finished pinning Agnes’s hair up in a style of smooth elegance when Flavian appeared in the dressing room doorway. He was dressed as he had been for the autumn ball last year in black and white with a silver waistcoat. He paused in the doorway and raised his quizzing glass to his eye. He looked her over unhurriedly.
“Enchanting, I feel compelled to say,” he said and lowered the glass.
Madeline smirked and bobbed a curtsy and slipped out of the room.
Agnes got to her feet and turned. She smiled at him. It seemed a little extravagant to her that they were both dressed with such formal magnificence for what was to be little more than a family gathering at Lord Shields’s home, but she was looking forward to the evening with some pleasure and only a little nervousness. The dowager’s sister, who had told Agnes to call her Aunt DeeDee, and her daughters had treated her with kindness earlier today, after an initial half hour or so of reserve. The rest of Flavian’s family would have had time to learn of his marriage and to recover from any surprise and disapproval at its suddenness. They would be polite, at the very least.
Flavian had been rather quiet at the early dinner of which they had partaken a couple of hours ago. He looked a bit somber now too, despite calling her enchanting.
She was feeling far more cheerful than she had this time yesterday. He had not loved Lady Hazeltine—not before he went to the Peninsula, anyway, and she suspected there were other lost memories surrounding that leave of his, when his brother had died and he had celebrated his betrothal, though not quite in that order. She did not know exactly what had happened, apart from the bare, indisputable facts, but she hoped to find out. For his sake, she hoped to find out.
He had propped his shoulder against the doorframe and crossed his arms over his chest.
“I paid a call earlier today,” he said. There was a longish pause, during which she raised her eyebrows. “On your mother.”
She wished then that she had not stood up. She reached behind her with one hand to clutch the edge of the dressing table.
“My mother.” She fixed her eyes on his.
“She was remarkably easy to f-find, actually,” he said. “Divorces are rare and always a bit scandalous, and people remember them. I did not expect, however, to discover her whereabouts so easily. She lives not too f-far from here.”
Agnes took a step back until she felt the dressing table bench with the backs of her knees. She sat down heavily.
“You went looking for my mother,” she said. “Youwent lookingfor her against my express wishes.”
“I did.” He was regarding her with hooded eyes.
“How dare you,” she said. “Oh, how dare you!Youknowthat she has been dead to me for twenty years. Youknowthat I do not want to hearofher orfromher. Ever. I do not want to know her name or her whereabouts or her circumstances. Ido not want to know. Oh, how dare you go asking about her and finding out who she is and where she is. And howdareyou call upon her.”
She was alarmed to realize that she had raised her voice and was shouting at him. If she was not careful, she would be attracting the attention of her mother-in-law and the servants. She got to her feet and hurried toward him.
“How dare you!” she said more softly, thrusting her face close to his.
