It seems no matter how much he had tried to prevent it, he was slowly turning into his father day after day.Wait a minute.Colin jumped to his feet and looked Nathaniel in the eyes, closing the distance between them. “Sell her off? What do you mean by that? She ran away at night.”
His friend pulled back a little. “…Ran away you say?”
“Yes, she left the night you set off to find Darpley. Who told you I had sent her away?”
“So you didn’t send her away to— Colin, do you know where Anna is?”
Colin careened over the desk and grabbed at the lapels of Nathaniel’s overcoat. “Bloody hell Nathaniel, get to the point! What do you know man!”
Nathaniel made a calming gesture. “Please sit. I have to explain some things to you. Knowing you, you would charge out of here without thought and return with blood on your hands.”
Colin sat, but his body was tensed all over.
Nathaniel began again. “My search for Darpley led me to his estate in Bath, and although I did not find him, I saw Anna through one of the windows.”
Colin bolted to his feet again, bracing his hands on his desk. “How is she?”
“I do not know. I thought you had finally sent her away to stay with Catherine, or even worse, abandoned her fate to Hunter, but when I tried to enter the manor, the butler told me there was no one in residence. That immediately raised my suspicions and I had to travel back here quickly to know what exactly was happening.”
Hope rose inside him, and he felt as though his life was being restored. Colin then explained everything to Nathaniel before they prepared to depart for Bath. He sent for Frobisher and asked him to follow them, alongside another man of the law.
Chapter 37
I now know what the devil’s face looks like. He wears the face of my parents to disguise himself.
“Come in!” Anna called at the knock on her bedchamber door, thinking it was a maid. She had refused to leave the room after discovering that her mother had lied to her and that her sister was not coming. Besides, she was too weak to go anywhere and was forced to simply sit on her bed most days.
This sickness, whatever it was, was eating her, and she could barely take twenty steps without needing to rest.
Elliot walked in when the door opened, with Jemina behind him. Anna instinctively shrunk back into the cushion of the sofa she was sitting on, feeling fear and anger like never before. Her mother had asked her to leave a prison, but it had been a trick to lure her into the true prison. She could see that now.
“Anna, my dear,” her father smiled.
“What do you want from me?”
He looked at her incredulously. “Anna, I have not seen you since the day you left us to marry Ashden, and you ask me what I want from you?”
“Do not lie to me. I am not a child, nor am I insane. Do you think that I do not know that Mama has been lying to me since I arrived? First, that Catherine would be here, and then that my pain will go away.”
He took a step toward her, and she raised a hand to stop him. “Do not come close to me. I no longer believe that you truly have changed.” She looked from her father’s frowning face to her mother’s.
“Anna, everything we do is because we love you. Catherine is here now, but you know that she is fond of travel, and she was journeying across England with her friends.”
“Catherine is here? Why did Mama not tell me that all this while?” Anna demanded.
“I did not want you to think that she had abandoned you,” Jemina responded. “Given your delicate constitution,” she added.
“I do not have a delicate constitution,” Anna argued, but shewasill, and she could not leave this bedchamber.
Elliot spoke again. “Anna, I beg your forgiveness. I do not know what else I can do to make you believe my earnestness.”
She thought he sounded sincere, but a strange fog had taken residence in her mind recently, and she sometimes lost the sense of what was real, and what was not. Like seeing Nathaniel, or hearing Colin’s voice this morning. If she closed her eyes, she could sometimes feel him beside her. Perhaps her father was honest, and perhaps they had truly changed and she was resisting them.
Her mother sat beside her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “We have something for you to sign,” she said.
“What?” Anna pulled away from her. “What do you want me to sign?”
Jemina sighed. “You might have left your husband but he is not a free man. If you sign the annulment papers, you will release him to marry a woman who could bear a child for him. You may also remarry if you wish—"
