“Why not?”
“He gave me you.”
A small frown pinched Lucy’s mouth and released. “That’s something you must say, isn’t it?”
“Can I speak freely?”
“It’s the only way to speak,” Lucy said with her characteristic certainty.
Olivia smiled for the first time in days. “Now, that is something the Lord Percival I knew would have said. In some ways, you’re very like him.”
Lucy shook her head, protest in her eyes. “I don’t want to be like him.”
“He had some bad qualities, your father, but he had some good ones, too,” Olivia continued. “He was open. He spoke his mind. He loved to laugh.” She reached across the table and squeezed Lucy’s hand. “You’re allowed to embrace the good. You won’t be betraying me, Lulu. It’s your choice to open that letter or not, to forgive or not, but sometimes it hurts the person withholding forgiveness worse. It can turn into the sort of hate that eats away at a person.”
“Have you forgiven him?”
“Yes,” Olivia said, surprised that she meant it with every fiber of her being.
Lucy turned the missive over in her hands a few times before slipping it inside her book. A bittersweet joy sprang up inside Olivia, even as a thread of misgiving ribboned through it. Percy had better prove worthy of her.
A movement outside the front bow window caught Lucy’s attention. “Drummond has arrived.”
“I’ll be here when you come home.”
A month ago, Olivia had stopped picking up Lucy from school. She simply hadn’t been able to brave it, not since Jake was there in mornings and afternoons. Further, it had been hard to miss the steady increase in the number of mothers, all impeccably groomed and polished, personally seeing their daughters off to school and crowding the corridors. Motherly concern for the safe passage of their daughters was at an all-time high at The Progressive School for Young Ladies and the Education of Their Minds.
Surely, it had naught to do with the recently admitted Radclyffe family.
Ha. One mother had run smack into a doorjamb whilst craning her neck for a glimpse of him. The mothers simply couldn’t keep their eyes off him.
“Oh, Mum,” Lucy called out from the doorway, snapping Olivia back into the present, “may I invite Miss Radclyffe for a visit this evening?”
Olivia’s heart stomped out a hard thud in her chest, even as she willed the rest of her body to remain very, very still. “Do you have a project together?”
“Oh, nothing to do with school.” Lucy pulled a disgusted face. “I’ve told her about our rooftop garden, and she would like to observe the sky from up there tonight.”
Sweat slicked Olivia’s palm. Another response she couldn’t control. She could, however, continue to hold herself very, very still. “Of course.”
“Excellent.” Lucy threw her a quick smile and dashed off toward her day, calling out over her shoulder, “And please ask Cook to bake up a batch of her scrumptious shortbread.”
The front door slammed shut, and Olivia sagged into her chair. That name,Radclyffe, was like a long, razor-sharp sword that stabbed through to the hilt every time she heard it. Over time, mayhap its blade would dull and shorten to a more manageable state. A short dagger could be handled. And then, perhaps, someday she would feel nothing at all when she heard the name Radclyffe.
Her stomach twisted. That day hadn’t come. If their lives continued to be intertwined through their daughters’ friendship, it would inevitably happen, correct?
Of course, it would. It must.
She clenched her fists at her sides and allowed the nails to dig in deep. One sort of pain could replace another and draw her more fully into the present. Lucy hadn’t been wrong. Lately, shewaseverywhere and nowhere at once.
Since the day after the Duke’s ball, she’d filled every moment of every day with one task just completed, another task to complete. She couldn’t remember a time in her life when she’d been more occupied, both physically and mentally. After all, she had a new house and a new life. A life she’d striven tooth and nail to achieve. A life that offered freedom, independence, security, predictability. Everything she’d wanted, she’d gained. She’d secured the predictable life cycle of an English rose.
And if in the quiet of the night, when the house fell silent and only the whisper of her breath broke through the stillness, her mind protested that this life felt empty and lonely, that she’d never felt so empty and lonely, she rolled onto her side and began compiling mental lists for the next day’s tasks.
“My lady,” she heard as if from a very far distance. She glanced up to find her butler, Wilkins, standing in the doorway not ten feet away. “His Grace, the Duke of Arundel, has arrived.”
Olivia’s spirits experienced an immediate lift, and she pushed away from the table. With a somewhat renewed spring in her step, she rushed to the foyer and found the Duke taking in the room.
“This house suits you, my dear.” His eye followed the coiled staircase up to the skylight, bright and cheery, even on a gray and dank day like today. “I can see why you chose it.”
