I wrote to him. I do not know what I hoped for—perhaps forgiveness, or proof that he had found happiness. The reply came instead from his brother, now the Duke. My Edward is gone. He ended his life not long after our wedding.
His brother enclosed the letter Edward left when his family found him hanging from his attic rafters. He forgave me. He wished me well. He wrote that he never blamed me… yet could not go on living in a world where I no longer loved him.
Even now, I cannot forgive myself.
I traded love for ambition, and you traded yours for obligation, and neither of us has known a day’s peace since.
I do not expect your pity, only your understanding. I think, perhaps, you of all people might grant me that. You were honest with me once, and I despised you for it. Now I see it was the only kindness I was ever shown.
Please—if it is within your power—let me be buried somewhere with peace, if not forgiveness. I cannot carry on living in a world where he no longer exists.
—Victoria
William closed his eyes, pressing the heels of his hands hard against them. Tears stung—hot, unwelcome—but he let them fall. He had not wept in years, not since the night he found his and Violet’s carved names gouged from the old oak and her locket buried beneath it.
Victoria had been many things—proud, cutting, his mother’s mirror in more ways than she ever understood—but she had been trapped too. Shaped by the same ruthless expectations that had caged him. He had never cared to look—never cared to see her.
He swallowed hard. His voice was a rasp when he spoke into the empty room—
“God forgive us both.”
He strode to the door, threw it open, and called down the corridor—
“Harrington!”
The young secretary whose desk stood at the end of the hallway appeared almost at once. “My lord?”
“Send for the courier. I have letters that must go out today. At once.”
Harrington nodded and hurried away.
William returned to his desk, hands still unsteady, and pulled a fresh sheet of stationery toward him.
He did not need to think.
The words came with clarity he had not known in years.
To Her Majesty’s Private Secretary—
A request for immediate leave.
It is time I returned home...
Chapter Twenty-Three
The fire had burned down to a low bed of embers, its gentle warmth a welcome comfort on this cooler spring day.Violet sat on the small settee near the hearth with her mending basket beside her, a sock turned inside out over her fingers, the needle dipping and rising, catching the frayed wool back into something whole.
On the rug before the fire, Lily sat cross-legged, a tumble of curls framing her small face, utterly absorbed in the cat batting at a blue ribbon she had pulled from her own hair. A string of giggles spilled from her at Daisy’s antics.
“Daisy, come back!” Lily announced, abandoning the ribbon as Daisy bolted toward a ball of yarn near the leg of a chair. The cat seized it and darted away triumphantly. Lily squealed and scrambled after her.
There had been a time the cottage had known only despair—when Violet had first arrived and doubted she could go on. Now it held the easy sounds of life—Lily’s laughter, Daisy’s light paws, the soft rustle of the room around them.
She bit a loose bit of thread, unwilling to bother getting up for the scissors she knew sat on the table, and smoothed the mended heel before folding the sock into its pair. Five years had slipped between the girl she had been when she first crossed this threshold and the woman setting her needle down now. Five years since she’d had the great fortune to meet Mrs. Pembroke—warm, practical, and steadfast—whohad said with such certainty, “You won’t be alone here, Violet. Not in this town.” At the time, Violet had been too heartsick to believe her.
But she had been wrong. In the years that followed, those words had proven themselves again and again—through neighbours who offered quiet kindness, friendships that formed gently, and a village that, if it did not always know her story, never made her feel she stood apart.
Mrs. Grey. That was the name Lady Ashford had handed to the Pembrokes in place of her own—a convenient identity to settle her neatly out of sight.
