He sanded and sealed it, pressing the wax with his signet ring—the same crest his father had once insisted symbolised constancy and honour. The metal cooled beneath his thumb, and he wondered when constancy had begun to feel so much like penance.
By afternoon, the courier had taken the letter. With nothing left to do, he went walking.
The grounds were neat, the garden paths still trimmed, the hedges clipped to precision, but there was no heart in it. Everything bore the look of maintenance done out of habit rather than pride, the motions of duty without care or joy.
Near the garden wall, a few wild violets clung stubbornly to the earth—her favourite bloom. He knelt, brushing aside a strand of grass. The soil was hard, the plants stunted and starved for light. Whether they had been neglected or simply left to wither, he could not tell. The sight hollowed him.
He passed the stables where Victoria’s body had been found. Only a handful of horses were kept there now; without a proper stable-master since Thomas Hayes’s departure, few were willing to endure the house’s bitterness for long. The doors swayed in the spring breeze, hinges groaning with each slow shift. The smell of hay and dust turned his stomach.
He kept walking, scarcely aware of direction—until the manor’s roofline vanished behind the slope and he looked up to find himself standing before the old Hayes cottage.
He had asked Hensley earlier in the week whether it was currently inhabited. The butler had shaken his head. “No, my lord. Not since the Hayes family lived there. With fewer hands about the estate, there’s been no call for it.”
He studied the cottage’s poor state. The shutters sagged, one hanging crooked on its hinge, and ivy had overgrown the lower walls, its tendrils clawing up the brick like a slow reclamation. The door yielded easily beneath his hand—unlocked, as though time itself had forgotten to guard the place.
Inside, the air was cool and faintly musty, thick with the scent of dust and old wood. He crossed the small sitting room and found a candle on the mantel, half-burned but still serviceable. When he lit it, the flame wavered in the draft that slipped through the windowpanes, throwing thin gold light over the walls.
He climbed the narrow stair. The larger of the two bedrooms must once have belonged to Edith and Thomas Hayes—simple but solid in its furnishings. Opposite it, a smaller room stood nearly bare: a narrow bed, an old trunk, a cracked washbasin. He imagined Violet sleeping there once, the laughter of her younger years echoing faintly against the walls.
On the washstand, beneath a film of dust, lay a faded blue ribbon—creased, frayed at one edge. He lifted it carefully between his fingers, the silk lighter than air. The color had once been her favorite; he remembered how often she had worn it—woven through her hair, at her wrist, or trimming the plain gowns she made graceful simply by wearing them. He had noticed it long before he’d admitted what that noticing meant.
For a long moment he simply looked at it, then closed his hand around it. Something so small, so unmistakably hers, struck deeper than he expected.
With care, William slipped the ribbon into his coat pocket beside the worn leather of his pocketbook. It felt wrong to leave it behind.
He stood a moment longer before turning and stepping back into the fading light.
Dr. Webb came the next day. The physician was courteous, brisk, and visibly uneasy in the oppressive stillness of the manor.
“Her ladyship’s condition declines,” he said delicately. “It is not a matter of treatment, my lord. Only of time.”
William nodded. “Has she pain?”
“Little enough now. She sleeps often.”
There was more the doctor did not say—the weary kindness in his eyes said enough. Consumption, or the wasting fevers that passed for grief in genteel circles—it hardly mattered. His mother was fading, and all his anger with her faded too, leaving only pity.
A few evenings earlier, during one of their rare meals together, she had spoken with unusual frankness. There had been no confusion in her manner—only the quiet resignation of a woman too tired to keep her secrets. Over the soup course, she told him the name the household had been instructed to use when Violet was sent away—Mrs. Grey. Later, with her wine untouched beside her, she explained that the cottage they purchased for her had stood just beyond the Ashford boundary, on land belonging to the neighbouring Hamilton estate. They had chosen the place simply because they knew of it—his father and the landowner, Baron Hamilton, had been acquaintances, and the village there was considered respectable, quiet, and far enough from London to avoid attention.
The name Hamilton lingered. William recalled a Nathaniel Hamilton vaguely from his school days—one of those boys he’d exchanged easy conversation with, though never closely. Still, it was enough to place him. It rooted the ghost of Violet’s life in a place he could reach.
That evening, standing at the study window, he watched the last light fade over the hills. Somewhere beyond them lay Violet’s village—quiet, unremarkable, and perhaps the only place left in England where hope still waited for him.
He thought of the letters now in his keeping—Violet’s words, her voice pressed into paper by a girl who had trusted him. And beside them lay his own letters to her, pages filled with longing and certainty, written by a man desperate for her to answer. Reading them now was an act of quiet punishment. He could trace the places where love had blurred into confusion, where her silence—engineered, not chosen—had driven him to listen to every voice but hers.
His hand tightened against the sill.
The Queen’s reply would take a week at least. When it came—when permission was granted—he would have no more excuses left.
He would remain in England.
He would claim his duty, and the Ashford name—but never again let either cost him his heart.
He would find Violet, and their child.
And he would try—at last—to make right what he had broken.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
