“You knew,” he said.
“No.” She shook her head, adamant. “Robin…Mr. Hastings, I did not know. You must believe me.”
“Longleigh had me arrested for theft and assault on a peer.”
She needed to sit before her knees gave out. Tilly moved without even realizing where she was going or how she found herself where she arrived, her bottom thudding into a chaise longue. He followed her, crowding her with his body as he lowered himself to the cushion at her side.
“Look at me,” he said.
She was not sure she could. Prison? Longleigh had falsely accused his own son of stealing and attacking him, had seen him arrested and sent away? How to make sense of this? Of what had happened?
All the time she had spent looking for him…the investigators she had hired…she had never dreamt he might have been in prison by Longleigh’s doing. As the days had turned into weeks and then months and finally over a year without word, she had come to believe Robin dead.
“Look at me,” he said again, his baritone resonating with exigence. “Look me in the eye, damn you, and tell me you did not have a part in Longleigh’s bloody scheme to send me to that misbegotten hellhole.”
She did as he asked, turning to face him. And suddenly, all her anger and confusion at his deception fell away. Her heart beat fast. So fast. Here was the face of the man she loved. Hardened and gaunt, but still him. What had he endured, to make him so?
“I had no part in it,” she said. “I swear. I would never have hurt you. I searched for you when you disappeared. I hired detectives. I looked and looked. I begged with Longleigh to tell me the truth. All I had was a letter long after you disappeared, which I doubted very much had been from you, claiming you had gone to New York and that you wished me well.”
Her voice broke on the last word as she recalled receiving the letter, the hope that had instantly buoyed inside her, only to be dashed at its contents. She had known Robin would not leave her without word, that he would not simply disappear. But she had been helpless to find him.
“The ring you gave me,” he said suddenly.
She thought of the golden lion’s head, the sapphires she’d had commissioned for their resemblance to his eyes. “I remember it.”
“The cufflinks, the pocket watch, too. How would he have known about them if it had not been planned by the two of you?”
“Is that what he claimed you had stolen?” she asked, a sinking sense of understanding dawning over her.
“You know it is.”
“I did not know. I was not aware he claimed you had stolen anything.” Somehow, it was important for him to understand that. Regardless of the lies he had told her and what it meant—heavens, she could not think of that now. She needed him to understand that she would never have callously planted evidence upon him that would send him to prison. “I had no notion of any of what you are telling me now. I knew nothing of your arrest. All I knew was that one day you were here, and the next, gone.”
She thought back to Longleigh’s initial arrival in London. He had been delayed in Liverpool by some damage which had occurred to his yacht, and he had failed to reach them for another few weeks. But when he had returned, he had been eerily calm.
She expected he had been plotting all along. Plotting something terrible. Watching her expenditures. Waiting for the right moment to strike.
“I do not believe you.”
His words tore her from her thoughts. His disbelief was devastating, but not nearly as devastating as his revelation had been. Prison. He had been imprisoned.
“Is that how you were injured?” she asked. “Your leg.”
His jaw hardened. “Would you like the details, Duchess?”
No. The thought made her ill, but she knew she had to.
“Yes. Please. I want to understand what happened to you.”
“I was tried for the crimes I did not commit and found guilty. For my sins, I was sent to a prison called Dunsworth. Have you heard of it?”
“No.” She swallowed down the bile rising in her throat.
“Dunsworth practices the separate system. All the prisoners there are forbidden from speaking. They gave us numbers instead of names, and when they allowed us to move about the yard, we could only do so if we wore peaks to shield our faces. We were to have no identity, every part of our humanity stripped from us.”
Tears were pouring down her cheeks. She dashed at them with the back of her hand. “No.”
She did not know why she repeated the denial. It would not change a word he had spoken.
