“About that time…in Scotland.”
Lena’s breath caught. She knew exactly what he meant. “Almost nine years ago…”
“The accident,” Theo continued. “If Papa hadn’t found you…if he hadn’t treated you…”
“…I would have died,” she finished, her voice barely audible.
“You were almost dead, Mama. You were unresponsive for weeks. Then, somehow, you woke up.”
Lena gently touched his cheek. “And yours was the first face I saw.” A small smile tugged at her lips. “You were such a cheeky twelve-year-old.”
Theo covered her hand with his. “But you couldn’t remember anything. Not your name, not where you came from. That’s why Papa gave you a name: Helena. When no one came to claim you, Papa took you in. You became our mama. You returned the happiness to us that we’d lost when my mother died. We were—we stillare—happy.”
“Yes,” she whispered, forcing a smile as tears welled in her eyes. “I am your mama.” Her voice grew firmer. “And I wouldn’t want to be anyone else.”
Fear gnawed at her heart—the fear of losingeverything, of her family crumbling away, of the Duke who threatened to take it all from her. Already, the foundations of her life were shaking, the walls of her sanctuary cracking.
She shivered.
Theo swallowed hard. “When you saw them today—those people who might be your old family—you didn’t remember anything? Didn’t you feel anything? Nothing at all?”
Lena hesitated, then shook her head. “No. I have no memories of being a duchess. He could have been a shoemaker claiming me as his wife, and it would have meant the same to me.”
“But the birthmark…not only one, but two of them, and there were three people who recognized you, who claimed you. And Hecki…Mama, you can’t just ignore all that.”
A dull ache began to throb in her temples.
“I want to ignore it,” she whispered.
“They were your family first,” he pressed on. “They lost you. All those years, they thought you were dead.”
The silence between them grew heavy, like a weight neither could lift.
Then he spoke again, mercilessly. “They loved you too, Mama. Maybe as much as we love you now. Maybe even more.”
Her hand trembled as she raised it, as if to ward off his words which were a dagger to her heart.
“What will you do now?” Theo’s question hung in the air.
She looked at him, her eyes filled with helplessness. “I don’t know.” Her voice broke. “I simply don’t know.”
The best thing,Lena decided the next morning, was to keep it a secret. If she could just ignore it, perhaps it would fade away, lost in the routine of daily life. The faster she forgot all about this and moved on with her life, the better. The Duke would disappear, together with his claim on her and Hector, and she could live happily ever after with her family. She vowed that nothing—no one—would take her away from her children. Theo's words lingered at the edge of her mind, but she pushed them aside with determined resolve. She simply refused to think about it. That was the plan.
But this was Vienna—Metternich’s Vienna, to be precise—and it was permeated by a spy-network so dense that not a fly could pass through without being caught in its web. “One cannot sneeze without Prince Metternich hearing about it,” one visitor was said to have lamented. Thus it was highly unlikely that the Duke of Aldingbourne’s personal visit to a most unfashionable suburb of Vienna, namely that of the General Hospital—complete with a morgue and a lunatic asylum—would go unnoticed.
“So he finally found hisway there,” Baron von Hager, head of the secret police, commented, as he read the dépêche through his monocle. “Took a while longer than I thought it would. What did they discuss?”
Agent August had to confess that he did not know.
Hager threw down the missive impatiently. “More intelligence, Agent August. More intelligence! What are we paying you for?”
Agent August raced back to the Arenheim home, heels clicking against the cobblestones. He was now sitting at the kitchen table, to which he had invited himself. He had knocked at the kitchen door and found Frau Arenheim furiously making plum dumplings.
“Well?” he asked.
Lena held a plate with dumplings under his nose. “Here, have some. They really are quite good.”
August pushed the plate aside. “You have to tell us what he was doing here for an entire two hours and fifteen minutes. What did he say, wear, do, and eat?”
