He smiled despite his pain.
“Nine thousand five hundred, Lawson, actually,” he said. “To Miss Forster.”
Lawson gave him the sure nod that meant it would get done.
John expected him to depart, but he stayed on the threshold.
“Your father requested that I give Mary Forster a letter from himself when I saw her,” Lawson said. “I suspect the letter was almost as important as the annuity itself.”
Two weeks ago, John would have raged at the solicitor and told him that he better not deliver that letter. Now, he found it difficult to care. His father had been a complicated man who had made many mistakes. He thought of Catherine, with her haunting blue-black eyes and her full breasts and her strange hair like white lightning and her arcane stories and her quiet, thoughtful intelligence, and he could understand, now that he feared that he had lost her, why a man might go to such lengths to try and win his love back.
His mother hadn’t deserved what she had encountered in her marriage. She had been a lovely, good woman in her own right. He was still angry with his father, but he wasn’t going to let that anger rule his life. Not when he had to go to London and see Catherine. Once he was done with Lawson, he was going to have Marcel saddle the horses. He would search the whole city if necessary.
“Very well,” he said to Lawson.
The man nodded and John rose to see him out, regretting his harsh words to Lawson in the past.
But when he stood, the room swayed. He found himself on the floor.
“Your Grace?”
Mr. Lawson was over him and then so was Mrs. Morrison.
And then everything went black.
*
The next timehe came to consciousness, he was lying in his bed. He felt an immense pain in his head. He felt a pair of cool hands on his forehead and looked up and saw Henrietta.
“Shhh, brother. You must sleep.”
He must have fainted. It dawned on him that he must be quite ill. He thought of Henrietta’s fever and his father’s illness and he wondered if the same had overtaken him. From the pain in his head and the sweat all over his body, he suspected the answer was yes.
He tried to say, “Catherine,” to Henrietta. He needed to explain that he had to go and find her. He couldn’t lie here in bed when she was moving further and further away from him.
The words came out as nothing, a sort of groan, and he realized afresh that he was truly very ill.
“Sleep, John.” He felt a cool cloth on his forehead.
He needed to reach Catherine, but he felt himself dragged down into the hot soup of his own unconsciousness.
Before everything went black once more, he imagined her face before he had left her back at that quaint, poisonous farmhouse. He wished with everything he had that he could go back to that moment, that he had stayed beside her no matter what, that he had never followed their plan, but then he lost himself to darkness.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Catherine didn’t cryon the coach ride back to London. She was jammed into a packed carriage with a sundry bunch of equally miserable people for the two-day journey. But she barely noticed them. Her mind was whirring over John. She already missed him. It had nearly killed her to send that awful note. She had wanted more than anything to run back to him after learning all she had from her aunt. She had ached for him from the moment she got in the coach. She wanted nothing more than to bury herself in his arms and have them work together to solve their newest problem. She wished she could run her hands through his silky curls and take in his fresh scent of leather and soap. But she couldn’t do that to Henrietta. And she wouldn’t marry him with such a lie between them.
After all, Reginald’s lie had ruined his chances with Mary. Catherine would wager a large sum of money that her aunt’s current husband, Mr. Ryerson, knew her aunt’s true identity. A relationship founded on lies wouldn’t survive. It would just spawn pain. Like Reginald and Mary, like Lady Wethersby and Sir Francis. She couldn’t keep the secret of Henrietta’s birth from John and she also couldn’t tell him the truth. She couldn’t be the person who told him that Henrietta’s mother was the woman who had made swaths of his life a torment. That his sister’s mother was the woman who had helped to destroy his own so utterly.
Now, looking back at her interactions with Henrietta, she couldn’t help notice things that, at the time, had floated below the surface of her consciousness. She had felt a kinship for the girl almost immediately and, it turned out, for good reason. They were cousins. Other scraps of visual information flitted back to her: the way her smile curled in the sun, the texture of her hair, the shape of her nose. They recalled her aunt now, she could see. But, without being told, she would have never put it together.
As she looked out the window of the coach, Catherine’s thoughts drifted to the former duke, Reginald, whom she had resented for so long. As it happened, he had suffered for his crimes. It must have hurt him to watch his lovely young daughter grow up and remind him every day of the woman he had loved and lost. No wonder he was faded and aged before his time. No wonder he had stalked Edington Hall in his last years. She too would have been agitated and haunted. His own daughter had been the greatest ghost of all.
*
By the timeCatherine arrived back at Halston Place, it was evening. She went up the same drab steps and knocked on the door.
An unfamiliar and very young footman answered, beckoning her into the parlor.
