“How much would bring back the estate?” Catherine asked, softly.
“Catherine,” Lady Wethersby said. “You earned that, I can’t let you—I could never.”
“Wethersby Park is my home, too, you said. Why wouldn’t I want to save my home?”
Lady Wethersby said nothing.
“How much?” Catherine repeated.
“Five thousand pounds would restore us to our country estate. And let us keep these quarters in town.”
“We can rent more fashionable lodgings than these,” Catherine said, quickly, not wanting Lady Wethersby and Ariel to feel any deprivation.
“No, I have grown fond of the place,” Lady Wethersby said, looking around. “Particularly now that it is has been properly spruced.”
“It ishome, Catherine,” Ariel said, with a tone of chastisement. “Halston Place has always been there for us. We shan’t abandon our old friends when we grow great.”
“Very well,” she said with a laugh, “Wethersby Park and Halston Place it is.”
She reached out and held the hands of her only real family members. At least, she thought, this entire journey hadn’t been for naught. She had done it. She had saved them.
“I’ll write the solicitor tomorrow,” Lady Wethersby said, her voice shaking, and Catherine was, despite her misery, more than a little happy. She was surprised how well the emotions could coexist.
After Ariel and Lady Wethersby showed her to her new bedchamber—redone with new furnishings and paint—they left her to sleep. She was exhausted from her journey and yet she couldn’t lose consciousness.
She kept thinking about John.
Would he come after her? she thought. He had never said he loved her, but she knew he cared about her and had truly wanted her for his wife. She hated to think that he would just let her go.
She heard a knock on the door and rose to answer it.
Lady Wethersby stood in the hall.
When Catherine saw the concerned look on her face, alight with maternal anxiety, the very look she had hoped to see on her aunt’s face back at that quaint little farmhouse, she burst into tears for the second time that day.
Lady Wethersby hugged her close and patted her on the back.
“There, there, my fine girl. My brave girl.”
Catherine let herself sob into her shoulder until she didn’t have any more tears.
Then, Lady Wethersby drew back and said, “May I come in?”
Catherine nodded and they both sat down on her bed.
“What happened with the Duke of Edington, my dear?” Lady Wethersby began. “If you don’t find it an intrusive question.”
Catherine looked at Lady Wethersby quizzically. How did she know? She supposed she was a bit emotional for someone who had just come back from a trip writing a history book for profit, but she still didn’t understand how Lady Wethersbyknew. She had only written once from Edington. After all, she had only been gone for a little over two weeks.
“My dear, you didn’t expect me to believe that story about preparing a history for his betrothed, did you?”
Catherine felt a blush steal across her cheeks. Shehadexpected Lady Wethersby to believe it.
“I knew there was something more to the story from the beginning, but I didn’t want to bother you with having to explain it, when I knew you were just trying to protect us. And then my old friend Julia Trilling wrote and said that you had seen her. And that you were asking after your aunt.
“I won’t ask you to explain it all to me,” Lady Wethersby continued, “but I want to make sure that you are all right. Did he hurt you, my dear?”
Catherine asked herself why she wasn’t telling the full truth to the one person who had always been there for her. Lady Wethersby had been more like a mother, more like a parent to her than anyone else in her life, at least in the past seventeen years. Even when life became difficult for Lady Wethersby, she had never left Catherine behind. She had always been there.
