John very much wanted to know what the old nurse had told her, but he also knew that the hallway of this strange farmhouse was not a place for their discussion. So, he offered her his arm and they made their way out of the farmhouse, bidding Mrs. Jennings a quick farewell in the entryway.
Only once they had returned to the carriage did John turn to her. “Did you find anything of use?”
Catherine didn’t respond, looking down at her hands. He studied her face. She looked worried, perturbed, and he wanted to fold her in his arms, to heal whatever ailed her. He wanted to tell her that, no matter what, everything would work out. Unfortunately, that would be a lie. He could give no such assurances. He was no less harrowed by his circumstances than he had been two days ago and he very much hoped that she had discovered valuable information.
“Please, tell me everything she said.”
She pressed her hands to her face and then withdrew them.
“When Mary left her, she went back to Edington.” She spoke as if measuring each word carefully.
“When Mary Forster left Lulworth? She went back to Edington?”
Catherine nodded.
“Then we’re right to return ourselves.” He was relieved that his initial plan had been sound.
“She must have told someone in Edington she was coming back,” Catherine continued. “Maybe one of her friends or maybe even…”
She trailed off, still looking down at her clasped hands.
And then her implication dawned on him. “My father? Why would she have told him?”
Catherine bit her lip. And then heknewshe had learned something she didn’t want to tell him.
“Whatever it is, just tell me.” He didn’t like the frustration dripping from his own voice, but he hated the anticipation.
She nodded, swallowing hard.
“It was very strange speaking with Martha, because it was the first time anyone has ever spoken to me as an adult about my family. I mean,reallyspoken to me about them, not just a member of thetonsniping about the scandal.”
John winced.Or me,he thought,using the scandal to insult her to her face. Wanting to convey his contrition, he took hold of her hand. She didn’t evade his touch. Instead, she grasped back.Was this what friends did?He found he didn’t know the answer.
“It wasn’t that she said anything revelatory,” Catherine continued. Now he could hear the recent tears in her voice. “But the difference was in the details. She gave me this perspective on my family I had been too young to grasp at the time.”
She paused again, as if lost in thought, then she shook her head.
“Anyway, she told me something about Mary and your father that I had never considered before. She described what happened as—” she looked up at him “—well, she said, that they loved each other.”
John was stunned.Love?The word filled him with an old rage, the rage he had felt as a child, when he hadn’t understood why his father would have betrayed him and his mother.
“Bollocks. Bloody mad.”
Catherine shook her head but she still clasped his hand.
“It was strange. I had never heard that. Not from my father, certainly—nor in my years in society, either.” She took a deep breath. “When it happened, my father was enraged, destroyed. You have to understand—he relied on my aunt for everything. He wasn’t a strong man. He had been weakened by the death of my mother. She died giving birth to me. And my aunt stepped in, I think, and took care of him—of us. He never spoke of your father except as an enemy. A monster. And he was only alive for a year after Mary’s disappearance. It had never occurred to me that the duke and Mary might have loved each other.”
He had never considered it either. He had assumed that what had happened that afternoon had been a mad moment of lust, that Mary Forster had seduced his father in an instant, and that their lives had come tumbling down from this one mistake. Well, two mistakes—his father’s and his own.
“I don’t understand. I always thought that they just—that that was the only time.”
“Me too. But I think that we should at least consider that, from what Martha said, they had a relationship. That it might have been more complicated.”
John cursed under his breath. He hated thinking of his father and Mary Forster ensconced in some kind of sordid love story.
“My father never spoke of your aunt. Or the scandal—at all.”
Catherine looked up at him in surprise. “He never saidanythingof it?”
