“No. We never spoke of it.”
It only festered beneath the surface,he added mentally,slowly poisoning our relationship until there was nothing left except the occasional explosive row.
“Perhaps he should have, but he didn’t.”
“Martha also said that Mary was with her for a long time—almost six months.”
“She lived with the cottagers for all that time?”
“Apparently.” With this word, she dropped his hand. “I just don’t know what it all means.”
“Neither do I.”
“But I think we are right to go back to Edington.”
He nodded, his mind still working through these new complications.
“I can visit her friends and see if any of them knew about her movements. And it occurs to me that we should look through your father’s papers. Does he have any correspondence that he left behind?”
“I am not sure.” He thought of the study where everything went wrong, where he still hated to be. He had hardly entered the study at Edington Hall since that day all those years ago. “I am sure he must have something of the sort. He died quite suddenly. Fever. It took him in days. And yet he still had time to organize the most infernal will ever created. Typical, for my father.”
He had let his anger leach into his words. He looked at Catherine, expecting her to gloat, to declare she had been right about his father’s character.
Instead, her expression was neutral. He saw no triumph in her expression.
“We should look through his papers. I think it’s most likely that she came back to see him.”
He nodded to show his assent. He dreaded the horrors his father’s old papers would dredge up but he also knew he had no choice.
John looked out the window at the countryside, lost in thought as the fences and hedgerows trundled by, running over this new information in his mind. At first blush, he felt repulsion at the prospect that his father hadlovedMary Forster, that their affair had been ongoing. His father had, yet again, found a way to sink below his already abysmal expectations.
He had always assumed Mary Forster had seduced his father for power. Perhaps, she had hoped that, as a duke’s mistress, she would have access to certain favors and luxuries. She was an unmarried woman of an old and revered but not particularly rich family. The Forsters had been among the gentry but a liaison with his father would have offered Mary more. It hadn’t occurred to him that their relationship may have extended beyond the bounds of that one party, of that one moment of weakness on his father’s part, but now he felt ridiculous that he had never considered the prospect. He felt ill, thinking of it. How much more didn’t he know? And how much more would he find out before he solved his father’s last, horrible riddle?
John closed his eyes, trying to block out these thoughts, but he was unsuccessful.
Then, a single silver lining twisted into view. He had always seen his stumbling across his father and Mary Forster at that party as a horrible quirk of fate. How unlucky, he had thought many times, for him to reveal them at the exact moment they committed the sin that ruined all of their lives. If his father had been carrying on an ongoing affair with Mary Forster, it softened his own role. They could have been exposed at any time, before or after his mistake. In that case, he bore less culpability. This possibility made him hate himself a little bit less.
Catherine gasped beside him. His eyes flew open, suspecting danger, but instead she was pointing towards the sea.
“Pray, let’s stop. We must stop here.”
They were on the road back to town, which ran by the ocean, and they could see the cliffs and the glinting water from the carriage. The gray sky made the seascape look forbidding and, to his eye, not particularly inviting.
“Catherine,” he said, caught off guard by her sudden change of demeanor. “I really—”
He was going to tell her that he didn’t care to leave the carriage, not in his state of mind. This news about his father had put him in a foul mood.
But he looked at her face and realized he couldn’t refuse her. Her eyes were so lit up that they looked a steady, magnificent blue. She looked so excited and so beautiful that, for a moment, he couldn’t breathe.
He tapped on the ceiling of the carriage and Marcel came to a stop.
“All right. Just for a moment.”
Catherine beamed at him and grabbed his hand, forcing him to nearly bound out of the carriage.
She pulled him in a quick trot towards the edge of the cliff. As he looked over at Catherine he saw how the breeze animated her features and burnished her skin. He felt his sorrow about his father subside a few degrees. As they stood by the edge, she smiled up at him, and—for a moment—he forgot who he was, who she was, and could think only of the beauty of the spot and the woman beside him.
“There!” She pointed and he saw a strange formation. It was a giant mass of rock that jutted out into the sea, but a hole had been worn through it. As if a door had been cut out of the stone.
