“...What terms did he offer you?”
“Terms?”
“Contractual terms—what was expected of both parties, how children of the relationship will be provided for, and what would constitute a parting gift—that sort of thing.”
Hera blinked.
“Contracts are often drawn up when this sort of relationship is established,” Penelope explained.
“He didn’t offer a contract,” she said faintly, “and I hadn’t the experience to ask. Even if I had known enough about the law to seek its protection, I trusted him. He seemed...deeply in earnest. And he was kind...tomeat least. And at first.”
The Duchess of Ashbey reached out and covered her hand. “Again, you are too generous—especially considering what followed.”
Hera felt her heartbeat spike. “That, of course, I can never forgive him for.”
Pen touched her shoulder. “What happened?”
“Everything changed when I told him I was increasing. ‘I will conceal you,’ he said...” She took a halting breath. “‘And when the time comes, I will make sure we are well-rid of the problem. Babies die all the time.No one asks any questions, especially of people like me.’”
She shuddered with the same chill his words had unleashed, a chill as cold and as terrifying as Karl’s resolute and coolly calculating gaze.
She’d seen, with sudden horror, that, while he’d acted the part of a gentle lover, the prince was wholly disconnected, not just from decency, but from humanity.
“Little things I’d noticed about him but long denied, took on a new, sinister meaning. The brisque, distant and sometimes demeaning way the treated his own children, for instance, which he’d falsely explained away as a manifestation of his grief.”
He'd hated the wife his father had chosen for him, she later learned.
“I was scared for the potential life growing inside of me. So, when Karl went away to attend an event at the Royal Pavilion, I gathered up what I could carry, and I cast myself on my sister-in-law’s mercy. She was, of course, disinclined to shame my brother or their household by taking me in, but she agreed to arrange for me to be admitted to a lying-in hospital under a false name, as if I had, indeed, been her servant.”
Penelopetsked. “Your brother was content with his plan?”
Hera shook her head. “Since my brother barely tolerated me when I was respectable—blood will show, he always said—my sister-in-law decided against telling him the whole. When my father married my mother—his second wife—she was already carrying me. She was more than thirty years my father’s junior and not of his class. My half-brother was appalled, and my mother, disowned by her own family—who were, I believe, London merchants, although I never knew them.”
“Then you were quite alone,” Penelope said.
Hera nodded. “But luckier than most, in some ways. The matron of the lying-in hospital helped me petition the Foundling Hospital to take my daughter, which she needn’t have done. And the steward at the Foundling Hospital, in turn, found me a position with the duchess.”
“Last year, as you know, I became a patron of the Foundling Hospital,” the Duchess of Ashbey reminded Penelope. “We needed a nursemaid, and I asked the steward if he knew of any unfortunate woman he could recommend.”
Unfortunate woman.
Hera hated the expression. Circumstance had rendered her without external resource, but she had fortitude and resilience. She’d outwitted a prince and saved her daughter’s life, had she not?
She may have found herself with few good options, but she did not, and never would, think of herself asunfortunate.
No.
She’d had a choice. Perhaps, as Penelope had suggested, a choice between bad options, but a choice, nonetheless.
“When I went to speak privately with Mrs. Montrose,” the duchess continued, “she trusted me with the details of her story—and her deep desire to be reunited with her daughter if she had the means. Given my own history, I found myself quite moved. But since she’d already given over the child, a strict process had to be followed.”
“I must prove to the board of directors I havereformed,” Hera explained. “And I must prove I can care for Annis.”
“I’ve done everything in my power to help,” the duchess added. “But the application process is lengthy, and even I could not persuade the directors to make an exception. But they agreed that eight months in my employ should be enough for me to truthfully speak to Hera’s character—which I intend to do. The vote will take place soon—a few weeks hence, I’m told.”
“I am so close, but now...I just do not know what to do.”
“What makes you think Karl is the one looking for you?” Penelope asked.
