"I know exactly what I'm condemning him to. He told me himself, at great length, with extensive detail." Lydia felt a strange calm settling over her. This was the confrontation she had been dreading, and now that it was happening, it didn't seem so frightening after all. "The difference is, I've stopped believing that those things matter more than love."
"Love." Helena's voice dripped with contempt. "How touching. How naive. How utterly, devastatingly predictable. Every generation thinks its love is special. Every generationthinks that people can overcome the obstacles that have defeated everyone else. And every generation learns the same bitter lesson—that society is stronger than any individual, and love is no match for three centuries of expectation."
"Your sister thought differently."
Helena went very still. The colour drained from her face.
"Oh yes," Lydia continued. "I know about the letter. The one Catherine wrote before she died. The one begging whoever found it to choose differently. Not to make the same mistake she made." Lydia took a step closer to Helena. "You told me her story was about noble sacrifice. But it wasn't, was it? It was about regret. It was about a woman who let fear make her decisions and spent ten years wishing she'd been braver."
"You know nothing about my sister."
"I know she loved a scholar. I know she was going to run away with him. I know you helped your father stop her." Lydia's voice hardened. "I know you helped destroy her chance at happiness, and then you spent forty years convincing yourself it was the right thing to do."
The church was absolutely silent. Even the candles seemed to have stopped flickering, as if the whole world was holding its breath.
Helena's composure cracked. For just a moment, something raw and terrible showed in her eyes; grief, guilt, a wound that had never healed. The formidable viscountess suddenly looked like what she was, an old woman carrying a burden she had never been able to set down.
"She was going to ruin herself," Helena whispered. Her voice had lost its commanding edge. "She was going to throw everything away for a man who had nothing to offer her. I was trying to save her."
"You were trying to save yourself. You were trying to save the family name, the family honour, all the things you'd beentaught to value more than people." Lydia's voice softened, just slightly. She had expected to hate Helena. She had expected to feel nothing but anger toward the woman who had almost destroyed everything.
Instead, she felt something closer to pity.
"But she didn't want to be saved," Lydia continued. "She wanted to be loved. And you took that away from her."
"I did what I thought was right."
"And was it? Was it right, Helena?" Frederick stepped forward, his voice gentle but relentless. "Did she seem saved to you? Did she seem grateful, in those last years? Or did she seem like a woman who was dying by inches, trapped in a life she never chose?"
Helena's face crumpled.
It was shocking; the great Lady Helena Blackmore, whose composure had seemed unbreakable, suddenly looked old and tired and desperately sad. The armour she had worn for sixty years was cracking, revealing the wounded person beneath.
"She hated me," Helena said. Her voice was barely audible. "At the end. She wouldn't let me into her room. She said she couldn't bear to look at me. She said I had killed her—not her body, but everything that mattered. Everything that made life worth living."
"Helena…"
"I told myself she didn't mean it. That the fever had made her delirious. That once she recovered, she would understand why I had done what I did." Helena's voice broke. "But she didn't recover. And the last words she ever spoke to me were words of hate."
The silence stretched. Lydia found herself reaching out, almost involuntarily, toward this woman who had been her enemy.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry for what you lost. For what you've carried all these years."
Helena looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time without contempt or calculation, and something shifted in her expression.
"You mean that."
"I do."
"Why? After everything I've done. After I tried to destroy you, I tried to take away the man you love. Why would you be sorry for me?"
"Because you've been punishing yourself all those years. Because you've spent your whole life trying to convince yourself that you made the right choice, and it's never worked. Because…" Lydia paused, choosing her words carefully. "Because I understand what it's like to believe that sacrifice is the same as love. I almost made the same mistake you did."
"But you didn't. You came back."
"I almost didn't. If Thomas hadn't told me about the letter, if I hadn't realised what you had really done, I might have spent the rest of my life like Catherine. Full of regret. Wishing I had been braver."
Helena was quiet for a long moment. The church remained silent, every person present aware that they were witnessing something extraordinary; a moment of grace in the midst of conflict.
