“I did what I told you I was going to do when I turned eighteen. I told Mr. Bowker to find her. That money is hers. Dad left it to her.”
Agnes seemed to deflate before Emmy. Where a minute earlier there had been a fiery warrior, now there was a beggar woman. The change in her was that remarkable.
“Colin, how could you do such a thing?”
Emmy could feel the pain behind her words, the sense of betrayal.
“Because it was the right thing to do. You know it is.”
The man turned to Emmy and put out his hand. She shook it slowly and with little enthusiasm, she was still so astonished. “I’m Colin Thorne. Your half brother.”
Agnes winced and turned her face away, as though she could no longer bear the sight of Emmy in her house.
Emmy looked from one to the other, from the half brother she didn’t know she had who’d risked his mother’s wrath to see that she was paid in full, to the wronged woman who’d learned too late that her husband had been unfaithful to her. And then there was Emmy in the middle, the whore’s daughter. The ignorant child who couldn’t see where the good things her mother had had came from, or rather, who chose not to.
Emmeline.
The girl she used to be.
She reached into her handbag, and closed her fingers around the check that had been made out to Emmeline Downtree.
Emmy pulled it out, laid it on the table by her teacup, and stood.
She started to walk away from the man who wanted her compensated and the woman who wished she had never been born. It was several seconds before either one of them realized Emmy was leaving them and their money.
Colin came after her. “Wait, Miss Downtree! Wait.”
But Emmy did not wait.
“Miss Downtree!”
Her hand was at the door when Colin reached her. He had the envelope in his hand.
“It’s yours. He wanted you to have it.”
Emmy looked at the envelope. Such a thin little thing to have caused such grief today.
“But that’s not whatIwanted,” she said.
And she left him standing there with the envelope in his hand, his fingers covering the wordEmmelinescrawled across the front in Mr. Bowker’s practiced script.
Thirty-two
OUTSIDEthe Thorne mansion, the driver stood next to the vehicle as if he’d been told Emmy would only be a short while.
He snapped to action when Emmy emerged from the house and opened the car door for her. Emmy would have walked away from that place on her own two legs, but she had no idea where she was. She got inside.
“Paddington, miss?” the driver said when he was also back inside the vehicle.
Emmy did not want to go back to Thistle House right then. Not as Emmeline, and that was who she firmly was as she stepped out of the Thorne home slathered in recriminations. She wanted more than anything to go to Primrose and fall asleep on the heap of bridal gowns, and never open her eyes again.
She wanted to wake up in the arms of the angels andhave them tell her she was worthy of love—to give it and to have it given to her.
But there was no place like that in London. Not for her.
Except perhaps...
“The Savoy,” she said.
