“Hardly alone,” Lady Eleanor said. “She is hardly a helpless child. She has been most insistent on her independence.”
“There are highwaymen,” he said. “Accidents. Illness. The distance…”
“You sailed to India at eighteen,” she cut in. “But your little Scotswoman cannot manage the Great North Road with a Wexford purse?”
“She is my wife,” he said, voice low and dangerous. “I am responsible for her safety.”
“She is a danger to herself,” the Dowager retorted. “She terrorizes your guests. She pries into wings you have clearly marked as forbidden. You should be grateful she has gone. The air in this house is easier without her.”
He stared at her. “You speak as if she broke into a bank, not rattled a door handle.”
“That door,” Lady Eleanor said sharply, “is not just any door. It leads to your father’s rooms. The things he left. The thoughts he did not share.”
He went very still.
“My father’s …” He swallowed. “I know his papers are stored there. I ordered them kept together.”
“There is more than papers,” she said. A curious, almost taunting light came into her eyes. “Did you never wonder what he thought of you? Truly?”
“I know what he thought,” Edward said, the old ache rising. “He thought I was a disappointment.”
“He told you so,” she said. “Often enough. But men do not always say what they mean. They write it. In diaries. In letters never sent.”
He stared. “Diaries?”
“One in particular,” she said. “I did not know of it until after he died. It was in the bottom drawer of his writing table. I … read it.”
“You never told me,” he said.
“What would it have served?” Her mouth twisted. “You hated him enough already. I did not see why I should complicate the neatness of your resentment.”
“What did he write?” The question escaped him before he could cage it.
“That,” she said, with sudden, wicked satisfaction, “you may discover for yourself. If you choose to go into those rooms at last.”
He pictured it with painful clarity. The locked wing opened. Dust motes dancing in light not seen in years. His father’s desk. A drawer. A book. His father’s hand on the page. Maybecondemnation, as he had always assumed. Maybe something worse. Or, impossibly, approval. A thing he had never had. A thing he had convinced himself he no longer needed.
“If you know where the diary is,” he said slowly, “why have you left it there?”
“Because it is not mine,” she said. “It is his. And yours, perhaps. If you are brave enough to read it.”
He took a breath that shuddered. “When I return with Isla, I will do so.”
Her eyes narrowed. “When you return?”
“I am going after her,” he said simply.
“Edward,” she said, exasperation sharpening to anger, “do not be a fool. Let her go. She has what she wanted. She is back with her brother, free from English company. You, meanwhile, could remain here and put your life in order. It may not even be too late to seek an annulment. The marriage is recent. No issue has come of it. The Church is sympathetic to alliances entered into under pressure.”
He laughed, short and humorless. “Do you hear yourself? You speak as if you are negotiating the return of a defective bolt of cloth.”
“I am speaking as your mother,” she said. “I see you walking toward a cliff and I am trying to pull you back.”
“You see only the drop,” he said. “Not what might be on the other side.”
“On the other side is ruin,” she said flatly. “Of your fortune. Your reputation. Your prospects. Charlotte may forgive much, but not a heart once given to a woman who used you.”
“Charlotte has tried to use me more in the last fortnight than Isla has,” he said.
