“Sit down, Olivia. I wish to speak to you.”
Nodding a bit jerkily, she dropped onto the window bench when she backed into it. “Yes?”
Now that he had her full attention, Griffin was uncertain how he should begin. He had rehearsed some version of it during his return journey, but he hadn’t taken into account how the carefully guarded expression in her own face would tie this tongue.
“You always knew I was married,” he said, starting with the most obvious point. “I never pretended otherwise and never asked you to indulge in the same.”
Olivia did not know if a response was called for, so she simply nodded.
“This morning—before Gardner arrived—I had it in my mind to tell you the whole of it. About my marriage, that is. It seems self-serving to say that now, after the fact, but it is the truth. I would have prefaced it with an apology, of course, and asked you how I might atone for my boorish behavior.”
“You apologized last night,” she said. “I imagined your atonement came this morning in the form of scones, hot cocoa, and your request to accompany me on my walk.”
“Then you must raise your expectations, Olivia, for that was merely a prologue. You deserve more.”
She could not think of a reason why he would believe that, but she did not say so. Better to bring him around to what he meant to say than devote time to why he meant to say it. “It is late, my lord, so if you would be so kind…” She set her hands in her lap and folded them together.
“Yes. Of course.” Griffin looked around for a place he might sit, realized he would find none of them comfortable at present, and opted to remain on his feet. “You heard Gardner say that he found my wife. What you did not have occasion to know was that I have hired a dozen or so men over the years to locate her. The last word I had on where she might be came shortly before I met you. There was some reason to believe she was in Paris. On the intelligence I was given by the gentleman I’d hired, I decided to make the trip myself. She was not there, nor could I find evidence that she might have been.”
He saw a shadow of concern cross her face but did not know the cause for it. “There is something you want to know?” he asked.
Still frowning slightly, she shook her head. “It is difficult to understand, I think, though I suppose you will come to it eventually.”
“Come to what?”
“How she came to be lost.”
“If you are imagining an abduction or some other manner of foul play as others are wont to believe, set your mind at rest. Lady Breckenridge is not lost as much as she is in hiding. She did not wish to be found and still may not know that it’s finally happened. Gardner did not approach her, merely discovered her location. Whether she will be there when he returns for her is yet to be seen. If she learns of the inquiries on her behalf, she may go again.”
Griffin watched Olivia listen to him with the whole of her body. She leaned forward, head inclined just a bit to the right while a small vertical crease deepened between her eyebrows. Her gaze was centered and focused, and her hands had unfolded and lay open in her lap. He was touched and humbled that she would honor him with all of her attention.
“It’s been a little more than six years,” he said. “Elaine’s departure was not entirely unexpected. She threatened as much from time to time as the mood struck her. You will perhaps find it odd, or perhaps a measure of her contempt for me, but she never attempted to hide the fact that she had taken lovers—and there was a succession of them—although she was adept at concealing the truth of it from others. It was her care for her own reputation, and in a smaller measure, mine, that lulled me into believing she had decided there was some benefit to a marriage such as we had.”
Griffin finally set himself, as was often his habit, on the arm of a wing chair. He stretched one leg to the side and rested his arm across the back. “We were friends once, or so I thought. That has been the most difficult thing to reconcile. Elaine is seven years my senior, a second cousin on my father’s side, and was a frequent visitor to Wright Hall when I was growing up. As a child, I thought she was a magical creature, the queen of my sisters’ fairy court. I adored her then and that did not change when I learned she was very much of the flesh. I cannot find it in myself to be ashamed of it.”
“Nor should you,” Olivia said gently.
Griffin steeled himself against Olivia’s compassion and went on. “Elaine and I married six months after my father’s death. It was a rather hastily planned affair. We were not yet through a year of mourning, and I was deeply engaged in learning the extent of my family’s debts. I had my mother to consider, for she could not be convinced there was the least need for frugality, and then there were my sisters, who would have to make good marriages if they were to be properly cared for.”
Olivia closed her eyes briefly so he would not be put off by the sympathy she could not help but feel. He had been a young man, not yet twenty at his father’s death, and barely that as he exchanged vows with a woman who seemed bent on taking advantage of his adoration for her. “You learned your lady was carrying your child.”
Nodding, Griffin slowly released a breath. “I had imagined that some day I would find the courage to propose, but I had no confidence that she would accept. She’d had proposals before and remained unmarried by choice. I thought she was admirably free spirited, a woman with an income large enough to support her somewhat disdainful opinion of men. Her refusal to yield to the expectations of society was more fascinating than troubling, a point of admiration rather than alarm.”
Olivia almost smiled then. How he would have been drawn to this woman, convinced that her unconventional manner demonstrated strength of character, never suspecting it could conceal the lack of it. “Her parents did not press her to marry?”
“There is only her mother, a widow who never remarried. Again, not for lack of suitors and opportunity. She is a handsome woman with independent means in the same vein as Lady Rivendale but without that lady’s lively humor and delicious appreciation for life.”
Griffin pushed his fingers through his hair and offered a grin rife with self-mockery. “It all seems so clear in the retelling, doesn’t it? You must wonder at my naïveté.”
She shrugged. “Everyone is naive at nineteen. We only think we are not, and that is the cruel irony of it.”
Griffin appreciated her generosity. He could have pointed out thatshewas not naive at nineteen, indeed, not at twelve, nor eight, nor six. “Elaine miscarried, but I think you suspected that. It occurred only a few weeks after the wedding. Sometimes I think how life would have been different if we had not rushed to marriage, but that is naturally a ridiculous use of time and gray matter.”
And in every way a human response, she thought. “Do you believe the child was yours?”
He gave her full marks for not avoiding the question. She could be fearless in her own fashion. “I did at the time. I came to doubt the truth of it soon after. I said nothing to her about my suspicions, and I cannot say if that was a mistake or not. What I believe is that it would have changed nothing in the end. Elaine would have still engaged in her affairs, and I could have not kept her at my side. I do not know when I came to the realization that she could not help herself, but there you have it. I do not offer it in defense of her behavior. As fantastical as it seems, she was compelled to be with men. With any man. With many men. I did not think she knew I meant to divorce her, but it may have been what provoked her to leave when she did.”
“How is it possible she could have disappeared so completely for so long?”
