“Well, now, why would Mrs. Fletcher say that?” Arabella asked.
Aunt Belle shrugged.
“I do not know. Perhaps she believed that being thrown over broke her nephew’s heart.”
Grace’s brow creased. Dr. Hall had never once acted like a man with a broken heart, but that didn’t matter. She wanted to know about this being thrown over business.
“Well?” she asked. “What happened?”
Aunt Belle, who always enjoyed a little flair, peeked to her left and then her right, as if a dozen or so gossip columnists werestanding just behind her. Grace managed not to roll her eyes, and instead inched closer, interested to hear what she had to say.
“It was well known that Dr. Hall was engaged this time last year, to one Miss Catriona Ward, daughter of Douglas Ward. All of Glasgow had been invited to the wedding.”
“Wait,SirDouglas Ward?” Grace blurted out. “The surgeon?”
“Who is he?” Arabella piped up. “I’ve never heard of him.”
“He’s a brilliant man. Absolutely brilliant. You know, it was he who discovered the difference between sensory nerves and motor nerves in the spinal cord. There’s even a condition named after him, when there’s a unilateral idiopathic paralysis of facial muscles due to a lesion of the facial nerve.”
Arabella blinked, then faced Belle.
“Who is he?” she asked again.
“A very well to do member of Glasgow society.” Arabella bobbed her head up and down. “He was knighted for his advances in medicine and as he only had one child, a daughter, he made sure to have her educated far beyond your average subjects. To be sure, she was just as brilliant as her father. There was talk of sending her to Andersen’s University because she supposedly possessed the same mind as her father and with his backing, it would have happened.”
Grace frowned, unsure she wished to hear the rest of the story all of a sudden.
“What happened?”
“Well, she and Dr. Hall had been acquainted for several years, as Dr. Hall was once a student of Dr. Ward. They were engaged after a lengthy courtship and all seemed well and good, until…”
Arabella leaned forward.
“Until what?”
Aunt Belle’s face scrunched to the side as she shook her head.
“It really is a bitter thing, but on the morning of the wedding, while everyone was waiting inside the church, including Dr. Hall, it was discovered that Miss Ward had disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“Was she kidnapped?”
“Or run away?”
“The latter, I’m afraid. It turns out that she had been carrying on with an Englishman, a peer she had met while on holiday in Cornwall the year before. Supposedly he had shown up the night before the wedding and they ran away, never to be seen or heard from again.”
“Oh, my, that’s awful,” Arabella said. “What a vicious thing to do.”
But Grace could not think of anything to say. It truly was a vile thing to happen to someone, but then she remembered her own dalliance, two years prior, that had ruined a near marriage.
It wasn’t as if she had ever intended to do what she did. Grace loathed Lord Bartley and had been quite vocal about her dislike after he had ridiculed her once for reading about sciences when the female brain was too delicate an organ for such a task. He had called her efforts to study Sisyphean, and what’s worse, he had proposed to Grace’s dearest friend, Lady Natalie Hawkins, who had been less than enthusiastic about the match, but had accepted due to pressures from her grandparents, the Duke and Duchess of Spotsmore.
“You cannot marry him. He is a toad,” Grace recalled saying to Natalie only a week before that fateful night that had changed the course of her and her sisters’ lives forever. “He’s awful.”
“I don’t have much of a choice, Grace. Grandpapa has already decided it and my grandmama is picking out veils.” Natalie had dabbed a kerchief to her eye. “Perhaps it will not be so terrible. He does prefer the country and we’ve discussed at length my love for the city. Perhaps we will simply live separately.”
“There must be something that can be done.”
