“Come now.” Henrietta pursed her lips, suddenly looking very much like Gemma. “It’s only the two of us here. There’s no need for pretense.”
The way Henrietta was looking at her, quizzical and expectant as she spooned pie into her mouth, made Bess sit back in her chair with a breath that was almost a laugh. Henrietta knew. “What on earth did he put in that letter to you?”
“Nathaniel? Oh no, dear, he never said a word about you. But he is hardly my only correspondent.”
Bess pinched her brows together. “No one else knew about us.”
“My dearest Bess.” Henrietta laid down her spoon and regarded Bess pityingly. “I can understand this blind spot in someone like my stepson, but I would have thought you, of all people, would realize that of course there were others who knew what you and Nathaniel got up to. Did you really think you could come and go as you pleased in a house full of servants whose whole job is to pass unseen and unnoticed through their duties attending to their employer’s needs?”
“The servants,” Bess breathed out, a belated blush scorching her from head to toe. “But why are they writing to you?”
“I’ll have you know, I was very well-liked as Duchess of Ashbourn,” Henrietta replied pertly. “I always think you can tell a lot about a woman by how many lady’s maids she goes through, and I kept mine for years and years. All the servants, really—it was easy. I was loyal to them and paid well and didn’t scream at them, and they were loyal to me in return. The bar is really shockingly low. At any rate, when I left you and Lucy at Ashbourn House, I renewed my acquaintance with the head housekeeper, Mrs. Drummond. She is a very lively letter writer, I must say, quite handy with the turn of a phrase. She kept me apprised of all your goings-on; I daresay I knew you were in love with Nathaniel before you did.”
The easy, matter-of-fact way she said it stole the breath from Bess’s lungs. Wheezing a bit, she said, “Henrietta. I beg of you.”
“Oh, don’t worry, dear. I didn’t have any spies at The Nemesis at that time, though not for lack of trying. So a veil may be drawn, shall we say, over the particulars of those evenings. Still, I knew that Nathaniel went there sometimes, and then that you went also, and eventually that you seemed to both be there on the same nights. I don’t have much formal schooling, but I can do arithmetic when it’s as simple as that.”
Bess put her hands over her face and very deliberately did not scream.
“I didn’t want to bring all this up, you know,” Henrietta said, her tone a little waspish in a way Bess rarely heard from her. “I wanted to let you and dear Nathaniel resolve things on your own, but you’re making such a muck of it, and it’s dragging on so long, I really feel I must intervene.”
“There’s nothing to intervene in,” Bess said, attempting to be firm. “Whatever I had with Nathaniel—Ashbourn, I mean. It’s over now.”
“Mm, so I hear. I wonder if you would feel the same, if you read the last letter I received from Mrs. Drummond.”
Bess’s mouth went dry. “What does she say?”
Henrietta took a final bite of her pie and wiped her lips with the serviette Bess had brought. She tilted her head to take Bess in. “First, I’d like to know if I’m correct. I have a theory, you see, about why Nathaniel left Five Mile House with barely a word, looking like a man on his way to his own hanging.”
“That is between Nath—the duke and myself, surely.” Bess did not want to talk about it. She could hardly breathe for how much she didn’t want to talk about it.
“Gemma thinks he got cold feet and ran home,” Henrietta mused, unheeding. “But that girl has always known how to hold a grudge. She would say that I am too forgiving, on the other hand, but I don’t think there is such a thing. Forgiveness is only another form of love, after all, and there can never be too much love in the world, can there? At any rate, I think you are the one who put an end to it. And I believe I know why.”
It was excruciating to hear Henrietta’s light voice twitter like a bird over a wound so fresh and deep, Bess was still bleeding. “I don’t—please. Henrietta.”
“We tried not talking about it,” Henrietta pointed out, uncharacteristically firm. “And that didn’t work. So now we’re trying something else, and if you want to find out what’s in Mrs. Drummond’s latest report on the state of affairs at Ashbourn House, you will let me say my piece first. You sent Nathaniel away, didn’t you? Tell me if I’ve got it wrong, but I don’t think I have.”
Bess couldn’t stay still. She leapt to her feet and paced over to the rose bushes. “That’s not…exactly what happened. I would have gone with him—but not as his wife.”
Her cheeks flamed but she should’ve known better than to think Henrietta would be shocked. “Ah, so that was the rub. And you would not marry him because…”
“You know why,” Bess choked out, glaring down at the roses without seeing them. “Or maybe you don’t—maybe you’re braver than I could ever be, if you had no doubts and fears about marrying your duke.”
“Oh, my dear girl. Of course I was afraid. Though I can’t say I understood exactly what would happen, exactly how upset the Ton would be—but I understood the choice I was making. And I chose love.”
“But didn’t you worry that it wouldn’t be enough—that it wouldn’t keep him from one day regretting the marriage?”
Henrietta looked surprised. “Is that what’s stopping you? Love, real love, is forever. It’s more than enough. Bess, my dear. You are enough.”
The inside of Bess’s nose stung and her eyes burned. “You make it sound so simple.”
“Well, it was, in the end.” Behind her, Henrietta’s voice was thoughtful. “Our marriage caused such a fuss, so much trouble and strife. We made terrible mistakes—we hurt our children with our choices. It wasn’t perfect. And losing my darling duke…I thought I should never recover. It still hurts; I know it will hurt until I close my eyes for the last time and go to join him. But Bess. Even with all of that.”
She paused, her high, fluting voice choking off for a moment. Bess turned to look at Henrietta, who gave her a heartbreakingly tremulous smile and said, “Even with all that, I would not change one second of the time I had with Benedict. I would marry him again, a thousand times. With no regrets.”
Bess brought a hand up to cover her mouth, to hold in the hiccupping sob that wanted to come out. “Oh, Henrietta.”
“There will always be hard times, in every life.” Henrietta used the serviette to dab at the corners of her eyes. “The choice isn’t between being happy or unhappy. Or even between doing the right thing and the wrong thing. The choice is between being together…or being without each other.”
