“It probably burned in the fire, Davina.”
“It was that or something important that would help him prove who he was. I think whatever he took, he sent to the king.”
“Possibly.”
“Just possibly? You could say that about anything. You think I am right, don’t you?”
“I agree it was your grandfather. However, he could have taken anything. Jewels, silver, anything at all. If he had convinced himself that he was the baron’s son, he would believe he had a right to it, and that it wasn’t theft.”
She did not care for that view of things. “I don’t know what you expect when you speak of proof. Do you want someone to come back from the grave and sayI know the baron’s son did not die and was fostered in Northumberland?”
Something like that would be useful, impossible though it might be.
Upon returning to Teyhill, Davina said she would start on her packing for the journey back to London.
“I do not think we will leave until late morning,” he said.
“I assumed you would want to be off at dawn.”
“There are a few things I need to attend to tonight. Enough that I won’t be at dinner.”
“Then I will take mine in my chambers and see you in the morning.”
She went up the stairs. Eric instead headed past the library, on to Roberts’s little apartment. The steward was not in his office, but came out of his sleeping chamber when he heard Eric enter.
“Do you need something from me, Your Grace?”
“Your time, and your records.” He shed his coat and hung it on a peg. “I am going to walk back in time and you will be my guide. Make room on your desk for us. We will both have to do the search if we are to finish tonight.”
“Search, Your Grace?”
He explained what he wanted to see. Roberts turned to the shelves.
Having someone rise from the dead would be the best proof, but a note sent from beyond the grave could work just as well.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Davina sat with the duchesses in the same drawing room where she had met Brentworth. No other guests attended tonight except he and she. With the informal dinner finished, the gentlemen were talking in the dining room, and the ladies had sequestered her in the drawing room.
They both almost ate her alive with the curiosity in their eyes. It had been that way all through this impromptu evening at Stratton’s house, put together the night after their return to London. At the meal there had been much wheedling at Brentworth for information, and many leading comments that begged for the particulars.
“You are going to tell us now, aren’t you? How you left here an enemy and came back his wife?” The Duchess of Stratton—please address me as Clara now—asked.
“Did he seduce you?” Langford’s duchess, Amanda, blurted out. “Forgive me. That was too forward. But matters moved very quickly, and it seemed to me that—” She flushed and twirled her finger absently in one of her dangling dark curls. “That is what Gabriel thinks too.”
What to say? She was not accustomed to confiding in other women, and these other women were not ordinary ones. Neither was she, officially, although right now she felt very commonplace.
“She doesn’t want to tell us, Amanda. That is fine, Davina. You don’t have to. Our husbands will get the story out of Brentworth and we, in turn, will learn it from them.”
“That would be better,” she said. “I will say that even when I left London, he and I had been less enemies and more two people in disagreement over an important matter. There is a difference.”
“Absolutely,” Clara said.
“Definitely,” Amanda said. “Here is the puzzle, though. I hope you will not mind if I am direct, because you and I have a friendship. It is Brentworth, Davina.Brentworth.The unassailable, unapproachable, cut-from-rock Brentworth. However this came about, I hope that you think you can be happy with him.”
“I think I will be very happy.” She gave a bright smile when she said it, and she even believed it. In her heart, however, a little sadness lingered. She would be happy because she chose to be and because only a fool would not be happy if she was a duchess. While they remained in the first blush of marriage, she would even be very happy. She would know that he had already known his great passion with another woman, however. She would accept that he would probably seek out passion with others again, eventually.
At least with his insistence on discretion she might not learn about that when it happened. She could probably lie to herself for years.
