“It doesn’t haunt me, Caro,” Edmund had explained on one of his rare trips home to Sudbury. He had tactfully chosen a time when their father had been away visiting the elderly Earl Drake at Sommerleigh. “I know that was where Mother died, but she could have just as easily fallen at Sudbury Manor.”
Because it had not been the fault of the stairs. Her mother had been the most genteel sort of drunk, but a drunk nonetheless, and had imbibed a great deal of sherry before her fall. Caroline and Edmund and the marquess had all witnessed her swaying unsteadily as she had left the small upstairs drawing room and gone out onto the landing and toward the reviled stairs.
Perhaps her perpetual inebriation had been why her mother had thought Caroline a beauty and that no one would object to her lisp. Her mother’s vision had been regularly hazed by alcohol. And her own words had often slurred.
No, that wasn’t fair. Her mother had loved her and that love had made her see her daughter in a generous light.
And Caroline had still not entirely given up on the dream that she might one day earn her father’s love. He wanted her to be better. Better than her lisp and her stutter. Better than her mother, the tippler.
However, although she became better at running the house and the estate, learning to keep rigorous accounts to the penny, mustering the backbone to hire servants and not let them intimidate her, her speech did not improve.
She stayed almost mute in his presence and felt no love from her father.
She looked at the marquess sitting in his wing chair in front of the fireplace, a screen around him to keep the heat in. He was sweating and shivering at the same time.
“Y-y-you a-a-are ill, F-f-f-f-father.”
Thank goodness, the wordfatherhad noessesin it. What a torture that would have been. Indeed, it was bad enough that his title was a horror in her mouth.The Markwith of Thudbury.
Her father scowled at her, his bushy white eyebrows pushed together. “You are impertinent, daughter.”
But when she finally sent for a physician, the marquess did not have the strength to refuse the examination or to protest when his tall body was carried by footmen to his bedchamber.
“Pneumonia,” the doctor said.
Four days later, her father spoke to her for the last time as she was giving him some warm broth. His eyes were closed, but when she nudged his lips with the spoon, he would open his mouth and accept the liquid and swallow.
“Caroline,” her father croaked.
“I’m h-h-here.”
He opened his eyes, rheumy with illness. What would he say? Would he finally tell her he loved her? Ask her forgiveness or offer his own?
His words, when they came, were barely audible. “Remember that . . .”
She leaned forward.
“Remember I kept you safe.”
He closed his eyes and took no more broth.
He died two days later.
That night, alone in her bed, Caroline wept. She knew most would not understand why she shed tears for her father. A man who had thought it was best she be kept isolated and apart. So that she would besafe, he said.
When really he had just despised her.
But, in truth, she wept for herself. Because she had wasted her youth. She had been certain the rest of the world must be more harsh than her father. Because if her own sire thought she was shamefully flawed, wouldn’t others think something even worse? And so she had clung to him, to her place, to Sudbury, and had not dared to imagine or to ask for more.
But her night with the Earl of Burchester had shifted her thinking a bit. She hated to think Phineas had affected her, but he had. He had treated her so sweetly when he had thought she was just a serving girl. That sweetness had shown her that a stranger could be kind, even if the stranger thought he was high above her in the social strata.
Of course, he had wanted to frolic with her. Perhaps that was why he had been so warm. Maybe he would not have been, otherwise.
But still, when he had come to her bedchamber the next morning, knowing who she was, he had been hurt by her refusal. Almost as if what she thought of him was of consequence. Almost as if she were a person with the power to injure someone else’s feelings, not just be injured herself.
Phineas Edge had given her a peek at the world outside Sudbury Manor and shown her that it might not be filled only with sneering people who mocked her speech and shunned her.
As she penned a letter to her brother to inform him of her father’s death, she allowed herself a heretical thought—she might have a friend in the future.
