“You have a daughter,” he said.
She held up two fingers. “I bore two. Twins.”
“My son had Mina outside of marriage. Did you think I would judge you for that?”
“It’s not the same for men.”
“It should be worse for men. They don’t bear the children. Not that it should be?—”
He suddenly realized he had gone about this completely the wrong way round and had not yet contradicted the only thing that was all his to contradict.
“I’m not planning to marry any girl. Whom do you mean?”
“Emma D’Oyly.”
He quickly said, “I’m not marrying her.” Then, as gently as he could manage, “But she’s your daughter?”
The D’Oylys had never mentioned Emma was not of their blood. Perhaps they had thought it unimportant since Emma did not stand to inherit a title. Or perhaps it was a secret, even from Emma herself.
Susannah wrung her hands. “I left her at the kitchen door of the D’Oyly house twenty-nine years ago. I knew I should leave my baby where people had money, but I never imagined— I thought maybe the cook or a groom’s wife would take her. I didn’t know the D’Oylys had adopted her as their own until I saw her in your drawing room. I saw her and . . . knew.”
Henry conjured Emma in his mind. She did possess features that were not present in Sir John or his wife or Charlotte D’Oyly, but Henry would have never noticed on his own.
“She is like you. She’s very beautiful.”
“That’s her father, not me.” Susannah smiled a sad smile.
“Mr. Greenway?” he guessed.
She nodded. “He never—he never said we would marry, but I thought, of course, we would. Then I heard he had asked for Miriam’s hand when I was in the village one day, and I stormed into the inn, all rage and venom, and he said, he said, he said, why would he ever marry me? I had a useless father, I had the boys, Dando was only six, and Ned wasn’t going to take that on, he needed someone to help him run the coaching inn.”
He started to say something, but she put three fingers flat against his lips. “I must get through this.”
He kissed her fingers and nodded.
She took her hand away. “And he was right. I would have been a terrible wife for what he wanted. And he would have never been a husband to me, just another boy I needed to mop up after.”
She shifted her legs. “His and Miriam’s engagement was a long one, I’m not sure why, maybe his parents thought Ned was too young. But he came to me one night, and he wanted to— He kissed me and said sweet things, and fool that I am, I didn’t ask, I assumed the betrothal had been broken off. I couldn’t imagine he would want me while still engaged to Miriam. But nothing had been broken off.The banns were read four days later, and Miriam gave birth to Celia six months after that.”
“Oh, Susannah.” He stroked her knee.
“And I gave birth three months after Miriam. It was impossible to hide. I was enormous. And everyone knew Ned had been the one to put the babies in me. I became a fallen woman.How Susannah became the fallen woman of Much Wemby.”
He could hear the italics. He could hear how much pain she had been in, how she had lived with consequences no man would ever suffer.
“Where’s your other daughter?”
She started to cry and laugh at the same time.
“She was born dead, right here. She was so little. She didn’t move, didn’t breathe, didn’t cry. I buried her there,” she pointed at the stone with the carved letters, “and took my other daughter to the D’Oylys.”
“Why—”
“I knew my screaming in the cottage would scare Dando and Jory. And Father.”
“You were here alone?”
“No, Hodge was with me. Through all of it.”
