She rose and crossed to the wall where Georgie’s drawings were pinned. The gap where one had been removed showed, but the others remained.
A woman with spectacles before a circle of children. A tall man seated among them with a slate. And newer ones Lucien had not seen. Elinor reading aloud, hands animated. Elinor with a cat on the desk, children gathered close. Elinor beneath a sky of stars, her face lifted, her spectacles catching chalk lines of light.
In every drawing, Elinor stood at the center.
Annabelle studied them in silence as Mrs. Harding gathered the children back to their seats and the low murmur of lessons resumed. Lucien watched his sister’s face as she understood.
“She was not just a visitor,” Annabelle said.
“No.”
“She was their teacher. Before the engagement. Before you.”
Lucien looked at the drawing of Elinor beneath the stars. The chalk lines were unsteady, a child’s hand, but the face was recognizable. The spectacles. The loose hair. The smile she wore only here, in this room, for these children.
“Yes,” he said. “She was here first. She found this place before I inherited it. She was teaching them in secret, sneaking out of her house at night, risking everything, because she believed they deserved an education and nobody else was going to give them one.”
Annabelle turned to him. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears and something harder beneath them. Understanding. The pieces clicking into place.
“That is how you met her,” she said. “Not at Hyde Park. Not at a ball. Here. In this schoolroom.”
He nodded.
“And the engagement.” Her voice dropped. “Was it real?”
The question sat in the room between them, surrounded by children’s drawings and the hum of a reading lesson and the ghost of every lie he had told the one person who had never deserved to be lied to.
Lucien looked at his sister. She stood with her arms at her sides, her face holding steady against whatever was building behind it, and he owed her the truth. He owed her more than the truth. He owed her the apology that should have come weeks ago, when the guilt first ate through the walls of the ruse.
“No,” he said. “It was not real. Not at first.”
Annabelle’s breath caught. She pressed her lips together and looked at the drawings, then at the children, then back at him.
“And then it was,” she said.
“Yes.” His voice came out rough. “And by the time it was real, I had already agreed to end it, and I did not know how to undo what I had set in motion.”
Annabelle closed her eyes. A single tear tracked down her cheek. She wiped it with the back of her hand, the gesture so reminiscent of Elinor wiping chalk dust from her fingers that Lucien’s chest seized.
“You are an idiot,” she whispered. “You are the biggest idiot I have ever loved.”
“I know.”
She opened her eyes. The tears were gone, replaced by something fiercer. “Then fix it, Lucien. Whatever it takes. Fix it before you lose her for good.”
He looked at the wall of drawings. At the woman with spectacles who had walked into a crumbling workhouse and given its children the stars. At the name above the door that he had painted because she had taught him what it meant to love something enough to name it.
In the schoolroom, Toby raised his hand and asked Mrs. Harding if they could learn about planets next.
Lucien walked out of the building before his heart could crack further.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“You are smaller than I expected,” Lord Bramwell stood in the Morland House parlor, hands clasped behind his back, his gaze moving over Elinor with open appraisal.
Tall and thin, his lined face might have been distinguished on a kinder man. On him, it was not. His coat was fine, but it carried a faint sourness beneath the tobacco.
He was sixty-three. Rebecca had supplied the number that morning with brisk efficiency.
