“Enough.” That quiet word came from Lady Seymore, and both Cressida and Theodore turned to look at her.
Lady Seymore was no longer seated at the table. She had risen at some point in the last several minutes—Cressida had not noticed precisely when—and was now standing near the window with her hands folded at her waist, the plum silk of her gown catching the candlelight at its folds, her silver-streaked hair neatly arranged above a face that wore an expression Cressida had not previously seen on it:shame.
“I said, enough,” she repeated softly. She looked first at Theodore, who had gone very still in that controlled, dangerous way of his, and then at Cressida. “I need to tell you something.”
Theodore’s eyes narrowed. “Whatever you wish to say, it can wait until?—”
“It cannot.” Her voice did not rise, but there was no arguing with it. She had the tone of a woman who had arrived at a decision and would not be dissuaded. “It cannot, given that you are currently accusing your wife of a thing she did not do.” She exhaled through her nose. “Because I did it.”
The candlelight moved across the room in a slow, indifferent pulse.
“I beg your pardon?” Theodore blurted, breaking the silence that had already begun a languid stretch between them.
“The scandal sheets.” Lady Seymore did not flinch from his stare. “The information was mine to give. I gave it.”
Cressida heard the words, and for a long moment, they arrived stripped of meaning, as though in a language she had studied only at a remove and could not yet translate with any confidence.
She looked at Lady Seymore and remembered, quite involuntarily, the column that had described her stay at Ashmere Castle with such specific,corrosiveaccuracy. The exact details, the particular phrasing that could only have come from someone with knowledge of the castle, of the circumstances, ofher, and of the column’s editor to see the thing published without delay.
The entire edifice of it rearranged itself in the span of a breath.
“You…” Cressida trailed off, the word barely audible.
“Yes.” Lady Seymore held her eyes, even as the shame burned inside her own. “Me.”
Theodore’s chair scraped back from the table. He stood, and the sudden change in his height had a particular effect. The way a building looked different in a storm than in fair weather—much more consequential. His face was composed. That was almost worse than if it had not been, because Cressida had learned over these weeks that his composure was not evidence of calm. It was a lid on something worse.
“Tell me,” he said, “that I misheard you.”
“After the storm—you will recall there was a rather severe storm, the morning of Lord and Lady Whitebrook’s wedding—I received word.” Lady Seymore held his gaze without flinching. “Not from the castle, but from my house. My housekeeper’s sister is married to a coachman in the village nearest Ashmere. The sort of connection one never considers until one finds a use for it.” A brief pause. “I knew within two days that you had brought an unchaperoned young woman here. I did not yet know who she was.”
Theodore had gone completely still.
“I made enquiries,” she continued, in the same level tone. “Carefully. Once I knew the young woman in question was the daughter of the Earl of Bardwell, I sought out Lady Norwell—we have been friends these thirty years, she and I. What she told me confirmed what I had already half-decided.”
She glanced at Cressida, apology and resolution in equal measure.
“Lady Norwell was very worried about her granddaughter. The engagement to Emerton and what her parents intended for her. She had been worried for some time, with no means of addressing it. And I had in my possession information that could change things.” She looked back at Theodore. “So I used it.”
“You used it.” He repeated the words with a quietness that was more unsettling than any raised voice. “You took information from my household—from my estate—and you used it. Against me.”
“Foryou,” she corrected. “There is a difference.”
His expression did not change. “I do not recognize the distinction.”
Lady Seymore’s chin lifted. “Then allow me to explain it.” Her voice, still level, carried the particular quality of a woman who had reached the end of her arguments and chosen to spend the last one well. “I thought about what I know of you. I have thought about what I know of you for a very long time. You have managed this estate and your affairs and the weight of this family’s history entirely alone since you were seventeen years old. It has made you an excellent duke.” She held his gaze steadily. “And a deeply unhappy man. I have watched it, year after year, and said nothing because you made it perfectly clear that my opinions were not required.”
There was no sentimentality in her voice. She delivered the account with precision, as though sentiment would only undermine the case she was making.
“And then Cressida came along. I thought, at last here was a woman worth the disruption.”
“You decided,” Theodore repeated.
The words were controlled, but Cressida could see his hands, the way his fingers had straightened at his sides very slowly as though he were releasing something by degrees.
“I did.” Lady Seymore did not retreat from it. “I thought I was helping you both.”
Cressida had not moved from her chair. She was watching Lady Seymore with the focused, effortful attention of someone trying to hold several understandings in place at once before any of them could collapse into something less ordered.
