Frederick’s face changed at once. He turned fully to Emmeline. “Are you unwell?”
Emmeline opened her mouth, but for a moment no answer came. She was staring at Juliet—the living answer to weeks of fear and guilt and searching.
“I am all right now,” she said slowly. “But I am very confused.”
Frederick sighed, and the sound seemed dragged from some exhausted place too deep for wit to reach.
“Yes,” he said. “I expect you are.”
Juliet stepped forward. “Your Grace, I am so sorry.”
Emmeline looked at her properly then. She was smaller than Emmeline had imagined. Her gown was simple, her face thinner than it ought to be, her eyes shadowed. She looked like someone who had run so long from terror that even stillness had begun to frighten her.
“You are truly Lady Juliet,” Emmeline said.
Juliet nodded. “Yes.”
“And you have been here all this time.”
“Not the entire time,” Frederick said quickly. “I have moved her between safe lodgings. This was only meant to be temporary.”
Emmeline turned to him and hurt rose unexpectedly beneath the shock. “You knew.”
Frederick’s mouth tightened. “I found her on the wedding day.”
The room seemed to alter around those words.
Emmeline thought of Rowan in the chapel yard, rigid with anger and fear. Rowan sending men across the countryside. Rowan bribing scandal sheets, pretending not to bleed from his sister’s absence because control was the only bandage he trusted.
“You found her,” she repeated.
“At the inn,” Frederick said, quieter now. “She had changed clothes with one of the girls there and was about to vanish farther than I could safely allow. She begged me not to take her back.”
Juliet’s eyes filled. “I thought he would make me marry Lord Wellfield.”
Emmeline’s chest tightened at once. There was so much fear in Juliet’s voice.
“Rowan would not have dragged you to the altar by force,” she said, though even as she said it, she thought of the man he had been then, who had believed security could be given without listening to the heart.
Juliet gave a small, broken laugh. “Would he not? Perhaps not with his hands. But with his will, yes. With disappointment. With all the arguments that make refusal feel childish and selfish and cruel.”
The words struck too close.
“I accepted Lord Wellfield,” Juliet continued, twisting her fingers together. “I told myself I could do it. I told myself Rowan had chosen sensibly and that I owed him obedience after everything he had done for me. He protected me all my life. He raised me more than our father ever did. I thought the least I could do was not make his life harder.”
Frederick went very still at that.
Juliet swallowed. “But on that morning, when they put me in the gown, I could not breathe. I could not make my hands stop shaking. I kept thinking that once I walked into that chapel, my life would no longer be mine. I know it was rash. I know I behaved terribly. By the time I began to think clearly, it was already done.”
“And so Lord Calham hid you from Rowan,” Emmeline said.
Frederick’s eyes met hers without flinching. “Yes.”
“And from Aaron.”
That landed differently. Juliet flinched as though struck, and Frederick looked away.
Emmeline saw Aaron at the dinner table, saying Juliet used to let him speak of his mother, brightening at every mention of her and then dimming when no answer came.
