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“So, the whole problem with Bertrand is that you are in love with him,” her mother said.

Stephanie opened her mouth to deny it, but she stared down at her hands spread over her lap instead. Was that it? Was that the explanation of everything that had happened since she was seventeen? That she was in love with Bertrand? Was it not all his perfections that had caused her so much anguish but the fact that even at so young an age she had fallen irrevocably in love with him? It sounded so bizarre, so…stupid.

“Love hurts so much, Mama,” she said, aware even as she spoke of what a tired cliché she was mouthing.

“So you deliberately hold yourself at one remove from it?” her mother said. “You love in abundance and bring joy to many lives, but you are afraid to give your heart?”

Stephanie made a sound like a high-pitched bleat. “Everyone left me,” she said. “And no one would tell me why. Me or Owen. No one would answer our questions. Everyone left instead. Devlin and Ben went in the middle of the night even though Nicholas wept and Owen raged and I begged. I begged Devlin to go and ask you if he could stay, and I think he went, but you said no. And Nicholas left soon after and then Owen. You were no longer you and Ravenswood was no longer Ravenswood. Everything stopped and no one ever came. Pippa turned to marble. Only Papa was the same but not the same. What had been natural to him was suddenly forced. He still loved me. He did. He felt like the only one. My world had come to an end, and it seemed that no one loved me any longer. But Papa did. Then he left too without even saying goodbye. He died in the taproom at the inn. He did not even say goodbye.”

Oh goodness, where were all these childish complaints coming from?

“Stephanie,” her mother said, her voice full of distress. “Oh, Stephanie. No one stopped loving you. You were always the light of all our lives. But you were nine years old. We tried to protect you.”

“How could you protect me when my world had ended?” Stephanie cried. “We knew something catastrophic had happened, but we were left, Owen and I, to piece the story together with the bits of information other people dropped. Papa did not love us, we learned, but lived another life during the months he spent in London each year. Devlin had discovered it during the ball at the fete and had spoken out and was banished. But Papa did love us. He loved me. My faith in him wavered, but only very slightly. He loved us all. It could not have been entirely an act, that warm pride he showed in us, the tears he shed when he was leaving for London each year, the tears he shed when he returned. No, I am not denying that he did terrible, terrible wrongs, especially to you. But people are not all goodness or all evil. Papa was a bewildering mixture of the two.”

“Your love for your father and your anger and bewilderment with me have destroyed something in you,” her mother said, her voice flat. “You are afraid to love as you did when you were a child, wide open and vulnerable to unalloyed happiness and crushing pain. Now you will love only with a love you can control.”

She seemed almost to be talking to herself.

“I failed you,” she said, looking directly at Stephanie. “I was preoccupied with the destruction of my marriage and family, with the public shame, with the guilt of what I had done to you all. You were so very young and so precious. Your governess loved you and you loved her. You were happily involved with your choirs and your friends in the village. I stayed back in the hope I would not contaminate you with my own darkness. I did not realize fully until quite recently that I handled the situation quite wrongly, that I should have gathered you to me, pain and darkness and all, so you would know yourself unconditionally loved through it all. Children, I realize now, too late, cannot be shielded from pain but only assured they are loved and safe—if indeed they are. You were always both.”

Stephanie curled her fingers into her palms and watched her knuckles turn white in the fading light of evening.

“He loved you, Stephanie,” her mother said. “You are quite right about that. You were his favorite, though he loved you all. He would want you to love, to be fully, even recklessly happy.”

“Is that what you are now?” Stephanie asked, looking up at her. “With Matthew?”

Her mother nodded, frowning. “But I did love your father,” she said. “He was handsome and charming when I first met him. And he…glittered, for want of a better word. We were both in love when we married. He loved me all his life in his own way. He always treated me with the utmost respect. Sometimes I believe he almost revered me. But…there was that other side to him.”

“But Matthew is faithful?” Stephanie said.

“Yes,” her mother said. “Stephanie, I am the last person to advise or tell you what to do. But it is my fervent wish that you will allow yourself to love with every last corner of your heart—and to be loved in return. No one is more deserving of happiness than you.”

Stephanie sighed. “I wonder,” she said, “if the Marchioness of Dorchester can recommend a hairdresser close by.”

Her mother frowned in inquiry over the apparent non sequitur.

“I want someone to cut the dry ends off my hair,” Stephanie said.

Her mother gazed at her in silence.

“On the night of that ball,” Stephanie said, “when I was wearing my hair up for the first time, Papa told me how lovely it was and made me promise that I would never cut it.”

She saw understanding dawn in her mother’s eyes.

“By the next morning the world had ended,” Stephanie said. “It is so foolish that in all these years I have not grown beyond that point. I am twenty-six years old.”

Her mother came to sit beside her and gathered her in her arms. “Seventeen years late,” she said. “I am so sorry, Stephanie. I have always loved and loved and loved you. But I have not always shown it.”

“To answer your original question,” Stephanie said. “Yes, Mama, I both love Bertrand and am in love with him.”

She felt a bit as though she had dived off a cliff.

Chapter Nineteen

Of such stuff farce was made, Stephanie thought the following morning while it rained outside and the men found indoor activities with which to amuse themselves. The women, without exception, and also Katy Bennington, were crowded inside Stephanie’s bedchamber, arranged in a rough horseshoe about the dressing table, some standing, a few seated on the available chairs, Abby and Katy on the end of her bed.

Stephanie was sitting on the bench before the mirror, through which she could see them all. Her hair was loose down her back. Hetty had unwound her braids and finished brushing out her hair. It hung over the seat of the bench behind her.