By midnight, he had developed a headache that throbbed behind his eyes like a second heartbeat.
By one on the hour, he had made his excuses and departed.
The London streets at dawn were a different world than the London streets at midnight. The carriages and crowds had thinned to nothing, leaving only the occasional lamplighter making his rounds and the distant clatter of delivery carts beginning the day’s work. Rhys rode alone through the greyhalf-light, his horse’s hooves echoing on cobblestones still damp from an earlier rain.
The smile was gone now. There was no one to perform for, no audience requiring charm, no role demanding maintenance. In these quiet hours between the night’s end and the day’s beginning, Rhys allowed himself to simply exist without pretense.
He was one and thirty years old. He had a title, an estate, more money than any reasonable person could spend in a lifetime. He was handsome enough that women pursued him and charming enough that men forgave him his handsomeness. By every measure society applied, he was a success.
He was also the loneliest man in London, and he had no one to blame but himself.
The thought of Celeste came, as it always did in these quiet moments. Celeste with her dark hair and her French accent and her laugh that had made him feel, for three brief years, like the man he might have been in a kinder world. Celeste, who had cherished him enough to bear his children and too much to demand he take her as his wife. Celeste, who had passed away from a fever when the girls were two, while he was in London playing at being a rake because he was too much a coward to build the life he actually wanted.
He had told himself it was for her protection. That entering into matrimony with an actress, even a retired one, would have destroyed them both. That the girls were better off hidden, raised quietly in the country where society could not touch them.
He had told himself many things in the years since her demise. Most of them had been lies designed to make the guilt bearable.
The truth was simpler and uglier: he had been afraid, afraid of what matrimony would cost him. He had been afraid of what the ton would say. Afraid of being the man who gave up everything for affection, only to discover that everything wasn’t enough.
And then she had passed away and he had learned what “not enough”really meant.
He reached his townhouse as the sun broke fully over the rooftops, painting the stone facade in shades of gold that felt like mockery. His valet had left a lamp burning in the entrance hall. His bed would be turned down, his nightclothes laid out, everything in perfect order for a master who rarely slept before sunrise.
Rhys climbed the stairs and did not go to bed. Instead, he went to his study, where a locked drawer in his desk held the letters.
Mrs. Kemp wrote monthly with updates on the household. Mr. Grieves wrote quarterly with financial reports. Between them, Rhys assembled a picture of his daughters’ lives that was detailed enough to ache and incomplete enough to torment him.
The children are well, Mrs. Kemp had written three weeks ago.The new governess arrives next Tuesday. Miss Grace comes highly recommended by Mr. Grieves. I pray she lasts longer than the others.
The new governess. The fourth one in eight months. Rhys had stopped learning their names after the second, a pale young woman who had fled the premises claiming that Thistle had cursed at her in Latin. Since Thistle did not know Latin, this seemed unlikely, but the governess had been unmoved by logic.
In two days, as planned, he would ride to Cornwall and spend three days being the father his daughters deserved, before returning to London to resume being the man they must never know existed.
He knew it was insufficient but he was at a loss to be a better father.
The ride to Cornwall took two days, changing horses at coaching inns where the Duke of Trevane was not expected and therefore not required to perform. Rhys made the journey in ordinary clothes, without his valet, letting the road strip away the layers of his London life with each mile that passed.
By the time Hartfell House appeared on the horizon, grey stone rising against the grey Cornish sky, he was no longer the rake. He was simply Rhys, a man on his way to see his children, carrying in his saddlebags the small presents he always brought: ribbons for Anna, who liked to organise them by colour; a new sketchbook for Viola, who filled them faster than he could supply them; and a small jar with holes punched in the lid, suitable for the temporary housing of whatever creature Thistle had most recently befriended.
The grounds of Hartfell were well-maintained, as they always were. Grieves managed the estate with the same efficiency he applied to everything, and the income fromthe property’s farms more than covered the expenses of the household. They possessed every luxury that wealth might command, yet were denied that singular liberty of spirit which the poorest creature might claim as her own.
Rhys dismounted in the stable yard and handed his horse to the groom, who knew better than to ask questions about the master’s comings and goings. The servants at Hartfell had been selected for their discretion as much as their competence, and they guarded the family’s secrets with the loyalty of people who were paid extremely well to be loyal.
He entered through the side door, as he always did, and made his way toward the study where Mrs. Kemp would be waiting with her quarterly report and her carefully neutral expression.
But the study was empty when he arrived, and a moment later Mrs. Kemp appeared in the doorway with her cap slightly askew and something that looked almost like hope in her eyes.
“Your Grace. We weren’t expecting you until tomorrow.”
“I made better time than anticipated.” He crossed to the window, looking out over the gardens where the late-summer roses were fading into autumn.
“The children?”
“Out walking, Your Grace, with the new governess.”
“Ah. Miss Grace, yes? Grieves mentioned her in his last letter.”
“She arrived a fortnight ago.” Mrs. Kemp moved into the room, and Rhys noticed that she was standing straighter than usual, her hands clasped before her with something other than their customary anxiety.
