The question came out before he could stop it, raw and unguarded.
Mel was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was careful.
“I am as yet undecided as I am still fraught with indignation and I am but beginning to comprehend that all I once held to be true regarding your character was, in fact, a most grievous misconception.” She paused.
“But, you told me the truth tonight. You disclosed things to me things that were painful and shameful and necessary. That means something.”
“Does it mean you’ll stop calling me‘Your Grace’as though the title is a weapon?”
The ghost of a smile again, clearer this time.
“That, remains to be seen.”
She left the study taking most of the frost with her .Rhys sat back in his chair and stared at the fire, he felt hope, something he had not felt since the night of Mrs. Kemp’s slip.
He had told her the truth and had allowed her to see the cowardice and the grief and the man he had been failing to become. She had listened, had sat down, and had offered an assessment that was brutal in its honesty and somehow comforting in its balance.
The birthday was in three days and he had a story to prepare, a truth to shape into something his daughters could understand. He had a future to imagine and a past to finally, properly, begin to grieve.
But for tonight, he had the memory of Mel’s almost-smile and the knowledge that the frost was beginning to thaw.
It wasn’t forgiveness as yet, but it was a start.
CHAPTER TEN
“Your Grace, there is correspondence from London.”
Mrs. Kemp stood in the doorway of the study, a silver tray bearing several letters balanced on her palm. It was the third such delivery this week, each bundle thicker than the last, each bearing the increasingly emphatic handwriting of Mr. Grieves and the various social obligations Rhys had been studiously ignoring.
“Put them on the desk,” he said, without looking up from the book he was reading with Viola.
“I’ll attend to them later.”
“You said that about the previous correspondence, Your Grace.”
“And I will say it about the next batch as well. Later is a flexible concept.”
Mrs. Kemp’s expression suggested she had opinions about flexible concepts and the men who employed them, but she set the tray on the desk and departed without voicing them. She had learned, over the past three weeks that the Duke of Trevane was not to be moved from Cornwall by anything short of parliamentary emergency.
He had been at Hartfell for three weeks, and London had not collapsed in his absence.
The children’s birthday had come and gone, celebrated with a party that Anna had orchestrated as though she were planning a military campaign. There had been cake and presents and games in the garden, and Rhys had told his daughters, finally, about the woman who had given them their names.
He had gathered them in the nursery on the morning of their birthday, the three of them arranged on Viola’s bed with expectant faces and barely contained excitement. Thistle had been vibrating with energy, already calculating how quickly she could get to her presents. Anna had been holding her attendance register, ready to document the proceedings. Viola had been watching him with those quiet, knowing eyes.
“I would like to tell you about your mother,” he had said.
The room had gone very still.
He had told them the truth, or as much of it as six-year-olds could understand. He told them about Celeste’s dark hair and French accent, about her passion for Shakespeare and music, about the way she had named each of them with deliberate meaning. Annabelle for the clever heroine who disguised herself and won the day. Viola for the quiet observer who saw everything and said little and Thistle for the wildness that every garden needed.
“She cherished you very much,” he had said. “She held each of you when you were born and sang to you in French. She declared, with the greatest tenderness, that you were the most exquisite blessing of her life.”
Thistle asked if their mother had liked toads and Anna had asked why she wasn’t here anymore. Viola had climbed into his lap and held on, and had not asked anything at all.
He had not told them everything he could not, due to his cowardice, or about the fever that had taken Celeste while he was in London pretending his life was not falling apart. There would be time for those harder truths later, when they were older, when they could understand the complexity of adult failures.
But he had given them something: a beginning, a foundation they could build on.
