She thought, here is the proof of it.
And then she stopped thinking entirely, which she had not managed without difficulty for a very long time, and slept in the arms of the man she loved and who loved her back.
CHAPTER 18
The Newbury townhouse was in Grosvenor Square, four storeys of pale stone that faced the gardens with the composed confidence of a house that had been excellent for a very long time and expected to remain so.
Megan sat across from Dorothea and looked at her hands.
She had worn the gray dress, the one that was good without being conspicuous, and the hat with the small feather. She had dressed carefully; she was supposed to be the Dowager Duchess’s lady in waiting. Dorothea had watched her come downstairs and had said, “Good,” in a tone that admitted no further comment, and had picked up her gloves.
She had not told Megan anything.
She had not told Megan why this morning, when there had been several mornings before it. She had not told Megan what she expected to find or what she hoped to find or what she already knew and was choosing to present in the order that suited her best. Dorothea told you what she intended to tell you in the precise sequence she had decided upon, and Megan had been in her company long enough to understand that pressingthe matter was not just useless but would be actively counterproductive.
She sat with her hands folded and looked at the streets of London moving past the carriage windows and tried to breathe through the thing that was happening in her chest.
The thing had no name. It had been building since the moment she’d first heard the Duchess of Newbury’s name spoken aloud in the blue sitting room at Saxton House, and it had gotten considerably worse when Oliver had said, with that particular quality of quiet that meant he knew more than he was saying,I know she lost a daughter.
A daughter.
A long time ago.
She pressed her palms flat on her lap and looked out the window and refused to think about it further, which was not working in the slightest.
The carriage drew up before the house at a quarter past two.
The butler was old, the sort of old that meant he had served this house for decades and had developed a butler’s particular species of watchful loyalty, the kind that kept its own counsel and noticed everything. He admitted them with the practiced deference of a man admitting a peer, took Dorothea’s card without a word, and showed them to a drawing room on the first floor while a footman went ahead.
The drawing room was pale blue and silver, the colors of a room that had been arranged by someone with excellent taste and a preference for light. The furniture was good and old and slightly worn at the armrests. Portraits lined the wall, three of them, a man in the style of thirty years past with a strong jaw and dark eyes, a family group, a young woman in white with roses.
Megan looked at the portraits and looked away.
She stood near the window, not because there was anything interesting in the street but because it gave her somewhere toput her eyes while Dorothea settled herself in the chair by the fire.
They waited perhaps four minutes.
Margaret Fairfax, the widowed Duchess of Newbury, came into her own drawing room with the particular bearing of someone who had been beautiful and still was, in the way that some women were beautiful past all the usual ages, not despite the years but because of them, the bone structure finally having outlasted everything decorative and temporary. She was perhaps fifty, perhaps a little more, fair-haired and straight-spined and dressed in half-mourning, lavender and grey, which she had apparently been wearing for so long it had ceased to be a statement and become simply what she wore.
Her eyes were green. An interesting green most thought.
Megan, standing by the window with her hands still folded and her face arranged in the carefully managed expression of a person accompanying someone of rank, felt the air leave her lungs.
Green eyes. Not the ordinary sort. The particular color that Oliver had called sea glass, the color that she had occasionally caught in mirrors at Penharrow’s house and found unsettling in some way she couldn’t quite name.
She looked at the Duchess of Newbury and the Duchess looked at her, and for one suspended moment neither of them did anything at all.
“Margaret.” Dorothea had risen. There was warmth in her voice, genuine warmth, the kind she rationed carefully. “How very well you look.”
Margaret crossed the room and took Dorothea’s hands. Up close she was smaller than she appeared, fine-boned, and her grip was very steady. “Dorothea. It has been far too long.” Her voice was measured and clear, the voice of a woman who had spent years learning to manage her own expression and had become rather excellent at it. “Far too long.” She drew back andlooked at her Godmother with the directness of women who have known each other for decades and dispensed with performance long since. “You look exactly as you always have. It is deeply unfair.”
“I have always considered it a talent.” Dorothea sat back down. “May I present my companion. Miss Megan?—”
“Just Megan,” Megan said, because that was what she was, what she had been for fourteen years, the woman with no surname, the woman who was no one’s daughter.
The Duchess had turned toward her and stopped.
Not the polite pause of an introduction. A stop. The complete, involuntary arrest of a person whose body has done something before their mind has given it permission, their feet still and their breath caught and their eyes doing the thing that eyes did when they were looking at something they had given up expecting to see.
