“Your…” The Duchess stopped. Restarted. Her voice was very controlled. “Your companion.”
“She is.” Dorothea’s voice was entirely level, with the careful texture of a woman threading a very fine needle in uncertain light. “She has been with me for only a few weeks. She is a person of very considerable quality.”
The Duchess was still looking at Megan.
Megan stood under the weight of that gaze and felt something old and nameless moving through her, some current she had no language for, the same deep pull that the name had made in her when she first heard it.
“Forgive me,” the Duchess said. Her voice had shifted slightly. Thinned. “Forgive me, I—” She stopped. “You must think me very rude.”
“Not at all,” Megan said.
But the Duchess was not finished looking at her.
They sat. Tea was brought. Dorothea carried the conversation with the skill of a general managing a field, askingquestions about London and the season and the state of the square’s gardens, drawing Margaret out with the practiced ease of someone who had been making conversation in drawing rooms since before half the city had been built. Megan sat and poured and managed her hands and felt the Duchess’s gaze return to her every few sentences, like something on a string.
At the fourth return, Dorothea set down her teacup.
“Megan,” she said. “Your hat, if you please.”
Megan looked at her.
Dorothea’s expression was entirely composed. “It is warm in here. I believe Margaret won’t mind.”
She would have argued, perhaps. She would have found a reason to resist. But there was something in Dorothea’s face that was the look of a woman who had been waiting for this moment for a very long time, and the weight of it was heavier than argument.
She reached up and removed the hat.
The Duchess of Newbury made a sound.
It was not a word. It was not a name. It was like an animal in pain. The sound that came before words, the involuntary sound of a body recognizing something that the mind was still trying to catch up to, and it came from somewhere deep and private and completely beyond her considerable control.
The teacup in her hand tilted. Dorothea reached across with the swift efficiency of a woman who had been expecting this and caught it, set it on the table, and sat back.
“Margaret,” she said quietly.
The Duchess was looking at Megan.
She was looking at the hair, fair as snow and heavy, that was Megan’s hair but was apparently also something else. She was looking at the angle of cheekbone and jaw and the green eyes,hergreen eyes, and her own face was doing something that it had clearly been very carefully prevented from doing for a very long time.
“Who are you?” the Duchess asked. Her voice was barely a whisper.
Megan could not speak.
“She does not know her name,” Dorothea said, and the gentleness in her voice was the specific gentleness of a woman who has been carrying something for someone else for a long time and is finally setting it down. “She was taken from her family when she was very small. She has been told she is no one. She has been told she belongs to no one.” A pause. “I did not believe it from the moment I first saw her.”
The Duchess rose from her chair.
She crossed the room with a steadiness that cost her something visible, a shaking in her hands that she could not quite control and stood before Megan and looked at her face for a very long time. Up close her own face was quite steady now, in the way that things became steady when they had moved past the capacity for ordinary trembling and into something else entirely.
“Your leg,” she said. “Below the knee, on the right side. Is there…” Her voice failed. She pressed her lips together and tried again. “Is there a mark? A birthmark, small, dark, at the outside of the ankle.”
The room was entirely still.
Megan looked at Dorothea. Dorothea looked back at her with the expression of a woman who has known this answer and held it and is holding it still and will say nothing.
With hands that were completely steady, because she had always been better at managing visible things than invisible ones, Megan reached down and drew up the hem of her gray dress and pulled down her stocking.
Just above the ankle, on the outside of her right leg, a small dark mark sat against her pale skin. She had had it all her life. She had never thought to wonder about it. No one had ever told her to wonder.
