The Duchess was still holding her hand.
She did not appear to be in any hurry to stop.
“I have something I need to tell you,” Megan said.
It was the wrong thing to say. She heard it the moment it was said, heard the shape of it, the weight that came with it, and saw the Duchess go still with the particular stillness of a woman who has spent twenty years braced for the worst news and found good news and is not yet finished being afraid.
“Not about now,” Megan said quickly. “I am well. I am more than well. Oliver—Lord Astor, he…” She stopped. “There is a plan. I am protected. I am going to be the Marchioness of Astor.” She felt the strangeness of the sentence even now, the clean surreal fact of it. “I am not in danger.”
Margaret closed her eyes for one moment. Opened them.
“But there are things,” Megan continued, “that happened in that house. Things that were done. That you deserve to know.” She looked at her mother’s face, which was the most extraordinary thing,her mother’s face, and tried to find the right words for what she was about to say and could not. “I need you to know so that you understand why we are going to make him pay. But I am also afraid of what it will cost you.”
The Duchess looked at her steadily. “You think it will hurt me.”
“I know it will hurt you.”
“Megan.” Dorothea spoke. Her voice was perfectly level, and she had the quality she always had when she had thought something through completely and was delivering the conclusion. “Look at your mother.”
Megan looked.
“She has spent fourteen years imagining every possible thing that might have happened to you,” Dorothea continued. “Every night for fourteen years she has had those thoughts. The not-knowing is its own injury. Whatever the truth is, whatever Penharrow did—” She paused. “It will not be worse than what her mind has made in the dark in the absence ofinformation. You will not spare her pain by protecting her from facts.”
Megan was quiet.
The Duchess was still looking at her with those eyes that were her eyes, calm and steady and absolutely certain.
“She is right,” Margaret said. “And I will tell you something else.” She released Megan’s hand and sat back slightly, straight-backed, and became quite precisely the woman who had walked into the room, all composure and bone and contained iron. “I am not the woman who needs protecting in this room. I am the woman whose daughter was stolen from her by a man who apparently decided he was above the law and above God and above every article of human decency.” Her voice was very quiet. “Whatever he did to you, I want to know it. Not because I will be broken by it.” Her eyes were extremely dry now. “Because I want to be accurately informed when I decide how to end him.”
Dorothea made a sound that was extremely short and also, unmistakably, satisfied.
“Now,” said the Dowager Duchess of Saxton, setting down her glass, “we are in agreement, the three of us. The first order of business is making Megan’s identity irrefutable. Not merely claimed but documented, verified, beyond any legal question. I have already been in conversation with a solicitor, and I intend to speak to him again this afternoon.”
“The birth records,” Margaret said immediately. “We have birth records and there are parish records, christening records. I remember the day as if it were yesterday, holding you in my arms. I remember the vicar, I remember exactly which church. There were witnesses. Nanny Wilson is still alive. She can attest to the birthmark which is a family trait. Your brother has it too. We had friends present; half the county was there.” Something moved through her expression. “He won’t win.”
“That is precisely what I have been working from,” Dorotheasaid. “And there is the matter of Lady Megan herself, whose resemblance to her mother is sufficiently striking that I recognized her without being told, and a birthmark, well documented in the family records I intend to summons.”
“The family Bible,” Margaret said. “My husband’s grandmother wrote every birth in the family Bible. Megan’s birthmark is recorded there. She wrote it down herself.” A pause. “The Bible is at Newbury Park in Wiltshire. It has been there for forty years.”
Dorothea looked at her over her spectacles with an expression of pure appreciation.
“Margaret,” she said. “I have always thought well of you.”
“And I of you.” The Duchess folded her hands in her lap. “Now. Oliver Sommerset is a good man. I remember his father. He has been working to protect my daughter, and I am grateful for it, and I intend to support him in whatever way I can.” She paused. “But I want it made clear that I am not a bystander in whatever comes next. Penharrow has been living his life as if what he did has no reckoning coming. I have been waiting a long time to give him one.”
“We had rather thought,” Dorothea said, with a serenity that had iron underneath it, “of making the reckoning comprehensive.”
“Tell me what you have in mind.”
“The petition he has brought in Chancery with Megan’s identity established, it collapses entirely. But that is a legal outcome. It is tidy. It restores what was taken.” Dorothea’s dark eyes were very direct. “I want more than restoration. I want him ruined. I want him investigated under the criminal law for what he did. I want him excluded from every room he has ever been in, and I want every man who ever showed him courtesy to understand what they were courteous to.” She paused. “He is a Welsh earl. His influence in London is limited and his debts are considerable. I have been making enquiries.”
Margaret was listening with the focused attention of a woman receiving military intelligence.
“He has enemies,” Dorothea continued. “Men he has wronged in the past decade. Men with standing who have been waiting for the correct alignment to act against him. My son the duke has more weight in Parliament than Penharrow can dream of, and he is—” She glanced at Megan. “Significantly motivated.”
“As am I,” Margaret said. “As well your brother the Duke of Newbury. God help me, I’ve never said this about anyone, but I want that man dead. He cost me…he cost me my daughter, and I will have my revenge.”
Megan looked at the two of them. Her mother and Dorothea, one in lavender and grey, one in black silk, both with the identical quality of composed and terrifying resolution, the particular quality of women who had spent too long being patient.
