Page 2 of The Lost Letter: A Victorian Romance

“Yes. A thick lock of dark brown hair. Milsom confessed that it belonged to a lady named Miss Sylvia Stafford and that—”

Sylvia felt all the color drain out of her face. A long suppressed memory threatened to overwhelm her. “You don’t mean that your brother…That your brother is…”

“The Earl of Radcliffe. Though you would have known him as Colonel Sebastian Conrad—Oh dear! Miss Stafford!” Lady Harker leapt up and rushed to Sylvia’s side. “Have you swooned? Shall I fetch my sal volatile? Do say something Miss Stafford!”

Sylvia stared up at the chattering figure of Lady Harker. “I have not swooned,” she said. “I am perfectly well. Only a little surprised.”

Lady Harker clasped Sylvia’s hand. “My dear Sylvia…May I call you Sylvia? And you must call me Julia, for I feel as if you are a sister to me already. And I mean to make you my sister. It is why I have come. To force you back to Hertfordshire with me so that you may marry my brother and make him well again. But I mustn’t get ahead of myself. We must first get to know each other and then—Ah! Here is our tea.”

She released Sylvia’s hand to usher in the maid with the tea service. Having done so, she sent her back out again, sat down, and proceeded to pour. “Sugar? Lots of it?” She dropped several lumps into Sylvia’s teacup and stirred briskly. “Here you are, Miss Stafford. A few sips of this and you shall feel better directly.”

Sylvia took the teacup with visibly trembling hands. She forced herself to take a swallow. The hot, sweet liquid calmed her quivering insides, but she did not think there was a beverage on earth that could calm her quaking heart. “Your brother…” she began, amazed that her voice was as steady as it sounded. “You say that he was injured in India?”

Lady Harker heaved a sigh. “Horribly injured, I’m afraid.” She helped herself to a chocolate biscuit. “A saber cut cleaved the side of his face and he is now terribly scarred and blind in one eye. He did not lose the eye, thank goodness. It is only cloudy. I say this to prepare you, Miss Stafford. For when I first beheld him, I am afraid I acquitted myself rather badly. It is a bit frightening, you see.”

Sylvia slowly lowered her teacup back to its saucer and returned them both to the tea tray. She was trembling all over now and hard pressed to conceal it. “Is your brother in very much pain?” she asked faintly.

“I fear so. Though, I do think he could bear it all better if he would only allow people to come and see him.” She heaved another sigh. “But he does not want anyone to see him. I think he is ashamed to have lost his looks. Not that he was ever very handsome to begin with. But I daresay you thought he was, else why would you have given him such a large lock of your hair?”

Sylvia thought of that night in Lord and Lady Mainwaring’s garden so long ago. The air had been redolent with the perfume of roses. The stars shining like diamonds. She had let him kiss her there. And she had kissed him in return, cradling his stern jaw in her hands. “How many young ladies have you kissed in moonlit gardens, I wonder,” she had murmured to him.

“None but you, Miss Stafford,” he had replied huskily. “None but you.”

Sylvia looked across at Lady Harker. She could see no resemblance between her and Colonel Conrad. Sebastian had been tall, dark, and broad-shouldered, his features harsh, as if carved from granite. He had been intimidating to most. Especially to young, silly women. Sylvia’s friends had gasped behind their fans when first he approached her and asked her to dance.

“You’ve frightened them,” she had told him. Indeed, except for a brief introduction at a party the previous evening, those may have been the very first words she had ever spoken to Sebastian Conrad.

“Have I?”

“They are all about to swoon.”

He had stared down at her, an expression in his eyes hard to read. “But not you, I take it.”

“Oh, I never swoon. And it takes a great deal to frighten me. Far more than a scowl.” She had smiled up at him then, adding, “You shall have to try harder, sir.”

Sylvia hated to think of it now. “Yes, I did give him a lock of my hair,” she said. “It was very wrong of me to do so. We were not engaged. And we had no understanding between us. But I was young then, poorly chaperoned, and I confess, far too romantic minded for my own good.”

“Never say so, Miss Stafford! Your lock of hair has given him ever so much comfort. And I am sure he meant to propose. You must know that words have never come easily to my brother. And I have never known him to even speak with a young woman—unless you count that gruff sort of grumbling he was always used to do. Why, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I discovered that he had a lock of hair from his sweetheart. If I had only known—”

“Lady Harker—” Sylvia objected.

“Naturally, I wrote to all my friends to find out who you were and where you were. I told my husband that if I had not found you by Christmas, I would hire a private enquiry agent to do so. But as luck would have it, my dear friend Lucinda Cavendish was staying with Lord and Lady Ponsonby in London and was able to discover from Lady Ponsonby’s maid, Miss Button, that you—”

“Button? My former lady’s maid?” Sylvia was stunned. She had not thought of Button in ages, but the mere mention of her name was enough to bring it all back.

Papa had hired Miss Button to be her lady’s maid just after her fifteenth birthday. She had been one of the only constants in Sylvia’s young life. How well she could remember Button arranging her hair as she sat in front of her ornately gilded dressing table. Or Button waiting up until all hours to help her undress and to listen, avidly, as she related everything that had happened at whichever ball or concert she had been attending that evening. Button had even been the one to comfort her on those rare occasions when something—or someone—had driven her to tears.

And yet, for all that, she and Button had never been more than mistress and servant. It was a fact which had been painfully driven home to her in the days following Papa’s suicide.

“What shall we do, Button?” she had wept during the initial, overwhelming wave of grief. “What is to become of us?”

But there was no us. The ink had hardly been dry on Sir Roderick’s death certificate before Button was informing her that she had secured a new place and would be taking her leave.

Sylvia had known herself then to be truly alone.

“That’s right.” Lady Harker nodded. “Miss Button said that you had gone into service with a family named Dinwiddy as governess to their children. It was not long after that I found you here in Cheapside.”

“I see.” Sylvia looked down at her hands as they lay folded in her lap. They were chalk white. Rigid. “Does your brother know that you have come here?” she asked, raising her gaze back to Lady Harker’s face.