Page 29 of The Lost Letter: A Victorian Romance

“Frequently.” His somber expression briefly reflected a glimmer of the anguish in her own. “And you wrote to me, apparently.”

“Often.”

“And sealed your letters with a thousand kisses.”

Oh God! She looked away from him. “D-did I tell you that?” Her eyes closed briefly against a flood of embarrassment. “I’m sorry. My head is spinning.”

“It is a lot to take in.”

“Yes. I still cannot…” She tried to put her feelings into words, but it was all a jumble. “When you never answered, I thought…I thought…”

“I know what you thought,” he said. “It was what I thought as well. I expect it is what he wanted us to think.”

“That we hated each other.”

“Worse. That we had forgotten each other.”

She pressed a hand to her face, struggling desperately to make sense of it all. “Wait…” Her disordered thoughts caught on one phrase and held. “Who are you talking about? Who is he?”

“Your father, obviously.”

Sylvia’s breath stopped. “No,” she said. It was not true. It couldn’t be. If Sebastian had known her father better, he would never have suggested such a thing. “Papa would not have interfered.”

“You think not?”

“He had no reason,” she said. “It was he who gave me permission to write to you.”

For the barest instant, Sebastian could not hide his astonishment. And then his expression shuttered. “Did he, indeed,” he said. There was an underlying current of anger in his voice.

“Yes.” Her words tumbled out more quickly as she rose to Papa’s defense. “He saw how distressed I was when you returned to India. He told me not to worry. That you would return in no time at all. He even gave me his morning papers each day at breakfast so that I could search for news of you to put my mind at ease.”

Sebastian stilled. “You looked for news of me in the papers?”

A self-conscious blush rose in her cheeks. “Of course, I did. I checked for your name every day. I was terrified that you would be hurt or killed. And then, when I heard nothing from you, I thought you must have been. It did not even occur to me until much later that you simply had no wish to write to me.” She exhaled slowly. “Or so I believed.”

He looked at her for a long time, a bewildering series of emotions crossing his face. “I still cannot believe that your father permitted you to write to me.”

“Why not? He knew that we were friends. And he was not unsympathetic to a soldier’s need for letters from home.” She paused, adding, “Surely you must realize by now that Papa was not a high stickler.”

“In my experience,” Sebastian said dryly, “even the most ramshackle fellow can transform into a high stickler when it comes to his own daughter.”

Sylvia’s brows knit in an apprehensive frown. She looked down at her lap, trying to think of a way to explain to Sebastian that Papa could have had nothing to do with any of it. It must have been an error with the post, she thought, or something to do with the unreliability of mail delivery in India. But the more she puzzled over it, the less certain she became.

Her father made a rather obvious villain. He was in debt. Serious enough debt that he would take his own life a year later. He had a strong motive for her to marry well. Specifically, to marry one of her wealthier admirers—Lord Goddard, perhaps. If he had thought she was in danger of marrying a comparatively poor soldier, he could easily have taken steps to prevent her from forming what he believed to be an undesirable attachment.

But if he had objected to her burgeoning romance with Sebastian, why on earth had Papa given her permission to correspond with him? Unless…

Unless he had known that to forbid her outright was the surest way to guarantee that she would take the bit between her teeth and do exactly as she pleased.

No. It would have been a much better strategy to make her believe that her gentleman of choice had cruelly abandoned her. That he had, perhaps, merely been amusing himself at her expense during the London season.

She shook her head, refusing to believe it. Papa had been selfish. Reckless. But a deception such as this passed all bounds. “He wouldn’t have done such a thing,” she insisted, as much to herself as to Sebastian. “Not to me.”

Sebastian looked wholly unconvinced. “Did he ever give you any indication that he objected to my suit?”

Sylvia lifted one shoulder in a helpless shrug. “He did question me, naturally, but he was not unreasonable and, in the end, he said that he trusted me and I may do as I liked.”

“How very obliging of him,” he said. “Did it never occur to you that he might have read your letters?”