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“The desk drawer,” she said, meeting Arthur’s eyes. She slid off his lap at once and kneeling, pushed the key into the lock of the drawer that had been shut up for years.
The key turned. “It worked,” she breathed.
“Let me,” Arthur said. “God knows what’s in there.”
She moved out of the way as he pulled the drawer all the way open. Peering past him, she saw ledger books, a bundle of letters, a small picture frame turned facedown.
He turned the frame over. It was a photograph, yellowed and aged, of a woman with a baby. The pose was remarkably like that of the painting leaning against her office wall. The faces were too grainy to make out clear features but there was something about the woman…something familiar.
Arthur squinted. “That’s not my grandmother. Or my great-grandmother.” He flipped it over and undid the clasps to remove the photo.
Regan took the ledger from the drawer. These were Lord Malcolm’s accounts. What he owed his tailor. What he owed The Pearl. What he owed his art dealer, his mistresses, his whores.
“Hannah Howell,” Arthur said.
Regan stopped perusing the ledger and looked up at him. “What about my mother?”
“The photo,” he said, passing it to her. “Her name’s on the back, but it’s dated 1938.”
Hannah Howell and Angus, Age 1. August 1938.Regan turned it back over and examined the faces. “It’s not your great-grandmother,” she said. “It’s mine. My mother was named after her. And Angus was my grandfather…”
She’d seen something in the ledger, something that made no sense.
“H.H.,” she said, reading a set of initials aloud. “Malcolm was paying her. A whole series of monthly payments, beginning in June 1937.”
“Paying her? For what?”
Regan raised an eyebrow at him. “The obvious, obviously.”
“Would he pay her directly? Or the hotel? Never paid for it before. How does it work?”
“Not like this,” she said. The payments had begun when her great-grandmother was heavily pregnant with Angus. “Pay for play, not one payment a month. It’s more like…”
Child maintenance payments.
Regan knew what she would find in the letters, and yet she read them one by one in order, passing them to Arthur when she was finished. First were the letters from Regan’s great-grandmother Hannah. Then there were letters from Lord Malcolm’s mother, the Dowager Countess of Godwick. Together, they told the story of a brief, torrid affair that ended as all brief, torrid affairs did. This one, however, had unintended consequences.
“Lord Malcolm was your great-grandfather,” Arthur said finally, having reached the same conclusion she had, the conclusion she couldn’t bring herself to say out loud. “Regan…we’re second cousins.”
She nodded slowly. “It seems we are.”
“Good thing you don’t hate us wicked Godwicks anymore,” he said with a laugh. “You’re one of us.”
13
The Prisoner
“My God,” Regan said, closing her eyes. She leaned forward, head in her hands.
“Regan. Regan?” Arthur’s voice pushed past her defenses. “You can’t believe for one second that matters to me or anyone.”
Of course it didn’t matter. Not that. First cousins could marry in Europe and did. Even if they were brother and sister it wouldn’t matter because she couldn’t have children.
It would never be that. It was this:
“Your grandfather turned away his own niece.”
“He did,” Arthur said.
