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Chapter 1
A Tragic Letter
Clara drew in a sharp breath, suddenly aware of a strange ringing sound in her ears. Though she was comfortably seated she found her fingers scrabbling to find purchase on the table to keep her from toppling to the floor. Across the polished oaken expanse, she watched as the finely-dressed pale gentleman regarded her with a dispassionate gaze.
“I…I do beg your pardon, Mr Finch,” Clara breathed. “I do believe I may have misheard you. Would you mind repeating what you just said?”
The man sniffed through his thick, bushy moustache, giving Clara a cold look up and down. Under normal circumstances she would have a fair guess what he was thinking—just like any proud middle-class fellow, he was likely either leering at her body or sizing up just how rude he currently felt like being to one of her station.
But then, these were anything but normal circumstances.
With a hearty harrumph, Mr Finch spoke again in a slightly more insistent voice. “As I previously verbalized, Miss Clara, you are the natural daughter of the late Duke Lionel St. George. As such, you stand to inherit a portion of his estate.”
Clara felt her world threaten to shrink away into blackness. Her eyes leapt about the Fitzroy family salon for something stable to alight upon. But though the room had been such a familiar sight, not two moments before—to the point of debilitating boredom, really—the ornaments and furniture that she had spent her youth dusting and polishing now seemed entirely alien to her.
Taking a deep breath to steel her nerves, she instead locked her eye back on the gentleman across from her. When he had knocked at the door of her employer and asked to speak to her, of all people, Clara had taken him first for a constable, though his appearance immediately refuted this judgment.
Dressed modern if not extravagant fashion, Mr Finch had the salt-and-pepper hair and the thin, ink-stained fingers of a secretary or banker, and a pained expression to match this assessment. Indeed, he had a severe face, if not an unkind one—a hard youth spent at Saint Julian’s had been a good education in telling the difference between the two.
Clara found herself so engrossed in the sight of the man before her, and so lost in the sheer impossibility of the news he bore, that she nearly jumped out of her chair in surprise when he cleared his throat once again.
“I see,” she managed to say at last.
Foolish girl, she chastised herself, wincing. You’ll need to say more than that, or he will take you for a simpleton!
“You…are not unwell, are you, Miss?” Mr Finch asked, though he did not move from his position with legs crossed in one of the Fitzroys’ antique wooden chairs. “If you are infirm, it is feasible for me to return at a later hour.”
“No, no, thank you, sir,” Clara stammered. “It’s just…well, this is rather a lot to take in. To suddenly find out that I had a father—a lord, you said?”
“I did not, but that may be inferred by His Grace’s mode of address.”
“And he died?”
“Indeed,” Mr Finch said, unblinking. “His Grace’s expiration was as recent as it was tragic.”
Clara reached to scratch her head in confusion, then stopped herself—Mrs Worthing, the housekeeper, had rather savagely tried to break her of this habit, calling it unclean. Their mutual employer, Mrs Fitzroy, tended to agree and had a tendency to look at Clara out of the side of her eye as if she were covered in filth.
Clearing her throat instead, she asked in a shaky voice, “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand the last part. I am his ‘natural daughter’?”
The slim man stole a glance at his pocket watch, then snapped it shut with a purposeful twitch of his moustache. “Perhaps it would be suitable for you to read the letter with which I have presented you. I understand His Grace explains the circumstances a bit more fully therein.”
With another shock, Clara suddenly remembered the sealed envelope on the table before her. She had been so addled by the situation that she had forgotten it entirely. With shaking hands, she picked it up and examined it once more. On the front was written “Clara,” and on the back, it was sealed with a dried blob of dark blue wax.
I’ve never opened a letter addressed to me before, she thought, fingers brushing against the stiff, brilliantly white paper. Much less one sealed by a Duke!
Casting nervous glances to Mr Finch, who continued to be most unhelpful in his dedicated apathy, Clara carefully opened the envelope and withdrew a single folded page covered in looped, flowing handwriting.
“To My Dearest Daughter:
“I imagine this letter must come as something of a surprise. I can only beg your patience as I relate this story that by all rights you should have known all your life.
“Twenty-four years ago, I engaged in a secret liaison with a maid in my employ named Sara Barstow. She was a wonderful young woman, and apart from the impropriety and the tragedy that followed our entanglement, I do not regret or recant one ounce of the affection she and I shared.
“As Fate would have it, Sara and I conceived a child. Tragically, I did not become aware of this fact until after she had died in childbirth and given her baby—our baby—to St. Julian’s. That baby was you, Clara.
“I know that a better man would have taken you in to raise as his own rightful progeny. But I had a growing family of my own, and I knew my wife would never agree to taking you in. And as my integrity proved to be as low as my station was high, I ultimately chose to leave you in the care of the Sisters of the orphanage.
“I know no words can excuse my neglect, but I want you to know that I have regretted my decision for these many long years since your birth. I can only hope that sharing some small piece of my family’s fortune—our family’s fortune, Clara—can in some way make up for leaving you alone for all these long years. For you to be well taken care of and no longer alone is my final wish on my deathbed, and my most fervent.
