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Pen’s brow furrowed. “Forgive me, but what does this have to do with my mother?”
Florence’s cheeks pulled back in a strained smile. “That lieutenant reappeared five years later at the arm of Margot after her summer in Bath. He was a captain by then and Margot and he were deeply in love. But Margot was much cannier than Anne. By the time my parents discovered his presence in her life, she was already with child. She thought it would force my parents to allow her to marry him.”
Florence paused, her hand on her belly stilling. “She was so young. Nineteen. So naïve about the way society works. About how my parents are. Even at thirteen I could see how naïve she was. And also how in love.”
“What happened?”
“My parents threw her out.” Florence’s shoulders lifted. “Disowned her. Locked her out of the house with nothing but the clothes on her back. It was quite awful and I remember looking down at her from the window in my room—she was standing outside the front door, crying, railing at my parents. I remember crying as I watched her, wanting to go to her. Anne wouldn’t let me. The captain was already gone at that point—he’d been called back to his ship. My third eldest sister—Georgiana—did sneak out and give Margot a valise filled with her best dresses and all the coin she could find in the house. Georgina has only spoken to me once about that time, and only after she was quite foxed. She said Margot planned to get on a ship and follow her captain to sea.”
Her throat constricted, Pen had to force her next words out. “You…you are telling me I am a bastard?”
Florence’s bottom lip jutted upward. “That I do not know. Maybe Margot made it to her Captain. Maybe they married before you were born. I do not know.”
“How do you not know?” Pen’s hand tore from Strider’s grip as she jabbed a step forward. “How did your family never track her—find out the truth about what happened to their own daughter?”
“It is brutal, I know.” Florence’s face crumpled. “I cannot apologize for my parent’s actions, for I have never been able to rationalize it in my own mind, throwing away a daughter like that. After they removed Margot from our house, we were never allowed to speak Margot’s name again. And Anne…”
She shook her head, her face going upward to the canopy of leaves above her. “Anne has always been so bitter. To the core. Margot stole her love and the hatred that has poured from her since then knows no bounds. She is one of the most bitter people that you will ever meet. Desperate and resentful and she has done everything in her power to make sure all evidence of your mother ever existing in our family was destroyed long ago. Her name scratched out of the family bible. Anne told all of Margot’s acquaintances that she disappeared during a walk by the ocean and was presumed swept out to sea and dead. From the moment Margot was pushed out the front door, she has been dead to everyone. But not to me.”
Her hand shaking, Florence reached out, setting her palm along the side of Pen’s face. “I am so sorry you never knew her. Your mother was such a kind, wonderful spirit that made everyone around her smile. She was special. So special. Which is why her fall hit the hardest. She didn’t deserve anything but happiness and that’s not what my family delivered. I can only hope she found her captain—Captain Willington, I can only presume by your surname. I hope she found him and she had a few months of happiness before she died.”
Pen’s fingers lifted, clasping onto the back of Florence’s hand on her cheek. Her eyes closed for a long breath, locking into memory the closest thing to her own mother’s touch as she would ever get. Her eyes opened to her aunt. “Thank you.”
Florence nodded. “She was loved. Loved before the end. So I know she loved you, child. I hope she got to hold you before she passed.” Tears welled in her eyes and she pulled her hand away from Pen’s cheek. “I have to get back before they realize I came after you.”
Pen nodded, her arms wrapping about her middle as she watched in silence as Florence went to her horse and untied the reins from the tree. Strider moved to her, offering his fingers clasped together as a step for her to mount her mare.
Within a minute, she was gone, her horse on a quick pace back to the road and disappearing around a bend.
Strider’s arm wrapped around her shoulders as his look stayed on the road. “I’m sorry, Pen.” His lips landed on the top of her head.
“Sorry for?”
“Sorry they are miserable pieces of human refuse—save for that one.” His head nodded to the road where Florence had disappeared. “You deserve better.”
“Do I? I don’t know what I deserve.” She curled slightly around her arms holding her middle. “I’m a bastard, Strider. Illegitimate.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I don’t know otherwise. The possibility of my mother finding my father before I was born—it would have been quite impossible, Strider.”
“So what if you are?”
The edges of her mouth dropped into a frown. How to explain this to him? “It is a death. A death of what I had always imagined. A death of my parents’ grand love affair. A death of her wanting him and him wanting her so much they had to escape across the seas to be together. Instead, it was ugly and my father went from one sister to another and then abandoned her. Ugly from her family. Ugly from my father. I wasn’t wanted.”
“Nowthatyou truly don’t know.”
“I can imagine.”
“Then you need to stop your mind.” His arm tightened about her shoulders. “Now. Before you take all of that ugly from your family and apply it to yourself. You’re not their kind, Pen. You never were. If I were to imagine, I imagine your mother was the exact same as you. Kind and loving and trusting and always looking for the good instead of the bad.”
She looked up at him. “But you don’t like to imagine.”
He looked down at her, sincerity in his eyes. “I will in this instance.” His feet started moving and he steered her toward the carriage. “Let us get out of Bedfordshire and never return.”
She nodded, numb, the sense of her body, her person, quickly disappearing, leaving only a gaping, vacant hole down the center of her in its wake.
Leave. That seemed like the best—the only idea.
