They walked in silence for a while. Kit offered no comment that might distract his companion’s train of thought.
“Their wedding trip turned into a permanent way of life,” Lord Galton continued eventually. “She—Miriam—was forever wanting Lauren to join them, but I flatly refused to send her, and Kilbourne backed me on that decision. She was no fit mother, and they lived no fitting style of life for a child. There were forever rumors about their wild excesses and debaucheries, brought home by other travelers. Finally, Ravensberg, when they were in India, she left Wyatt in order to take up residence with some fabulously wealthy Indian potentate, and he resumed his travels with a Frenchwoman of questionable reputation. He died five years later—ten years ago—somewhere in South America. Kilbourne did not go into public mourning—mainly for Lauren’s sake. He did not want to have to hurt her with explanations. She was sixteen years old at the time—an impressionable age.”
“Good God! And Mrs. Wyatt?” Kit asked.
“The last I heard, she was still in India, with some official of the East India Company,” Baron Galton said curtly. “She writes once or twice a year, usually to Lauren. She is dead to me, Ravensberg, and by damn she will remain dead to my granddaughter if I have any say in the matter.”
“You—or Kilbourne—have kept her mother’s letters from her? You do not believe she should know the truth?” Kit asked. “That her mother is still alive?”
“I do not.”
The house was well in sight. It had been a lengthy walk for an elderly gentleman who obviously did not indulge in a great deal of exercise. He was breathing heavily.
“Perhaps,” he said sternly, “you feel you have made a bad bargain in your choice of bride, Ravensberg. But it was your choice to rush into a betrothal. And by God you will treat her kindly, or you will have me to answer to for as long as I am spared from my grave.”
“You need not worry about that, sir,” Kit said. “I love your granddaughter.”
The lie was spoken without thought, but it could not be recalled. And it was not such a great untruth, was it? He had grown enormously fond of Lauren. He had lain awake half the night before, thinking about her, wishing she were there in the bed beside him, curled warm and relaxed and asleep against him as she had in the hut and on the island, realizing that after she left there was going to be a yawning emptiness in his life for some time to come. The idea of actually marrying her was becoming more and more appealing to him. The need somehow to persuade her to marry him was becoming more and more imperative, quite aside from the fact that she might be with child by him.
Yet how could he coerce her when it seemed that the greatest gift he could give her was her freedom?
“Then you will protect her from the sordid truth,” Baron Galton said, “as I have done. As the late Kilbourne and his countess and their son have done. If you love her, you will never breathe a word to her of what really happened to her mother. She is far happier in her ignorance.”
“Yes, of course, sir. I will do all in my power to protect her.”
But she was not happy, he thought. All those who had loved her all her life were wrong about that. She had cultivated obedience and gentility and placidity in order to hide the hurt of being a child unwanted by her own mother. She had made herself into the perfect lady to win the love of her adopted family—so that they too would not abandon her. She believed her grandfather had not wanted the bother of caring for her. She believed—rightly, it seemed—that her father’s family had openly rejected her.
She was not happy. She had lived behind the mask for so long—for at least twenty-three of her twenty-six years—that even those nearest and dearest to her seemed to believe that the mask was the reality. Perhaps he was the only person on this earth who had seen the eager, vital, laughter-loving, sensual, truly beautiful woman who was the real Lauren Edgeworth.
But it was indeed a sordid story. Under the circumstances perhaps her grandfather and the Kilbournes had made the right decision to keep it from her. What would it do to her to discover now that her mother still lived, that she was, apparently, promiscuous?
That she had never stopped writing to her daughter?
That she had wanted Lauren to live with her?
“No.” Kit stopped walking again. They were very close to the house. “No, sir, I cannot agree with you. Lauren has suffered from not knowing. She would suffer too from knowing. Perhaps it would be a kindness to keep the truth from her, to protect her because she is a lady and has lived a sheltered life. But I don’t believe so. I believe she has the right to know.”
“You would tell her, then,” Baron Galton asked, clearly angry, “when I have spoken to you in strictest confi-dence?”
Kit looked steadily back at him. “Yes, I believe I will, sir,” he said, “if I am given no alternative. I will tell her the truth after I marry her. Not before then. I beg you to do it. The story should come from you. She needs the truth. You need to trust her with it. You need to set her free.”
“Free?” The old gentleman frowned. He drew breath to say more, but closed his mouth again.
“Please, sir?” Kit asked softly.
Chapter 19
Lauren had fully expected the day before the dowager’s birthday to be a busy one since she had committed herself to helping the countess with the last-minute preparations. But looking back on it later, she marveled that any day could be so eventful and still contain only twenty-four hours. She had never lived through a more tumultuous, emotion-packed day.
It began after breakfast when she was already busy with the countess in the latter’s private sitting room, drawing up a written schedule for the next day’s division of labor. The earl and countess would officially greet all comers during the afternoon—outdoors if weather permitted—and judge all the contests that had been announced in the village and the surrounding countryside a month or more ago. Kit and Lauren would organize and run the children’s races. The countess would . . .
But there was a knock on the door and at the countess’s summons it opened to reveal an apologetic Aunt Clara, with Gwen behind her.
“I am so sorry to interrupt you, Lady Redfield,” Aunt Clara said, lifting her right hand to reveal an opened letter, “but I simply could not wait to let Lauren know the news.”
Lauren got to her feet. She had noticed Gwen’s suppressed excitement at the same moment as she saw the ducal crest at the head of the letter—the Duke of Portfrey’s crest, that was.
“Elizabeth has been delivered safely of a boy,” Aunt Clara announced before they all disgraced themselves by falling into one another’s arms and laughing and crying and exclaiming.
“The Duchess of Portfrey?” the countess asked, getting to her feet and hugging Lauren. “Well, this news is as good an excuse for an interruption of work as any I have heard. Do sit down, ladies, and I will have a pot of chocolate brought up. I am quite sure Lauren is ready to hear every sentence of that letter. If she is not, I am.”
The duke had written that his son and heir had arrived earlier than expected, but with ten fingers and ten toes, a powerful set of lungs, and a voracious appetite. Elizabeth was recovering well after a long and difficult delivery. As soon as mother and child could safely travel, he was intending to take them to Newbury Abbey so that the newborn Marquess of Watford could become acquainted with Lily, his half-sister, and Elizabeth could be fussed over by her own family for a month or so.
“Oh, Lauren,” Gwen said, tightening her grasp on her cousin’s hands, “Mama and I must go home early to prepare for their arrival. Not that we will need to do anything, of course. Lily and Nev will have everything well under control. The duke is Lily’s father, after all, and the baby her half-brother. And Elizabeth is Neville’s aunt as much as she is mine. But—” She smiled, still dewy-eyed.