Why had he done this?
Perhaps . . . because she was unworthy?
But that was not true. Her mother’s voice no longer rang in her head, reminding her of her deficiencies. And for pity’s sake, why had she wished to hear that voice again? Had she imagined speaking to her mother would change anything? But she had changed. She was no longer that girl from four years ago.
“Di?” Tracy pressed the tea forward again.
She sprang up and hurried to the window. In front of the house a stable boy held Galahad’s reins. The big horse’s attention was turned toward his master standing several paces away beside a closed carriage pulled by four magnificent grays. Marked with a crest, the carriage door was open, revealing only shadows within.
“Diantha.” Tracy’s footsteps came behind her. “If you’re thinking Yale’s like our father, then you’re thinking wrongly. Our father did his best for all of us before the end.”
Sir Reginald Lucas had been a quiet inebriate, not howling and debauched but exhausted and sad. Wyn had been, rather, contained. Disciplined. On the road he’d never shouted or railed, and he had not handed her cruelties. Only that night at the inn the darkness in his eyes and the desperation of his touch had frightened her. But he’d told her afterward that he hadn’t been trying to frighten her. He had only wanted her.
An arm extended from the carriage and a heavy hand grasped Wyn’s shoulder. He dislodged it then climbed into the vehicle, and the carriage started away. Diantha’s gaze followed it around the corner.
“Don’t tell me you’re hoping he’ll return,” Tracy said behind her. “Because even if he does I won’t allow it.”
Out on the street, the boy reached up to stroke Galahad’s ebony neck and the thoroughbred dipped his head for the caress.
“Sis, I’ve news that will take your mind off that bounder.” Tracy shifted from one foot to another and shot a glance toward the window. “It’s about our mother. You see, she’s here in London.”
During the moment then in which she could not quite draw breath, Diantha considered the vicious irony of discovering she loved a man and then losing him within minutes of rediscovering the mother who had never loved her. It was, frankly, nearly too much to bear.
“London?” she said weakly. “But I thought her in France. That is to say, Papa said something to that effect.”
“Well, there’s the thing. I don’t know that our stepfather knows she’s here.” Tracy scrubbed a palm across his jaw. “If she’d told him, he might have alerted the authorities.”
“Authorities? What do you mean? Is she not supposed to be in England?”
Tracy’s eyes widened. “I thought you knew.”
“Knew what?”
“About that trouble with the law four years back.”
“The law?” She gaped. “Tracy, is Mama in exile? Is that why she left?”
“That, and Carlyle wouldn’t keep her any longer,” he said tightly. “Not after the smuggling.”
“Smuggling? Mama? Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
He shook his head. “Everybody knows it.”
“Only I didn’t because you never told me!”
“I supposed Serena did, or that you’d read it in the paper, and you didn’t wish to speak of it.”
Diantha sank into the chair Wyn had vacated minutes earlier. “I didn’t,” she whispered. “I did not wish to know.” It was, it seemed, a day for painful understandings.
The baroness had often said Diantha was not biddable enough, not demure enough, not beautiful enough. But the greatest cruelty her mother had perpetrated on her—the cruelty that only the housekeeper Bess and Teresa knew about—that she had not been brave enough to tell Wyn about even after all he had shown her of himself—that cruelty she had only learned of two years ago. In seeking out her mother in Calais, she had wanted to confront her with it, to tell her that she knew about the lie and that she had overcome it. But she could not have pursued that interview if she’d known her family might be hurt by renewing the connection with her mother. So she had never asked them why the baroness left. Not once.
Wyn was not the only one who had told untruths. She had lied to herself. Over and over again.
“Oh, Tracy.” She covered her face with her hands. “None of this has gone the way I planned.”
“Well, that ain’t here nor there. But she’s leaving for France again tonight and I don’t think she’ll be back. So do you wish to see her or not?”
Mouth dry, Diantha nodded.
“All right then,” he said stiffly. “I’d better go arrange that. I’ll be back for you before dinner. But listen, don’t tell Serena. This will be between the two of us, all right?”
Diantha looked into her brother’s face and saw uncertainty and weakness. He was Sir Reginald’s son, after all. Nothing like Wyn, no matter how she tried to understand it.
“I won’t tell her.”
Wyn would never know that she’d found her mother either. He hadn’t wanted her to go to Calais; perhaps he had known about her mother’s exile, as everyone else seemed to. So this was for the best. That he knew nothing further of her at all was for the best, and that she knew nothing more of him.
But not one iota of her aching heart believed that.
Chapter 28
The carriage with the noble crest on the door preyed upon Diantha for the remainder of the day. In the parlor after a walk in the park with the children, Diantha wandered, pretending to herself that she did not intend to go toward the window, then when she went there pressing her nose against the glass and peering down the street. The stable boy sat on a stoop two houses down.
“Serena, I think I left my gloves in the carriage just now.”
Serena’s head was bent to letter writing. “Ask John to fetch them for you.”
“Oh, he’s probably busy polishing the silver or some such thing.” She hurried to the door. “I’ll go myself.” She sprinted across the hall. The footman stood in the foyer. She gave him a bright smile then put a silencing finger to her lips. “I won’t go far, John,” she whispered and slipped out the door. He stood on the stoop and watched after her as she ran along the sidewalk.
The boy looked up, a shiny coin suspended between two fingers. He jumped to his feet and tugged his cap. “G’day, miss.” He wasn’t but eight or nine, trim and neat as all the servants in Serena’s household.
She smiled. “What are you playing there with your coin?”
His face twisted into an anxious grimace.
“Oh,” she said, “I don’t intend to take it from you. Only, I saw you playing and wondered what game it is. I am very fond of clever games.” And lies, like the lie she’d told Serena about going to Lady Emily’s this evening so that she could instead pay a secret call on her wicked mother.
His shoulders relaxed and he flipped the coin between his fingers again. “You see, miss, this here game is good for what you call ‘agilities.’ ” He nodded knowingly.
She drew up her skirts and settled on the stoop. “Will you show me?”
He extended his hand and the coin jumped back and forth between his fingers like a living creature, passing across his knuckles thrice before it fell with a clink to the step. The boy frowned. “Hain’t yet got the whole hang of it.”
“I am certain you will soon. Have you just learned it?”
“The gentleman what came calling at milord’s house this morning taught it me ’fore I held his horse.” He peered at the coin with unrest again.
“You don’t seem happy with it. Isn’t it enough for holding a horse?”
His brows made two upside down U’s. “Oh, no, miss, it’s plenty. It’s just that when the gentleman went, he left his horse behind. It’s a fine horse, miss, or I wouldn’t a wondered at it.”