Sometime before dawn she heard the rain begin again, pattering against the windowpanes. She thought of Rachel Fairchild lying in her cold, lonely grave beneath the pounding rain, and although she knew it was absurd, the rain unsettled her. When she finally drifted off to sleep, it was with the vague, half-formed intention of visiting the Friends’ burial ground the next day.
She arose early that morning, little refreshed. The rain had stopped sometime after dawn, although the clouds still hung low and heavy. Armed with a selection of lilacs and lilies from the corner flower stall, Hero set forth shortly after breakfast, accompanied by her maid and traveling in her own carriage. She was aware of her father’s servant discreetly shadowing her, but she had no need, today, to escape his watchful eye.
He followed her north, past Oxford Road to Paddington and the small hamlet of Pentonville that lay beyond it. She located the Friends’ meetinghouse and burial grounds easily enough, for she had sought directions from Joshua Walden. Leaving her carriage beneath the arching canopy of an old elm growing at the side of the road, she entered the burial ground through a simple gate in its low rubble wall.
The graves of the eight women were easy to find, a sad row of freshly turned earth beside the far western wall, slashes of dark brown contrasting starkly with the green of the wet grass. As Hero walked down the hill, her gaze narrowed at the sight of a tall woman who stood beside the graves with her head bowed, her shoulders hunched. She was dressed in black silk, with her hands fisted around the strings of a large traveling reticule. At the sound of Hero’s footfalls on the sodden grass, the woman turned, revealing the grief-ravaged face of Rachel’s sister Lady Sewell.
“It’s you,” she said in a breathy whisper, one hand coming up to cover her trembling mouth.
Hero’s step faltered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were here.” She made a vague gesture with the flowers she’d brought. “I’ll just leave these and go.”
Lady Sewell nodded toward the row of unmarked graves. “I don’t even know which of these graves is hers. Do you?”
Hero shook her head. “No. I’m sorry.”
Lady Sewell’s breath caught on a sob. “She never told me what he was doing to her. You do believe me, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course,” said Hero, although she hadn’t the slightest idea what the woman was talking about.
“All those years and she never said a word. But I should have known, shouldn’t I?”
“You should?”
Lady Sewell clenched her jaw tight to keep it from shuddering. “We made a deal, Father and I. I would keep quiet about the shooting, and he in turn would let me marry Sewell.” Her lip curled. “I should have known I couldn’t trust him.”
“The shooting?” said Hero.
A muscle bunched along the woman’s jaw. “He killed her, you know. My mother. It was an accident. He was trying to take the gun away from her, and it went off. But he still killed her.”
Hero remembered what Devlin had told her, about the death of Rachel’s mother. “You mean, in the pavilion?”
Rachel’s sister nodded. “Mama found out what he was doing to me. She knew he was spending the afternoon by the lake, working on some speech he was to give. She went down there, intending to kill him. I ran after her, begging her not to do it. She just told me to go home.”
Hero studied the other woman’s mottled, tear-streaked face. “Your mother was planning to shoot your father? But . . . why?”
Lady Sewell gave a soft, scornful laugh. “You still don’t understand, do you? You have no idea what it’s like. Lying in bed at night, afraid. Listening for the creak of the stairs. Your stomach clenching with the dread of hearing his footsteps in the hall. Knowing what’s coming. The pain, the . . .” Her lip curled. “The shame.”
Surely she didn’t mean . . . Comprehension warred with incredulity and Hero’s own ignorance. Did fathers do that to their own daughters?
A wry smile curled the other woman’s lips, and Hero realized something of her horror and disbelief must have shown on her face. “See,” said Rachel’s sister. “You don’t believe it. After he killed Mama, I told him I was going to let everyone know what he did to me at night—what he’d been doing to me for years. He just laughed at me. He said no one would believe me. They’d think I made it all up.”
Hero hunched her shoulders as a damp wind blowing off the surrounding fields buffeted her. It wasn’t cold, but she still shivered.
“So we struck a bargain, he and I. He promised if I left he wouldn’t start doing to Rachel what he’d done to me all those years. But now that I look back on it, I realize . . .” She drew in a ragged breath. “He’d already started doing it to her, too. It’s why she stopped singing. Why she buried her dolls. I thought it was because of Mama, but it wasn’t. It was because of him.”
Hero stared at the woman’s tall, elegant frame and pale features, not knowing what to say.
Lady Sewell turned away to stare out over the surrounding fields. “I remember one morning not long after Rachel’s betrothal to Ramsey was announced, I came upon her in the garden. She was singing, and I thought she was happy because she was in love. Now I realize she was happy because she thought she was finally going to get away from him.”
Hero’s voice came out in a broken, raspy croak. “When she ran away, where did you think she’d gone?”
“I thought she’d gone to Ramsey. Secretly, to get away from Father. I just—” She broke off, swallowed, and began again. “I don’t understand. Why didn’t she come to me? Why didn’t she tell me what he’d been doing to her?”
“Perhaps she thought you wouldn’t believe her,” Hero said softly.
Lady Sewell gave a strange laugh that raised the hairs on the back of Hero’s neck. “I went there to kill him, you know. This morning.”
Hero shook her head, not understanding. “Kill whom?”
“Father. I should have done it all those years ago.” Yanking open her tapestry reticule, Lady Sewell drew forth a heavy carriage pistol. Hero stepped back, her gaze darting to the road, where her father’s watchdog lounged at his ease.
“I held the gun right in his face. But then I thought, if I shoot him, they’ll hang me. And then what will become of Alice?”
“Alice?”
“My little sister. He swears he’s never touched her. But I don’t believe him. Not this time.”
Hero felt a cool gust of wind caress her cheek, breathed in the familiar scents of long, wet grass and damp earth, and felt so fundamentally altered by what she was hearing that she wondered if she’d ever quite right herself again. In the last two weeks, she’d been touched by violence on a shocking scale; she’d killed, and very nearly been killed herself. And then there was that other incident—the one she was endeavoring to forget. Yet this . . . this was somehow worse. She’d known about violence and death and, vaguely, about what happened between a man and a woman. She hadn’t known about . . . this. How could any man be so depraved as to do such a thing to his own child? How could any child ever come to terms with such a monstrous betrayal?
“So we made another bargain,” Lady Sewell was saying. “Father and I. I let him live, and he will send Alice to live with me.” She gave another of those wild laughs. “He worries people will think it strange. Can you imagine?” The laughter suddenly died, leaving her expression pinched. “I wish I could have killed him,” she whispered.