A Lady by Midnight (18 page)

Harry squeezed her hand. “I beg of you. Unburden your heart to me, if you wish—or find a way to tell Evan part of the truth. But unless you wish true harm upon Corporal Thorne, do not let Evan know about last night. And for the love of everything, change your frock before you speak with him.”

There was a knock at the door.

Kate sucked in a deep breath and hastily dabbed at her eyes. “Who is it?”

“It’s me.” The door opened a crack, revealing Lark’s sweet countenance. When she laid eyes on Kate, she flung the door open wide. “Kate, what is it? Are you still ill?”

Kate shook her head. “No. I’m fine.”

“I’ve just been telling her a very sad, tragic story,” Harry said, rising to her feet. “And she was deeply moved by the moral of the tale.”

“Harriet. Don’t provoke her so. At least not until she’s stuck with us for good.” Lark turned to Kate and smiled. “Evan has visitors at the tavern. The solicitors, I think. He’s asking to see you.”

Chapter Sixteen

A
s many times as she’d been in the public room below, Kate had never visited the rooms
above
the Bull and Blossom.

At Fosbury’s direction, she made her way up a narrow staircase and emerged into a long, windowless corridor. She froze, struck again by that same familiar image.

She was in an endless, shadowy tunnel, and her future lay at the other end. Pianoforte music came up through the floor, tingling in the soles of her feet. She closed her eyes, and blue flashed behind her eyelids.

“Kate, is that you?” Evan’s voice carried out from the first room on the left.

“Yes.” She shook herself and smoothed a hand over the skirt of her fresh sprigged muslin before entering the room.

“Come in, come in.” Evan waved her forward. “I trust you’re feeling better this morning.”

She stepped into a small yet comfortably furnished sitting room. She knew at once it had to be the Fosburys’ private parlor. They must have vacated it to offer Evan a full suite of rooms, worthy of a marquess.

“Miss Kate Taylor, I’d like you to meet two of the family solicitors, Mr. Bartwhistle and Mr. Smythe.”

“How do you do.” Kate curtsied to the two men, who were dressed in brown coats so similar as to be nearly identical.

“And this”—Evan turned her attention to an older woman in a faded indigo day dress several years past its peak of fashion—“is Mrs. Fellows.”

Kate smiled and nodded, but was dismayed when Mrs. Fellows made no acknowledgment in return. Instead, the older woman remained seated in the tufted armchair, facing the window and staring straight ahead.

“Cataracts,” Evan whispered in her ear. “Poor old dear’s nearly blind.”

“Oh.” Understanding the remoteness of her demeanor now, Kate moved forward to take the woman’s hand. “Mrs. Fellows, it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

Evan closed the parlor door. “Mrs. Fellows was just telling us about her tenure as housekeeper at Ambervale, twenty years ago.”

“Ambervale?” Kate’s heart skipped an alarming number of beats. Evan had told her in Wilmington that they meant to canvass for former Ambervale servants, but he’d never mentioned it again.

He pulled up a chair for Kate, and she accepted it gratefully.

He took a seat as well. “Tell me, Mrs. Fellows. Did you keep a large house staff in my cousin’s time?”

“No, my lord. Just me and my man. Mr. Fellows is gone now, some eight years. We had a cook in those days, and a girl came in daily for scullery. We sent the laundry out. Most of the house was closed up, you see. There were never any guests. His lordship and Miss Elinor liked their privacy.”

“Yes, I would imagine.” Evan smiled at Kate. “And then Miss Haverford became pregnant, is that right?”

The frankness of the question obviously pained Mrs. Fellows. But she answered. “Yes, my lord.”

“And she gave birth to a child. Was it a son or a daughter, do you recall?”

“A baby girl.” Mrs. Fellows still faced the window, and she smiled at the dust motes whirling in the sunlight. “They named her Katherine.”

From the other side of the room, Mr. Bartwhistle cleared his throat. His keen gaze fell on Kate—or more particularly, on the birthmark at her temple. “Mrs. Fellows,” he asked, “do you recall whether the infant had any . . . distinguishing marks?”

“Oh, yes. Unfortunate little dear had a birthmark. Right on her face.”

Unfortunate little dear?
For the first time in her life, Kate blessed that mark on her temple. If she could have stretched her lips like India rubber, she would have
kissed
it.

She leaned forward in her chair, training her ears so hard, she felt her eardrums bending under the strain.

“If you ask me,” said Mrs. Fellows, “it was the wine. If I told Miss Elinor once, I told her a hundred times—a woman shouldn’t be drinking aught of claret while she’s breeding. It’s unseemly. But she had a taste for a sip from time to time, and sure enough, when the babe came, there was a great splash of it on her temple.”

“Can you describe the mark in any further detail?” Evan asked. “I know it’s been many years.”

Mrs. Fellows shifted in her chair. “But I remember it, clear as day. It was just here.” She lifted an age-spotted hand to her own temple. “Had almost the shape of a heart. I’ll never forget that, because they laughed about it, you know.”

“They laughed about it?” Kate asked, forgetting that she wasn’t the one conducting the interview.

“Laughed with each other, yes. They were like that, always laughing with each other about everything. I heard the lady tell his lordship, ‘We know she’s yours, don’t we?’ That was on account of his having a birthmark, too. But the late Lord Drewe insisted the mark was from Miss Elinor’s side. Because she wore her heart on her face, and so the child must as well.”

On the other side of the room, Bartwhistle and Smythe were furiously scribbling, taking down every word.

Evan reached for Kate’s hand and squeezed it. “I knew it. I knew you were ours.”

“It sounds as though Simon and Elinor were very much in love,” Kate said, choked with emotion.

“Oh, yes.” The old housekeeper smiled. “Never seen a couple so madly devoted to one another.” Her smile faded. “And after his lordship died, so sudden and so soon . . . oh, she took it so hard.”

“What happened?” Evan asked.

“We never knew,” Mrs. Fellows replied. “The doctor said mayhap the midwife brought in a contagion. I always suspected the painting, myself. Can’t be healthy, staying shut up all day with those horrid vapors.” She shook her head. “However it happened, he was gone. We were all desolate, and Miss Elinor was beside herself. Alone in the world, with a newborn babe? And there was no money. None. His lordship had never kept much in the house, and we hadn’t any way to keep purchasing goods on credit.”

“What did you do?” Kate asked.

“We closed up the house. Miss Elinor took the babe and left. Said she’d go back home to Derbyshire.”

Evan leaned toward Kate and murmured, “I suppose she never made it that far, or certainly someone would have heard. If only we could know what happened between the closing of Ambervale and your arrival at Margate.”

A sense of desperate bewilderment settled on Kate. She was heartily sick of lies and deceit. She wanted to do—and say—the right thing. But she didn’t know what the right thing was.

How could she explain to Evan about “Ellie Rose” and the Southwark bawdy house—in front of two solicitors and the housekeeper who’d held her mother in such obvious regard? Did it even matter? Perhaps Thorne’s story was irrelevant. The little girl he’d known might have been someone else.

The most maddening thing of all was knowing that her own brain was holding the truth hostage. The memories were in there. She knew they were. But she could never quite reach the end of that corridor.

“I wish I could tell you,” Kate said. “I wish, more than anything, that I had some clear memory of that time.”

“The good Lord must have taken her to heaven,” Mrs. Fellows said. “I can’t imagine Miss Elinor would part with her child for anything less. I’ve six of my own at home, and I’d go to war with the devil for each of them.”

“Of course you would, Mrs. Fellows,” Evan said.

Impulsively, Kate reached forward and squeezed the aging housekeeper’s wrist. “Thank you,” she said. “For taking such care of her. And of me.”

Mrs. Fellows fumbled for Kate’s hand. “Is it you, then? Are you Katherine? You’re his lordship’s daughter?”

Kate looked to Evan, and then to the solicitors. “I . . . I think so?”

Mrs. Bartwhistle and Mr. Smythe conferred. In the end, Mr. Bartwhistle answered for them both.

“Between the parish register,” he said, “the striking physical resemblance, and the statement of Mrs. Fellows with regards to the birthmark—we feel it safe to conclude in the affirmative.”

“Yes?” Kate asked.

“Yes,” said Mr. Smythe.

Kate sank into the depths of her armchair, overwhelmed. The Gramercys had burst into her life less than a fortnight ago. Evan, Lark, Harry, Aunt Marmoset—each of them had accepted her into the family, individually. But there was something about the dry, actuarial “Yes” from the solicitors that made the brimming cup of emotion overflow. She buried her face in her hands, overcome.

She was a lost child, found. She was a Gramercy. She had been loved.

She couldn’t
wait
to pay another call on Miss Paringham.

Mr. Bartwhistle went on, “We will draw up a statement for your signature, Mrs. Fellows. If you will be so kind as to offer a few more details. Were you present at the birth?”

“Oh, yes,” the housekeeper said. “I was present at the birth. And at the wedding.”

The wedding?

Kate’s head whipped up. She sought Evan’s face, but his expression was unreadable. “Did she just say ‘the wedding’?”

A
fter Mrs. Fellows and the solicitors had gone, Kate sat with Evan in the small upstairs parlor. The musty parish register lay open before her on the table, flipped to a page just two leaves prior to her birth record.

“Simon Langley Gramercy,” she read aloud in a quiet voice, “the fifth Marquess of Drewe, married to Elinor Marie Haverford, the thirtieth day of January, 1791.”

No matter how many times she read the lines, she still found them hard to believe.

Evan rubbed his jaw. “Cutting it a bit close, weren’t they? Whatever scandal they began in, it seems Simon wanted to make things proper when it counted.”

Kate looked up at her cousin. “Have you known this all along?”

He regarded her steadily. “Can you forgive me? We always meant to tell you, of course, once we’d—”

“We? So Lark and Harry and Aunt Marmoset . . . they all know, too?”

“We all saw it together, that day at St. Mary of the Martyrs.” He reached for her hand. “Kate, please try to understand. We needed to be sure of your identity first, to avoid disappointing you, or . . .”

“Or tempting me to stretch the truth.”

He nodded. “We didn’t know you at all. We had no idea what kind of person you might be.”

“I understand,” Kate said. “Caution was necessary, and not only on your side.”

“That’s why you pretended an engagement to Corporal Thorne?”

She warmed with a guilty flush. How had he guessed? “It wasn’t a pretense. Not exactly.”

“But it was a convenience. Invented on the spot, right there in the parlor of the Queen’s Ruby. He wanted to protect you.”

She nodded, unable to deny it.

“I’ve long suspected as much. Don’t feel badly, Kate. When I think of how we surprised you that night . . . It was the strangest, most unpredictable situation. For us all. Both of us held information back. But we were only guarding ourselves and our loved ones as best we could.”

His words made her think of her argument with Thorne. She’d been so furious with him for withholding what he knew—or
thought
he knew—about her past. Hadn’t Evan committed the same exact transgression?

But she wasn’t leaping from her chair and shouting at Evan. She wasn’t heaping insults on Evan’s character. Nor was she flouncing from the room in an airy huff of indignation, vowing to never see Evan again.

Why the distinction?
she asked herself. Were the two men’s actions so fundamentally different? Perhaps smoothly spoken Evan just explained his reasons more deftly than Thorne.

Or maybe it was merely this: Evan had concealed happy news, while Thorne’s story represented a painful “truth” she’d prefer to reject. If so, she had dealt with him most unfairly.

But it was too late for regrets now.

With one long, elegant finger, Evan tapped the parish register. “You do realize what this means, don’t you?”

She swallowed hard. “It means they married before my birth. It means I’m legitimate.”

“Yes. You’re the legitimate daughter of a marquess. Which means that you are a lady. Lady Katherine Adele Gramercy.”

Lady Katherine Adele Gramercy.
It was too much to be believed. The title felt like a too-large gown, borrowed from someone else.

“Your life is about to change, Kate. You will move in the highest circles of Society. You must be presented at court. And then there is an inheritance. A significant inheritance.”

She shook her head, faintly horrified. “But I don’t need all that. Being your illegitimate cousin already felt like a fairy tale come true. As for an inheritance . . . I don’t want to take anything away from you.”

He smiled. “You will not be
taking
anything. You will have what was rightfully yours all along. We’ve merely had it on loan, these three-and-twenty years. I still keep the title, naturally. The marquessate cannot pass to a female child.”

He patted her hand. “The solicitors will sort it all out. Of course, you’ll have a great deal to discuss with Corporal Thorne.”

“No,” she blurted out. “I can’t tell him. He’s gone to London on business. And before he left, we . . .
I
broke the engagement.”

Evan exhaled in a slow, controlled fashion. “I am sorry, Kate—gravely sorry—for any hurt this has caused you. But for myself and for our family, I cannot pretend to be disappointed. I’m glad it ended before today’s interview, rather than after.”

“You needn’t have worried,” she said. “He’s not mercenary. He wanted no part of marriage to me, even once he knew you were planning to claim me as a Gramercy. If he hears I’m a true
lady
, it will only drive him further away.”

Thorne’s words echoed back to her:

If I hadn’t spent the past year thinking of you as a lady, I promise you—things would be different between us.

“Evan, you must be relieved on all counts,” she said. “Now that the solicitors have accepted me, there’ll be no need for you to . . . devise another way of giving me the family name.”

“By marrying you, you mean?”

She nodded. It was the first time either of them had admitted the idea aloud.

“The relief should be on your side, I think.” A smile warmed his eyes. “For my part, I would not have viewed it as a hardship.”