Page 88 of The Duke's Promise to Her Child
Huxley’s headstone was simple. She stood in front of it and did not speak for a long moment. The yew trees were still. The wind that had been cutting across the downs did not reach here.
“You were so charming,” she said. “When we first met. That is the thing I keep returning to. I was not naive — I was not ignoring signs because there were none to see. You were kind and generous and you looked at me as though I was someone worth looking at, and I believed you. I want you to know that I believed you completely. I was not tricked by someone I had reservations about. I was deceived by someone I genuinely thought was wonderful.”
The headstone sat in the shadow of an oak tree, and she almost felt Huxley’s desire to talk back as he always had.
“And then we were married. And it was as though everything you had been was put away somewhere, and what came out in its place was the real version of you. Who found me foolish and disappointing and not worth the effort of basic decency.” She paused. “I know when it started to get worse. When you began to suspect that my father was not truly connected to the Earl. When you worked out that my mother had embellished our standing. You decided that I had deceived you, and so you felt entitled to punish me for it. You never asked me. You never gave me the chance to explain. You simply decided what I was and treated me accordingly for three years.”
She looked at the stone.
“You told me I was nothing so many times that I began to believe it. That is what I am most angry about. Not the grabbing or the pushing or the rest of it — though I am angry about all of that too, and I have every right to be. But the thing that did the most damage was the smaller, slower, daily work of making me feel that I did not know anything, could not do anything, was not worth listening to or consulting or including. You made me feel that I was lucky to be tolerated. And I believed it. I genuinely believed it.”
She stopped and pressed her lips together for a moment. “It took your death for me to find out that I was wrong. It took managing on my own — the house, and the money, and Lavinia, and Mary — for me to remember that I was capable of things. That I had a mind and I knew how to use it. Your death gave me that back, and the most bitter part of that is that you took it from me in the first place.”
A sound from somewhere beyond the yew trees drew her attention Lavinia’s voice, high and cheerful, saying something to Benjamin with great conviction. The ordinary sound of it cut through the grey afternoon air.
“She is wonderful,” Helena said, more quietly. “You would not have deserved her. I think you knew that, which was part of what made you so unpleasant about her before she was born. You needed someone to be beneath you, and she was going to be too young to know she was supposed to be impressed by you.”
She exhaled. “Gideon is not like that. He crouches down to her height. He let me adopt a pig because he thought it would amuse her and make her happy.”
She looked at the headstone. It was true. Gideon was not Huxley. She had known this for months in her mind, argued it with herself at every turn. But standing here, at the end of what Huxley had been and done, she felt it for the first time in a way that went all the way down. Not as a thought. As a fact.
Gideon had not deceived her. He had not hidden himself until after the wedding and revealed something else underneath. She had seen him argue and blunder and make a fool of himself. Get things wrong and try again. She had seen him sit on the floor with Lavinia building towers out of wooden blocks. She had seen him learn to make daisy chains. None of that was performance.
She had been letting Huxley win. Even dead and buried. Every time she had flinched away from Gideon, every time she had retreated into the agreement and all those careful words thatmeant nothing, she had handed Huxley another piece of the life she was trying to build.
She was not going to do it anymore.
“Gideon has been good to both of us since almost the beginning, and I have spent weeks treating him with suspicion and fear and managed to hurt him considerably because of you.” Her voice was even. She had not expected it to be even. “You are going to take nothing else from me. Do you hear me? Not one more thing. You have had enough.”
She stood there for another moment, listening to the yew trees and the distant sound of her daughter’s voice. Then she turned and walked back through them without looking behind her.
Clara was waiting at the garden wall. She looked at Helena’s face and seemed to find her answer there without needing to ask.
“Are you ready?” she said.
“Yes.” Helena held out her arms and Lavinia lunged into them. She held her daughter against her shoulder and felt the solid warm weight of her and breathed. “I want to go back to Blackthorne.”
CHAPTER 38
GIDEON
The butler at Clara’s house showed them into the drawing room where Lady Hampshire rose to greet them. She was a composed woman with Clara’s sharp eyes, and when she saw Gideon her expression moved immediately into relief.
“Your Grace,” she said. “I am very glad you have come. I had hoped someone would put an end to all of this foolishness.”
“That is precisely why I am here, my lady,” Gideon said. “I wonder if I might speak with my wife.”
Lady Hampshire’s expression shifted. “You are most welcome to, Your Grace. However, she is not here.”
He went still. “Not here.”
“No. She left this morning with Clara and Mr. Ashworth. They have gone to Brighton. To the Vale estate.”
Gideon’s mind went immediately to Emmett — to the drawing room at Blackthorne, to the things Emmett had said to Helena’s face, to the cold calculation of the man and what he was capable of when he felt he had the advantage. Helena alone on his grounds with only Clara and Benjamin between her and whatever Emmett decided to do.
“We are going after them,” he said.
“Your Grace—” Lady Hampshire began.
