Lord Cornell, handsome and elegantly dressed for riding, looked down upon Chloe from horseback. A second gentleman, who bore a distinct resemblance to his horse, rode beside him.
“You may observe, Cedric,” Lord Cornell said, “that when two ladies are sufficiently lovely and sufficiently determined, they may steal husbands and flout scandal and even decency to win their way to the very top. Though a prince would have been a more brilliant catch than a duke, I daresay. Close to the very top, then. But what can one expect when one considers the mother? And one wonders if the delectable duchess won her duke in the same way as the mother tried to win a marquess and the scandalous sister won her—ah, playwright.”
Chloe stared up at him in disbelief. She had not realized that Lucy had turned away from the water and her children until she spoke.
“One of them,” Lucy said, “was fortunate enough to escape the clutches of a cad and a villain. But what can one expect when one considers that the man is not a gentleman?”
The horsy gentleman guffawed.
“Hoisted with your own petard, Corny,” he said. “I remember that from English class too. The Bard himself, if I am not mistaken. I had no idea I had paid that much attention.”
Lord Cornell grinned appreciatively at Lucy, touched the brim of his hat with his whip, and looked Chloe over from head to toe before riding onward along the path.
“You were quite right, Lucy,” Chloe said. Her voice was shaking, she could hear. And her knees felt decidedly unsteady. “He is a cad and a villain. And no gentleman.”
“Freddie said so even before I ran off with him,” Lucy told her. “But I could not tell you at the time, Chlow. You would have wanted to know who had told me. Besides, you would not have believed me. You were terribly enamored of him.”
She turned back toward the lake to keep an eye on the children.
“Chlow,” she said after a few moments, “what did he mean about Mama? Do some people still believe those rumors?”
Chloe closed her eyes briefly and gathered together her scattered thoughts. It was all very well to know with her rational mind that the purely uncalled-for spite of her former beau was not worth getting upset over. It was another thing to convince her emotions. And now here came another crisis. She had hoped Lucy might never have to know the truth. Presumably, so did Papa and Graham. But Lucy had a right to know.
“They are true, Luce,” she said. And she told her sister about their father’s confession and about her visit to the Marquess of Hitching’s home.
Lucy was openmouthed and wide-eyed by the time she had finished.
“You are my half sister, Lucy,” Chloe said, “just as Lady Angela Allandale is. Graham is my half brother, just as Viscount Gilly and his two brothers are. I have not met those two. I do not believe they are in London.”
Lucy flung herself into Chloe’s arms, drawing a few curious glances from the people around them.
“Oh, no,” she cried. “There is all the difference in the world, Chlow. He may be your father, and his children may be your half sister and half brothers, but Papa is your papa, and Gray and I are your brother and your sister. And do not ask me to hate Mama, Chlow. It cannot be done. I did exactly what she did but even worse, for Freddie was still married at the time, and Jasper would have been a ba— He would not have had a proper father if Freddie’s wife had not been obliging enough to die. Though that sounds callous, does it not? I am sorry, but I cannot feel really sorry for her. She despised him, you know. She did not understand him at all or appreciate his great talent. And she did not love him.”
The children were squabbling again. The doll lay forgotten on the grass while Sukie tried to wrest the string of the boat from her brother’s grasp, loudly admonishing him for refusing to share. Lucy hurried off to adjudicate.
It was only later, as they were walking home, the children ahead of them, that Lucy referred again to the incident on the path.
“That man,” she said, “ought not to be allowed to get away with insulting you so, Chlow. Will you tell His Grace?”
“Oh,” Chloe said. “No, such silliness is best forgotten, Lucy. No, I will not say anything.”
She and Ralph did not say a great deal to each other. Oh, no, that was not quite correct. They conversed at the dinner table each evening and at the breakfast table when they took the meal together. They spoke to each other on the way to and from the various evening functions they attended. There was rarely silence between them.
But they rarely if ever talked. Not since her visit to the Marquess of Hitching, anyway. And his eyes, if not quite empty again, had become inscrutable. Chloe remembered her first impression of him as a man who was unknown and unknowable. He had become that man again. But she could not complain. It was that man she had married, after all, quite deliberately.
And he was never cold with her or unkind or neglectful.
She tried to be happy with what she had. It was not his fault that she loved him.
* * *
Ralph could not seem to move ten yards from his own front door without feeling the compulsion to look over his shoulder. But any hope he had entertained after that evening at the theater that Viscount Harding and his wife had been making a brief stay in town was soon dashed. He saw them from the carriage window on the afternoon he went with Chloe to visit his grandmother. They were walking arm in arm along Oxford Street. They did not see him.
He had liked them, just as he had liked Max’s parents and Rowland’s. But these two in particular, because they had liked him. Lady Harding had laughed at all his silly boy’s jokes as though they were really amusing and had commiserated with him whenever he complained about having three sisters to plague him but no brothers to offer companionship. Viscount Harding had listened patiently to all his impassioned ideas upon any and all topics that had captured his boy’s imagination and had told him that he would be a great leader one day. They had liked Max and Rowland too, of course. It was not that they had singled him out as their favorite. And Tom, their own son, was obviously the apple of their eye, the light of their very existence.