No doubt that was the understatement of the century.
Lydia leaned forward, tapping the edge of the letter in her hand on the desk with perfect rhythm. “I may work at an orphanage, Margaret, but I am not completely unaware of the world beyond the door. The enormous man who arrived at the crack of dawn was the Duke of Lamont.” She paused, then qualified, “The Killer Duke of Lamont.”
Lord, she was coming to hate that moniker.
“He’s not a killer.” The words were out before Mara could stop them—before she could realize that they were a tacit admission that she knew the man in question.
She pressed her lips together in a thin line as Lydia’s eyes went wide with interest. “Isn’t he?”
Mara considered her next words carefully. She settled on “No.”
Lydia waited for Mara to continue for a long moment, her blond curls wild and unruly, barely contained by the two dozen pins shoved into the nest. When Mara said nothing more, her first employee and the closest thing she could call a friend sat back in her own chair, crossed her legs, rested her hands in her lap, and said, “He wasn’t here to deliver a child.”
It was not unheard of for men of the aristocracy to arrive toting their illegitimate sons. “No.”
Lydia nodded. “He was not here to retrieve one.”
Mara set her pen into its holder. “No.”
“And he was not here to make a generous, exorbitantly summed donation to the orphanage.”
One side of Mara’s mouth kicked up. “No.”
Lydia cocked her head. “Do you think you might convince him to do so?”
Mara laughed. “He is not in a generous spirit when I am near, sadly.”
“Ah. So he was not here for anything relating to the orphanage.”
“No.”
“Which means he was here because of your second visitor of the day.”
Alarm shot through Mara as she met her friend’s eyes. “I don’t understand.”
“Liar,” Lydia replied. “Your second caller was Mr. Christopher Lowe. Very wealthy, as I understand it, having inherited a glorious fortune from his dead father.”
Mara pressed her lips into a thin line. “Not wealthy anymore.”
Lydia cocked her head. “No. I hear he’s lost everything to the man who killed his sister.”
“He didn’t kill—” Mara stopped. Lydia knew.
“Mmm.” Lydia brushed a speck of lint from her skirt. “You seem very sure of that.”
“I am.”
Lydia nodded. “How long have you known the Duke of Lamont?”
There it was—the question that would change everything. The question that would bring her out of hiding and reveal her to the world.
She was going to have to start telling the truth at some point. She should consider it a gift of sorts that she could begin with Lydia. Except telling her closest friend, who had trusted her for seven long years, that she had been lying all that time was about the most difficult thing she’d ever done.
Mara took a breath. Let it out. “Twelve years.”
Lydia nodded slowly. “Since he killed Lowe’s sister?”
Since he supposedly killed me.
It should have been easy to say it. Lydia knew more about Mara than anyone in the world. She knew about Mara’s life, her work, her thoughts, her plans. She had come to work for Mara as a young, untried governess to a motley group of boys, sent from a large estate in Yorkshire—the one where Mara had herself hidden all those years ago.
Lydia lowered her voice, her tone gentle. Accepting. Filled with friendship. “We all have secrets, Margaret.”
“That’s not my name,” Mara whispered.
“Of course it isn’t,” Lydia said, and the simple words proved to be Mara’s undoing. Tears sprang to her eyes and Lydia smiled, leaning forward. “You no more grew up on a farm in Shropshire than Lavender will.”
Mara huffed a little laugh in the direction of the pig, who snorted in her sleep. “A farm in Shropshire would quite suit her.”
Lydia grinned. “Nonsense. She is a spoiled little porker who sleeps on a stuffed pillow and is fed from the table. She would care for neither the weather, nor the slop.” Her eyes grew large and filled with sympathy. “If not Shropshire, then where?”
Mara looked to the desk where she’d worked for seven years, every day hoping that these questions would never come. She spoke to the papers there. “Bristol.”
Lydia nodded. “You don’t sound like you were raised on the Bristol docks.”
A vision of the enormous house where she’d spent her youth flashed. Her father used to say that he could buy Britain if he’d wanted to, and he’d built a house to prove that fact to the rest of the world. The house had been gilded and painted, filled with oils and marbles that made the Elgins look minuscule. He’d been particularly fond of portraits, filling every inch of wall with the faces of strangers. Someday, I’ll replace them with my own family, he used to say every time he hung a new one.
The house had been exorbitant at best, outrageous at worst.
And it had been the only thing he’d loved.
“I wasn’t.”