“Harry would not stay,” Jessica announced in tragic accents just as Avery was noticing his absence. She was standing in front of the sofa, literally wringing her hands and the thin handkerchief clutched in them and looking like a youthful Lady Macbeth. “He laughed and then ran away down the servants’ stairs. Why would he laugh? Avery, it cannot be true. Tell everyone it is not. Harry cannot have been stripped of his title.”
“Jessica,” her mother said firmly but not unkindly, “come and sit quietly here beside me. Otherwise you must return to the schoolroom.”
Jessica sat, but she did not stop twisting her hands and pulling at the handkerchief.
“I certainly wish it were not true, Jessica,” the new earl said. “I would give a great deal to find that it was not. But it is. I would return the title to Harry in a heartbeat if it were possible, but it is not.”
And the devil of it was, Avery thought as he strolled farther into the room, that he meant it. He was genuinely upset for Harry’s sake and just as genuinely without ambition for himself. It was actually difficult to find a good reason to dislike and despise the man—an irritating realization. Perhaps perfection was inevitably irritating to those who were themselves imperfect.
The three on the sofa looked rather as if they had been bashed hard on the head but not quite hard enough to render them unconscious. Cousin Althea had stopped talking in order to listen to her son.
“Has that dreadful woman gone back to Bath where she belongs?” Camille asked Avery. “I wonder she did not come up here with you to gloat over us.”
“Cam.” Her mother laid a hand over hers.
“Oh, how she must be rubbing her hands in glee,” Camille said bitterly.
“I thought her the most vulgar of creatures,” Lady Matilda said. “I wonder that Avery allowed her inside the house.”
“She is my granddaughter,” the dowager said, handing the empty brandy glass back to Molenor. “If she is a vulgar creature, it is Humphrey’s fault.”
“Whatever are we going to do, Mama?” Abigail asked. “Everything is going to change, is it not? For us as well as for Harry.”
That was probably the understatement of the decade.
“Yes,” her mother said, laying her free hand over Abigail’s. “Everything is going to change, Abby. But pardon me, my mind is rather numb at the moment.”
“You will all come to live with Matilda and me, Viola,” the dowager announced. “The only good thing Humphrey did in his life was to marry you, and he could not even get that right. You are more my daughter than he was ever my son.”
“You can come here to live, if you would prefer,” the duchess said. “Avery will not mind.”
“Abby is coming here to live?” Jessica brightened noticeably. “And Harry? And Camille and Aunt Viola?”
Would he mind? Avery wondered.
“Uxbury is to call at Westcott House this afternoon,” Camille said. “We must not be late returning home, Mama. I shall put off my mourning before receiving him, and I shall inform him that we no longer need wait until next year to celebrate our nuptials. He will be delighted to hear it. I shall suggest a quiet wedding, perhaps by special license so that we will not have to wait a full month for the banns to be read. Once I am married, it will not matter that I am no longer Lady Camille Westcott. I shall be Lady Uxbury instead, and Abby and Mama may come and live with us. Abby may be presented next year, even perhaps this year, under my sponsorship. She will be the sister of the Viscountess Uxbury. You are quite right, Cousin Althea. All will turn out well in the end.”
“But what about Harry?” Abigail asked.
Camille’s forthright, almost cheerful manner visibly crumbled, and she bit her upper lip in an obvious effort to fight back tears. Her mother clasped both sisters’ hands more tightly.
“I could kill my brother,” the duchess said. “Oh, how dare he die when he did and escape retribution. How dare he not be alive now at this very moment to face my wrath. Whatever was he thinking? I had never even heard of this Alice Snow woman before today. Had any of you? Mildred? Matilda? Mama?”
None of them confessed to any knowledge of the late Humphrey’s first wife—his only wife, actually. Lady Molenor, Cousin Mildred, wailed briefly into her handkerchief.
“But he was married to her and had a daughter with her,” the duchess continued, sawing the air with the hand that was not patting her sister’s knee and almost elbowing Jess in the eye. “And then he abandoned her and married Viola as though that first marriage could just be ignored when it was no longer convenient to him. Of course, it was common knowledge that he never had a feather to fly with while Papa still lived, but was as wild and expensive as sin. We all knew that the last time Papa paid off his mountain of debts, he also told Humphrey never again to expect one penny more than his quarterly allowance, which was a great deal more than the pin money we girls had to be content with, let me tell you. I suppose he was in desperate straits by the time Mama and Papa chose a bride for him and married her in order to get the funds flowing again. I suppose he assumed no one would ever find out about his dying wife and their daughter—and no one ever did during his lifetime. I could kill him.”