He suspected that was going to become one of her favorite words in the days and weeks to come.
“Quite so,” he said. “I believe the late Riverdale to have been the most selfish man of my acquaintance, though admittedly I did not know him well. He was, or so I have heard, wild and expensive as a young man. He married the lady his parents had chosen for him when his debts were such that he had no choice but to do whatever it took to restore the flow of funds from which he had been cut off. Apparently that included bigamy and the hiding away of his legitimate daughter. When his father died not long after his marriage and he became the earl, he continued his profligate ways for a while, and then suddenly saw the light, so to speak, and changed completely. It was not a religious epiphany that had assailed him, however. No divine light struck him down and made a penitent of him. According to my father, who knew him well, though reluctantly so as a brother-in-law, he had some extraordinary luck at the gaming tables, invested his winnings in a wild and improbable scheme, made a fortune from it, and turned suddenly and eternally wise. He found himself a brilliant financial adviser and became obsessed with making and hoarding money. He was extremely successful at both, as I discovered when I became Harry’s guardian, and as you will have discovered from your consultations with Brumford.”
“I suppose, then,” Anna said, “it was his dire need for funds that drove him to marry someone else when my mother was still alive. I wonder why she allowed it. Though she seems to have been living with her parents and apart from him at the time. And she was dying.”
“If someone you had met in Bath disappeared from your life and came to London and married and had children,” he said, “would you know about it? Ever?”
“Probably not,” she said after giving the matter some thought.
“Your mother and her parents lived in a rural vicarage,” he said. “It is unlikely they would know of the bigamy unless they had acquaintances who frequented London and were familiar with the aristocracy and knew of the connection between your mother and the man who soon became the Earl of Riverdale. It is even possible he did not ever use his courtesy title in Bath.”
“No,” she said. “They probably did not even know, did they?”
“I would say,” he said, “that your father felt quite safe in contracting an illegal marriage.”
“Why did he never revoke the old will?” she asked. “Why did he never make another? Is that unusual?”
“It is,” he said, “to answer your last question first. My father had a will that must have been twelve pages long, all written in such convoluted legalese that I daresay even his lawyer did not fully understand it. The will was unnecessary, of course, since I was the only son and the settlements upon my stepmother and half sister had been well taken care of in the marriage contract. One is left with the intriguing possibility in your father’s case that the continued existence of the old will and the absence of a new one was deliberate on his part.”
She thought about it. “His joke upon posterity when he could no longer be called to account?” she said. “If that is so, he was being extraordinarily cruel to the countess and her children.”
“Or kind at last to you,” he said.
“There is no kindness in money,” she said.
They had reached the line of trees and turned to walk along the rough path among them. There was a nice sense of seclusion here. The harsher sounds of horses’ hooves, vehicle wheels, children’s shrieks, hawkers’ cries, and adult chatter and laughter from the park on one side and the street on the other seemed muted, though it might be only imagination. Here one could hear birds singing and leaves rustling overhead. Here one could smell wood and sap, the fragrances of the earth and various trees. Here one could ignore the artificiality of town life.
He looked at her while her words rang in his head. She was not delighted by her incredible good fortune, was she? He wondered if she had dreamed of it all her life and now found the reality a bit empty, because along with the fortune came the knowledge that her father had been a bounder of the first order and her half sisters had fled with their mother rather than meet her again or accept her offer to share her fortune. That Harry was off somewhere drinking deep until he touched bottom and some sort of rescue could be effected. That her family considered her impossible. She may never be ready were the last words her grandmother had spoken before they left the house. He wondered if she had friends back in Bath. A suitor, perhaps? Someone the family would not consider eligible for her.