Someone to Love (Westcott #1)(21)
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.”
“That daughter is my granddaughter,” the dowager said as though to herself, spreading her hands on her lap and examining the rings on her fingers.
Lady Matilda still hovered with the vinaigrette.
Jess was sobbing into the thin confection of a handkerchief she had twisted almost beyond recognition, and Avery toyed with the idea of sending her off to the care of her governess. But a chapter in her family history was being written here today—no doubt it would be a starred chapter—and he supposed it was wiser to allow her to experience it for herself in all its raw emotion. Besides, he rarely imposed his authority upon her, partly because he assiduously avoided exerting himself unnecessarily, but mainly because she had a mother who was reasonably sensible most of the time. And who could blame her today for wanting to murder a dead man? He was not feeling kindly disposed toward the late Earl of Riverdale himself and was selfishly glad he was not related by any tie of blood.
Bigamy was not, after all, a mild offense that could be attributed to wild oats.
“I had never heard of that woman either until today, Louise,” the former countess said, “though I did know of the girl Riverdale was keeping at an orphanage in Bath. I assumed, quite wrongly, that she was his natural daughter by a former mistress. I even felt a grudging sort of respect for him for taking financial responsibility for her. I wonder if the truth would ever have come out if I had not commissioned Mr. Brumford to find her and make a settlement upon her. It was not out of the goodness of my heart that I did it, I must add, but because I did not want her making any future claim upon Harry. I had hoped he and Cam and Abby need never know of their father’s indiscretion.”