A Study In Seduction(101)

And then it was as if she were no longer in the room with Alexander. The smell of coal swept through the air, the screech of wheels against the train tracks, voices rising from passengers, porters, vendors selling their wares on the platform.

And there stood her father, waiting for her, unaware of her disgrace. His glasses perched on the end of his nose—the wire frames appearing so fragile against his features, his coat flapping about his legs like the wings of a crow. Lines of worry furrowing his brow, concern over his wife, his mother-in-law, his daughter.

“What is it?” Sir Henry had asked. “What’s happened?”

She couldn’t respond, could only fold herself into his arms with the dreadful knowledge it might be the last time he would ever want to embrace her.

And so it had been. But never—thank the good Lord a thousand times over, thank her father a million times—never once since the day Jane was born had Sir Henry Kellaway withheld his affection, his genuine love for the girl.

“Did you tell him?” Alexander asked.

“Actually, I told my mother.” She gave a humorless laugh at the utter absurdity of the statement. “I don’t know why. I hadn’t seen her in several years. She was… they kept her on laudanum. I thought she didn’t even know I was there, but I had a burning need to tell someone the truth. So one night I sat beside her bed and confessed all.”

“Did she respond?”

“No. At the time, I didn’t even think she’d heard me. But the next day she told my father.”

“What?”

“She’d heard it all. Understood it, even. And she told my father what I’d told her. My father confronted me that night, and I had to confess a second time.”

“What did he do?”

Lydia fell silent.

If p is a prime number, then for any integer a, ap − a will be evenly divisible by p. The sine of two theta equals two times the—

No.

She suppressed the proofs, the theorems, the identities, the equations. Suppressed everything that made any sense. Forced the dark memory to the surface. The side of her face bloomed with an old, latent pain.

“He was enraged. He…” She touched the side of her face, shuddering as memories ripped through her—the pain of the blow, her father’s shock over his lack of control, her own fierce belief that she deserved any violence he chose to exact.

He inflicted no more—the one strike upon his own daughter was enough to stun him into immobility. For three days, he didn’t speak to her, didn’t look at her. Then one morning he and Charlotte Boyd called Lydia into a private room and explained in cold, blank tones that she would adhere to their plan or be left to fend for herself.

“It was my grandmother’s idea,” she told Alexander. “She said we would remain at the sanatorium for the time being. I think she and my father might have sent me off immediately if they hadn’t realized I was the only person who’d gotten through to my mother—even with such a disgraceful secret. So my father told me to continue to sit with my mother and try to reach her.”

“Did you?” Alexander asked.

“For several weeks, yes. Until it became clear her condition was worsening. My father spoke with the nuns about keeping me there during my confinement, and they agreed.

“No one else knew about my condition except Dr. Cole, and of course there was no danger of him telling anyone. So my grandmother said that after the child was born, we would tell people it was my mother’s. My father donated a substantial sum to the sanatorium to ensure the nuns went along with that story. That… that drained his finances significantly. He was never able to repair them.”

Her heart pounding with fresh trepidation, Lydia finally lifted her head. Alexander stood across the room, his gaze fixed on her. Wariness shone behind his eyes, but there was none of the censure or disgust she had feared.

“Go on,” he said.

“After the birth, we remained in Lyons for another year. Then when my mother died, we returned to London with the story intact and unbreachable. Jane became the daughter of my mother and father. She became my sister.”

“And you’ve kept the secret all this time.”

“Yes. Although people knew my mother was unwell, they had no reason to believe Jane wasn’t my father’s child. If we hadn’t told them, they still would have assumed she was the legitimate child of my parents. Even our distant relations believed that. Of course, we never wanted to change that assumption. And so we haven’t.”