Chapter 2 - The Diagnosis He Never Corrected
Clara did not put the letter down. She folded it once, precisely, because her hands had begun to shake and she refused to let Sebastian watch them do it.
“Tell me,” she said, “which part of this page you hoped I would never read.”
Sebastian stopped inside the doorway. Mud darkened his boots. There was a scrape across his knuckles, and the damp smell of river water came with him. He looked first at the letter, then at the contractor's invoices spread on his desk.
“The doctor wrote to me before our wedding,” he said.
“That much I gathered from the postmark.”
“He had revised his original assessment. He said pregnancy might be possible, not that it was certain.”
“You have had seven months to tell me.”
“Yes.”
Clara hated the clean honesty of that single word. It gave her nowhere to put the anger she had carried through three years of whispered insults. “When I cried after Lady Wexham called me an empty cradle, did you know?”
“Yes.”
“When I told you I thought I had failed you before we had even begun?”
Sebastian's face tightened. “Clara—”
“Did you know?”
“Yes.”
She stepped away from him. He did not follow. Beyond the windows, the rain fell so hard that the formal gardens looked like charcoal rubbed across wet paper.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I had already learned your father was keeping information from you. I believed that if I handed you the letter immediately, you would think I had pursued you for a child after all.”
“And you decided that keeping me ignorant was kinder?”
“I decided badly.”
“You decided for me. There is a difference.”
He accepted that without argument, which made her want to argue more. She looked down at the doctor's handwriting. There was another sentence she had missed: I have also learned that Mr. Whitmore has been representing my preliminary opinion as a final medical certificate, which it was not.
Her father had told two prospective fiancés. One had written an apologetic farewell. The other had suggested a discreet arrangement in which Clara would provide money and he would provide discretion. She had begun to think herself fortunate when Sebastian proposed marriage without negotiating either.
“Did you ask my father for this letter?”
“No. Prescott sent it through a solicitor after refusing to sign the certificate your father wanted.”
“What certificate?”
Sebastian opened a cabinet and removed a narrow blue folder. He hesitated before placing it on the desk, but this time he left it within her reach. Inside was a draft medical statement calling Clara permanently unfit for motherhood. The signature line was blank. Across its top someone had written in another hand: Lord Vane requires assurance before settlement.
Lord Vane. One of the men who had withdrawn his proposal, then returned with terms so humiliating Clara had refused to speak of them again.
“What settlement?” she whispered.
“A purchase involving the northern navigation company. Your father wanted Vane to marry you and approve it.”
“My father said my dowry was all he could afford.”
“Your mother left you shares in the company. They become yours to direct when you turn twenty-eight.”
Clara stared at him. She knew of a small inheritance from her mother, enough for an annuity and a respectable wardrobe. She did not know of shares large enough to attract a titled suitor or to require a fraudulent certificate.
“When were you planning to mention those?”
“I hoped to verify the trust documents first.”
“Were you investigating me when you proposed?”
“I was investigating your father.”
“That isn't an answer.”
Sebastian placed both palms against the edge of the desk. “Yes. I knew the northern company was connected to your family. I met you at Lady Wexham's dinner while I was looking into the accounts. I admired you before I knew what to do with that admiration. I should have told you all of it before I asked you to marry me.”
She remembered that dinner: a dreadful fish course, a woman correcting her American pronunciation of 'schedule,' and Sebastian asking what book she would rescue from a burning library. She had answered that she would rescue the nearest person instead. He had laughed, quietly, into his wineglass. She had believed the evening was the beginning of something uncomplicated.
There was no way to recover that belief intact.
“Do you need me to obtain the shares?” she asked.
“No.”
“Do you need my signature?”
“No. I need the truth about a flood that happened here five years ago. The accounts suggest money meant for its victims passed through your father's company.”
“Then why marry me?”
He rubbed a hand across his face. “Because I wanted to. Because you challenged me when everyone else tried to please me. Because the first time you saw my estate you asked why the tenants' roofs leaked while my stables had new slate. None of those reasons excuses what I hid.”
Clara found herself remembering the northern bridge's two conflicting receipts. “Did you pay to repair that bridge?”
“I ordered the payment.”
“Someone suspended it.”
His expression changed. He picked up the invoices, compared the signatures, and swore under his breath. “Edmund handles the northern contracts. He assured me the work was finished.”
Edmund Ashford, Sebastian's charming cousin, had congratulated Clara on the wedding by saying she should take comfort in knowing the duchy had a perfectly healthy male heir waiting elsewhere. She had thought him merely cruel. Now she wondered what else he managed on behalf of the family.
Clara replaced the letter in its envelope and put it in her own pocket. “This remains with me.”
“Of course.”
“I will sleep in the east guest room. I will write to a solicitor who represents me, not you. If he asks to see estate records, you will not decide which pages I receive.”
Sebastian nodded. “Agreed.”
“And don't send jewels. Don't send flowers. Don't turn breakfast into an apology.”
“What may I send?”
“The truth, when you have it.”
She moved past him. He stood aside, and she appreciated that he did not try to make a grand speech about letting her go. Downstairs, Mrs. Vale was instructing a footman to bring in a telegram. She handed it to Clara because the name printed across its envelope was not Sebastian's.
NATHANIEL WHITMORE, the sender read. Her father.
Clara opened it.
Arriving Blackmere tomorrow. Do not sign anything concerning northern property until we speak. You have already endangered more than your marriage.
Beneath the telegram was a second enclosure, sent separately through a London firm: a copy of a deed authorizing the sale of her mother's navigation shares. The signature at the bottom read Clara Whitmore.
May you like
It was dated ten years earlier, when Clara had been seventeen and living in Boston.
She had never signed it.
