Page 129

She marched from the room, Lavinia drifting slowly after, looking back at them.

Anthony clenched his fist on his thigh. Ah yes, the wagging tongues, the titillated stares. He was meant to fear such uproar, and rail against it, expending his energy on attempts to undermine, deny, retaliate.

He wouldn’t. He had a clear sense for the first time in his life of which opinions mattered. He and Effie would dig in and weather the storm, three-inch headlines be damned. Perhaps he would inspire different headlines soon, when he defected from the Conservative Party, setting his sights on previously unthinkable political targets.

duke of weston crosses the floor.

He managed a smile and was rewarded. Unease rippled across Yardley’s face, drawing his lip down, puckering his chin.

“You say my father signed the committal form?” He shrugged, conceding the possibility. Perhaps it had been his father’s last act before he died, closing the circle of harm—disguised as protection—he’d drawn around the women in his family. Yardley had initiated a process; his father had authorized it.

He could imagine another possibility.

Yardley was a talented draftsman, had known his father’s hand well, and his mother’s.

“I think, rather, you forged my father’s name . . . like you forged the letter that convinced him of my mother’s adultery.”

Yardley’s shoulders sagged. Anthony looked at him, the smiling giant of his youth, deflated. Smaller than he’d ever been.

“My father had in his possession a letter, a scrap of one, that my mother wrote to a lover.”

There was no stopping now. The ordinariness of the morning light, the smell of buttered toast, contributed to the feeling of unreality. He took a deep breath.

“Aunt Helen said it was believed to have been found in Peter’s office at the docks. My father did not make visits there his habit. But you held the contracts for all the company’s warehouses. You were often at the docks on business. You were the one who claimed to have discovered that letter, who gave it to my father.”

Yardley made no sound or gesture of denial.

“You forged it. You wanted him to think my mother unfaithful, but she was innocent. Nothing passed between my mother and Peter.”

It felt good to echo Aunt Helen, to hear her conviction in his voice. But as he spoke, he heard, too, a willed naivete, painfully unconvincing. He was repeating a story crafted for children, a story in which innocence existed, in which the heroes and villains were clearly defined.

The certainty thudded in his chest, even before Yardley drew a shuddering breath and turned to face the windows, his hands linked behind his back, fingers twisting.

There was no forgery. The letter was real.

“She wrote it to you.” Christ God. His mother had had an affair with Yardley.

“I was nobody.” Yardley raised his chin, addressing a slant of light, his voice muted. Anthony had to strain to hear, grateful for the effort, which kept his body tensed. Otherwise he might have exploded, raining blows.

“A young architect without spectacular prospects—a family employee—I was beneath consideration. And he—he swept her off her feet, a duke with a glorious political career rolling out in front of him. But he didn’t appreciate her. The things that dazzled him during their courtship—her exuberance, her love of song and dance, wine and flowers, gay company, the theater—grated once they were married. Flirtation and frivolity didn’t become the wife of a statesman. They made each other miserable.”

“And you were there.”

Yardley turned. He had insinuated himself into Anthony’s parents’ lives for motives too complex to tease apart: desire, jealousy, greed, envy, love, hate. They’d knotted up, rotted together, a festering mass that had infected Anthony’s life too.

“I made her happy,” Yardley said softly. “For a time.”

“Made her happy? You killed her.” Anthony’s voice cracked like a whip. “You betrayed her to my father, whom you had made a cuckold. Then you had your friend Michael Jephson diagnose her with nymphomania.”

“I wasn’t her only lover!” Yardley shouted. “She made your father a cuckold a dozen times over. She was laughing at all of us. If she didn’t sleep with Peter, then he was the only man in London.”

Never had Anthony let a comment such as that go unchallenged. His knuckles were still crooked from all the collisions with tooth and bone. It took impossible strength to relax his hands. He looked at his palms, the senseless lines.

Yardley’s voice was soft again, frayed with desperation.

“I swear to God I thought only to stop her, for her sake as well as mine. The way she behaved—brazen, shameless—it was a form of madness.”

Distortion. Yardley was a master of it. Maybe he believed his own stories. But his actions disproved them.