“Are you certain this isn’t all a terrible mistake?” She would rather have the father who never visited than the one who gave her away.
Wycliff’s mouth twisted into a grim line. “Lord Rathbone travelled to Paris and bore witness to the confession. He explained how they used the information to find you.” Wycliff exhaled a weary sigh. “It would serve Rathbone better if it were a lie, which is why I believe it’s the truth.”
A pulsing pain in her temple saw her press her fingers there and massage the tender spot. Wycliff shifted, and she feared he would insist on leaving the room to let her rest.
“So how did Lady Rathbone find me?” she said, hoping conversation would keep him at her bedside.
Wycliff pushed his hand through his mop of dark hair. “Lord Rathbone said his grandmother visited Jack Jewell and demanded to know the truth. He refused to reveal the information and so she hired an enquiry agent to investigate.”
“When was this?”
“Almost four years ago. A month before your father’s death.”
A chilling thought settled in her mind. “The coroner recorded my father’s death as suicide. Perhaps someone else pulled the trigger.”
“Or perhaps your father believed you were safer if he was dead. He knew Mr Flannery would take care of you. The Irishman knows enough crimi
nals in the rookeries to ensure no one would dare hurt you.” Wycliff shrugged. “Either way, you will never know for sure.”
Scarlett didn’t want to think that someone had murdered her father so callously. She would rather think that he made the ultimate sacrifice to protect his daughter. Tears sprang to her eyes. She had sat at the window week after week and cursed him for not loving her.
“The enquiry agent kept a watch on your father’s premises,” Wycliff continued. “At some point after leaving the seminary you went home.”
It had always been her intention to plead with her father, to drop to her knees and beg him to let her remain at The Jewell. “When I got there, the doors and windows were boarded. A neighbour told me what had happened and took me in for the night. I didn’t know what else to do as my father had never mentioned Mr Flannery. His neighbour’s daughter was an actress and found me work on the stage, a room to rent in Covent Garden.”
“And you remained there until you married Steele.” His tone turned frosty.
It was time she made him see her reasoning, the foolish thoughts that seemed so logical at the time, the error of her judgement.
“Marrying Steele seemed like the simple solution. I knew it was only a matter of time before some drunken buck followed me home and forced his advances.” Wycliff didn’t know what it was like to have men grope you when all you wanted was to earn an honest living. “Letters arrived, threatening letters—”
“You should have come to me.”
“Yes, I should have, but you were not offering marriage, security, a way out from the pit of despair.” He might have offered her another role, one equally precarious. “The night Steele saved me from the attack in the alley, I would have done anything for a moment’s peace.”
Silence descended.
It was as if those memories came alive. The air thrummed with the same tension.
“Things happened that way for a reason,” Wycliff eventually said in a melancholic tone.
She liked to think that, too.
“In some twisted way, perhaps marrying Steele saved your life,” he added.
“Saved me? How?”
“When you married Steele, the matron believed it was only a matter of time before you met your end, and so she called off her dog. Apparently, some older members of the ton were aware of Steele’s predilection for violence. There were whispers concerning the death of his first wife.”
How the previous Lady Steele had survived her marriage for fifteen years was anyone’s guess. “Lady Rathbone rarely spoke to me during my marriage, yet extended the hand of friendship the moment I donned my widow’s weeds.”
“Lord Rathbone is happy to recognise you publicly as his kin. Equally, he understands if you would rather refrain from associating yourself with the family.”
She didn’t want to be a Rathbone.
She wanted to be Scarlett Jewell—Ruby as her mother often called her.
Scarlett forced a weak chuckle. “Then Lord Rathbone has given up all thoughts of marrying the Scarlet Widow?”