“This is your wife, Frederic?”
“Yes, this is my wife, Caroline. She’s going to have a baby.”
Cecilia Nightingale smiled. “You’re lovely, Caroline. Congratulations.”
?
??Thank you, ma’am.” She looked toward North. He said simply, his hand outstretched to the woman, “Caroline, this is my mother, Cecilia Nightingale.”
“Oh goodness,” Caroline said. “Oh my goodness. North thought you were dead. Oh my. It’s Christmas and this is the most wonderful gift North could ever have. Do come in, ma’am. Please, come in.”
North stepped back when his wife tugged on his sleeve. It was then he saw the female who had been standing behind his mother. She was young, not older than Caroline. He could but stare at her.
“Yes, Frederic, this is Marie. She’s your sister.”
Caroline stared from one to the other. They could have been twins. She blurted out, “You didn’t betray North’s father! I knew it.”
“Oh no,” Cecilia said. “Indeed I didn’t.”
“But how did you come now?” North said, trying to grasp what was happening, what was real, and the consequences of this meeting.
“I brought her, my lord.”
It was Coombe. He stepped forward, his shoulders thrown back, looking brave and defiant and scared.
Caroline threw herself at him, hugging him close. “I knew you couldn’t have killed those women, I just knew it, and we were all sure when someone tried to kill me after you left and then there was that note left in my bedchamber calling me a slut and saying I would die. And do you know that some people still said you were in hiding and still doing all those awful things and—”
“My lord,” Coombe said. “I gather there has been some excitement since I left?”
“A bit, Coombe. How would you feel to know that someone left a bloody knife in your room at Mrs. Freely’s inn?”
Tregeagle said quickly, “None of us believed it, Mr. Coombe. However, we were greatly relieved that her ladyship was thrown when someone stretched a wire between a tree and the old stone fence. Then there was that nasty note left in her bedchamber and we knew it couldn’t be you, unless, naturally, you were in hiding, and everyone knew you could get into Mount Hawke with no trouble at all.”
“This is all well and good,” Caroline said, “but North, your mother is here and your sister.”
North turned slowly to face the woman who hadn’t said a word once she’d stepped into the vast entrance hall at Mount Hawke. She said now, “How I wanted to belong here, but your grandfather wouldn’t allow it. I was allowed to stay only three days, and every hour of every one of those three days I listened to your father argue with your grandfather. Then your father took me away.”
“But I wrote to my father’s solicitor in London, asking him where I spent the first five years of my life. He wrote back to tell me it was the house on the Steyne in Brighton. He wrote that my father had told him that you died and thus he was bringing me back to Mount Hawke.”
“No, no, I didn’t die, North. I’ve been living in Surrey for twenty years. Actually, your father sent me a yearly stipend, I suppose you would call it. It didn’t arrive this year, so I knew he must have died.”
North just looked at her, then at his sister, who hadn’t said a word, who just stood behind her mother, silent and still. “I don’t understand.”
Caroline said quickly, “Why don’t we all go into the drawing room. Tregeagle, please have Polgrain prepare tea and cakes. There must be lots of good food left from yesterday.” She turned to her mother-in-law. “Please, won’t you and Marie come with me. It’s chilly today. You can warm yourselves by the fire.”
It was an uneasy silence until everyone held a cup of tea in his hand. Then Caroline said, “My mother died when I was eleven years old. I missed her dreadfully. I still miss her. North has believed you were dead since he was five years old. He has missed you dreadfully as well.”
Cecilia Nightingale gently laid her cup on its saucer. “It’s stopped, hasn’t it?”
“What?” North said.
“The legacy of betrayal to Nightingale men. Coombe merely told me that you’d run away from Mount Hawke when you were sixteen. He said you couldn’t bear your father’s bitterness and the rage. He said you didn’t turn out like your father or your grandfather wanted you to.”
“That’s right, I didn’t, thank God. My father had been poisoned utterly by Grandfather. But that isn’t important now. Why didn’t you write my father to tell him of Marie? For God’s sake, she’s the very picture of him; she’s my twin. He couldn’t believe that you betrayed him once he saw her.”
“He never saw her,” Cecilia Nightingale said quietly. She reached for her daughter’s hand and held it tightly. “I didn’t want to give up, for I loved your father, despite everything. In those early years, he was so torn, so uncertain, wanting to believe in my love for him, in my loyalty, then hearing his father carry on and on about how I would betray him and I would hurt him dreadfully. Your grandfather did poison your father—that is a good word for it—not just against me, for it would have been any woman who’d married him, any woman who had already birthed the precious Nightingale heir. I begged your father to come and see Marie. He didn’t come, but your grandfather did, when she was five years old, the image of him, the image of your father, the image of you when you were five years old. He looked at her, then at me, and said, ‘You are a lying slut. Never again write to my son. He didn’t want to see you. He asked that I take care of this for him.’ And that was that. Until Coombe came to see me.”
“But she is obviously North’s sister,” Caroline said. “Why would he have said that?”