Quickly and with mounting excitement, Cressida tidied her hair and dusted a discreet veil of powder over her heated face. Her body pulsed with the knowledge of the power it soon would yield and in her haste to complete her ministrations she knocked the writing desk from her dressing table with her elbow.
It crashed to the floor, breaking apart and spreading pages to the far corners of the room.
Cressida crouched and quickly tidied them, the words blurring before her eyes. There was no point in reading them. Perhaps she never would. Justin could discreetly return them, for Cressida understood too well now the bleak history of a woman who’d been stripped of her one true love, her child—a sorrow compounded when she’d become a victim of sexual exploitation and finally, with no family support, had carved out a life for herself against the odds.
Hurriedly she tidied the pages and placed them in the remains of the little writing desk. A single folded letter sealed with wax had fallen to her seat, which she discovered as she was about to sit down, and when she picked it up the wax seal disintegrated and the letter unfolded before her eyes.
She saw the name Sir Robert and the familiar name of her old friend, Annabelle Luscombe. “Sir Robert,” she whispered aloud. Madame Zirelli’s old love?
Without thinking what she was doing might be wrong, Cressida carefully smoothed the letter, sat down upon the chair and began to read.
“My dear Mariah—” Sir Robert began—a familiar greeting, even after so many years, for, if what Madame Zirelli had said, she’d not seen him for nearly twenty.
Cressida tried to remember what she knew of Sir Robert. He was married. He had children, she thought, but hadn’t heard mention of him in years.
“I do not know if this will find you, or indeed where you are or whether you are married. I was saddened at news which filtered through to me in Basle, where I’ve lived the past sixteen years, of your divorce, but I hope you have found the happiness you deserve.
Throughout the fifteen years of my marriage I have thought of you with great fondness, hoping that life has treated you well. I have been living abroad, returning only recently after my dear wife, Lucille, died, and indeed I’d not have risked stirring up the past, Mariah, were it not for an occurrence some weeks ago which begs for clarification if I am ever to sleep easily again.
It is difficult for me to write this, but I have no choice for if—as I believe—I have been in ignorance these past nineteen years, then you have carried a terrible burden.
Several weeks ago I attended Lady Sommer’s ball where I chanced upon a girl who bore such an astonishing resemblance to you that I cried out to my friend, “Who is that young woman?”
“Don’t you know your own niece?” he told me. “Your sister’s child, Miss Madeleine Hardwicke. She is to marry Lord Slitherton in six weeks.”
In the intervening sennight I have pondered the matter and my disquiet has not abated.
Mariah, you cannot know how distressed I was at our enforced separation and the lengths to which my parents went to ensure I remained at Oxford rather than rush back to see you when I heard you’d been engaged as a governess in Dorset.
As you did not reply to my letters I did not persist, thinking you wished to close that chapter of your life.
It is strange returning to England after sixteen years to find both my parents dead and soon to follow them to the grave my older
sister, whom I feel I never knew, the mother of a child she believed she could never have. I have so many unanswered questions.
Perhaps you have some of the answers. Nothing would gladden my heart more than to meet with you again, so we may discuss all that happened so many years ago.
With fond memories,
Yours ever,
Robert.”
Cressida dropped the letter. Madame Zirelli’s kindness towards Cressida had stemmed from a genuine wish to supply her with the knowledge to control her own fertility, because it was this lack of knowledge that had ruined her own life.
Ruined, because she’d been stripped of a child she could never know.
Tonight Madame Zirelli had learned that Miss Madeleine Hardwicke was the daughter she could never acknowledge. In three days Miss Hardwicke would marry the ageing peer, Lord Slitherton.
Cressida refolded the single sheet of vellum and tapped the table with it, unable to dismiss the uncomfortable knowledge that the wedding would be as decidedly unjoyous for Madame Zirelli as it would be for Miss Hardwicke. And poor Miss Hardwicke would have to live with the consequences for many unhappy years to come.
Slowly, Cressida rose, tossed back her head and studied her face in the looking glass.
She could not think of Miss Hardwicke now. Cressida had other priorities. No, poor Miss Hardwicke and her unhappy state of the heart would have to wait.
But maybe, just maybe, she thought as she pinched colour into her cheeks and bit her lips, she could unite some unlikely forces and give the ton something to really get excited over. Something that would advance the cause of womanhood, for a change.
* * * *