Mary Balogh - A Summer to Remember

The others strode on ahead, talking all at once, it appeared, and bearing the morning’s catch with them. Kit reduced his stride to accommodate the slower pace of the elderly gentleman.

“I am planning, sir,” he said when there was no longer any possibility of their being overheard, “to institute an inquiry. I was a reconnaissance officer for a number of years, as you know, and have several useful contacts at both the Foreign Office and the War Office. I know many officers who are still active in the field too. I believe you should be aware of what I plan to do. I hope to discover exactly where, when, and how Mrs. Wyatt, Lauren’s mother, your daughter, died.”

“Why?” Baron Galton looked at him sharply. “What the devil do you want to know that for?”

Kit was somewhat taken aback by his almost hostile tone. “You have never been curious yourself, sir?”

“Never!” the old man assured him. “They met with some misadventure and died and word did not get back to us. That is all. People—sons, daughters, parents—die every day, Ravensberg. We can do nothing to bring them back once they are gone. It is pointless to spend time and money and effort simply to discover what we already know. It is best to leave them in peace and get on with our own lives.”

A sensible attitude, perhaps, but it did not seem quite natural for a father to be so unconcerned about his daughter’s fate.

“You made no inquiries at the time, sir?” he asked.

“At what time?” the baron asked. “They never did write often. How were we to know they were even missing until years had gone by? By then any inquiry would have been fruitless.”

“Did the Earl of Kilbourne make no attempt to locate his brother? Or discover what had happened to him?”

“Look here, Ravensberg.” Baron Galton had stopped walking and was regarding Kit sternly from beneath bushy eyebrows. “I have no doubt you are a clever young man and are eager to impress your betrothed by discovering what no one else has discovered in ten or fifteen years. But take my advice and leave it. Let sleeping dogs lie.”

Kit looked steadily back at him. “Good God, sir,” he said with sudden insight, “you know, do you not?”

The old gentleman pursed his lips and looked broodingly at him. “Leave it,” he said again.

Kit leaned slightly toward him, his hands clasped at his back. “You know,” he said. “But Lauren does not. Why? What happened?”

“She was a child, that was why,” the baron said irritably. “She had a good home with Kilbourne and his countess. She was happy and secure. She had companions of her own age and good prospects. She was only three when her mother left, little more than a baby. She quickly forgot her, as children do. Kilbourne and his wife became her parents. She could not have asked for better. You can see for yourself that the Dowager Lady Kilbourne loves her every bit as much as she loves her own daughter.”

“You believe that Lauren did not miss her mother?” Kit was still frowning. “That she did not feel abandoned? That she did not suffer when the infrequent letters and gifts stopped coming?”

“Of course she did not.” Baron Galton spoke firmly and turned to resume walking. “She never once asked. She never spoke of her mother. She never stopped being as serene and happy as she had always been. You may wonder how I can be so sure when I visited her only rarely. I love my granddaughter, Ravensberg. I dote on her. She is all I have of my own. I would have had her to live with me at the snap of two fingers, but it would have been selfish of me. She was happier where she was. I wrote weekly to Kilbourne until his death and he wrote weekly to me. Lauren was a model child and then a model young lady. She was rarely if ever disobedient. She never neglected her lessons or her other duties. She was never discontented or demanding. She was less trouble than either of Kilbourne’s own children. There was no need to upset her unnecessarily with news of a mother she had long forgotten.”

“Kilbourne knew the truth too, then?” Kit asked.

“Of course he did,” Baron Galton replied. “Forget about your inquiries, Ravensberg. And forget about upsetting my granddaughter by dredging up what is long in the past. Leave it be.”

“What did happen?” Kit asked.

The old gentleman sighed. “I suppose,” he said, “you have a right to know. I would have felt it my duty to inform you before you committed yourself to a betrothal to Lauren, had you given me an opportunity to do so. But I was presented with a fait accompli instead. My daughter was as unlike my granddaughter as it is possible to be, Ravensberg. She was always a great trial to her mother and me. She married Whitleaf just to be free of us, I believe, though I approved the match. She led him a merry dance. It was something of a scandal when she married Wyatt a mere ten months after Whitleaf’s death. By some miracle, though, that very marriage gave Lauren a good, steady home, where she was soon loved for herself. I never heard one murmur from either Kilbourne or his countess about bad blood. And they were quite as eager for the match between their son and my granddaughter as I was.”

They walked in silence for a while. Kit offered no comment that might distract his companion’s train of thought.

“Their wedding trip turned into a permanent way of life,” Lord Galton continued eventually. “She—Miriam—was forever wanting Lauren to join them, but I flatly refused to send her, and Kilbourne backed me on that decision. She was no fit mother, and they lived no fitting style of life for a child. There were forever rumors about their wild excesses and debaucheries, brought home by other travelers. Finally, Ravensberg, when they were in India, she left Wyatt in order to take up residence with some fabulously wealthy Indian potentate, and he resumed his travels with a Frenchwoman of questionable reputation. He died five years later—ten years ago—somewhere in South America. Kilbourne did not go into public mourning—mainly for Lauren’s sake. He did not want to have to hurt her with explanations. She was sixteen years old at the time—an impressionable age.”

“Good God! And Mrs. Wyatt?” Kit asked.

“The last I heard, she was still in India, with some official of the East India Company,” Baron Galton said curtly. “She writes once or twice a year, usually to Lauren. She is dead to me, Ravensberg, and by damn she will remain dead to my granddaughter if I have any say in the matter.”

“You—or Kilbourne—have kept her mother’s letters from her? You do not believe she should know the truth?” Kit asked. “That her mother is still alive?”

“I do not.”

The house was well in sight. It had been a lengthy walk for an elderly gentleman who obviously did not indulge in a great deal of exercise. He was breathing heavily.

“Perhaps,” he said sternly, “you feel you have made a bad bargain in your choice of bride, Ravensberg. But it was your choice to rush into a betrothal. And by God you will treat her kindly, or you will have me to answer to for as long as I am spared from my grave.”

“You need not worry about that, sir,” Kit said. “I love your granddaughter.”

The lie was spoken without thought, but it could not be recalled. And it was not such a great untruth, was it? He had grown enormously fond of Lauren. He had lain awake half the night before, thinking about her, wishing she were there in the bed beside him, curled warm and relaxed and asleep against him as she had in the hut and on the island, realizing that after she left there was going to be a yawning emptiness in his life for some time to come. The idea of actually marrying her was becoming more and more appealing to him. The need somehow to persuade her to marry him was becoming more and more imperative, quite aside from the fact that she might be with child by him.

Yet how could he coerce her when it seemed that the greatest gift he could give her was her freedom?

“Then you will protect her from the sordid truth,” Baron Galton said, “as I have done. As the late Kilbourne and his countess and their son have done. If you love her, you will never breathe a word to her of what really happened to her mother. She is far happier in her ignorance.”

“Yes, of course, sir. I will do all in my power to protect her.”

But she was not happy, he thought. All those who had loved her all her life were wrong about that. She had cultivated obedience and gentility and placidity in order to hide the hurt of being a child unwanted by her own mother. She had made herself into the perfect lady to win the love of her adopted family—so that they too would not abandon her. She believed her grandfather had not wanted the bother of caring for her. She believed—rightly, it seemed—that her father’s family had openly rejected her.

She was not happy. She had lived behind the mask for so long—for at least twenty-three of her twenty-six years—that even those nearest and dearest to her seemed to believe that the mask was the reality. Perhaps he was the only person on this earth who had seen the eager, vital, laughter-loving, sensual, truly beautiful woman who was the real Lauren Edgeworth.

But it was indeed a sordid story. Under the circumstances perhaps her grandfather and the Kilbournes had made the right decision to keep it from her. What would it do to her to discover now that her mother still lived, that she was, apparently, promiscuous?

That she had never stopped writing to her daughter?

That she had wanted Lauren to live with her?

“No.” Kit stopped walking again. They were very close to the house. “No, sir, I cannot agree with you. Lauren has suffered from not knowing. She would suffer too from knowing. Perhaps it would be a kindness to keep the truth from her, to protect her because she is a lady and has lived a sheltered life. But I don’t believe so. I believe she has the right to know.”

“You would tell her, then,” Baron Galton asked, clearly angry, “when I have spoken to you in strictest confi-dence?”

Kit looked steadily back at him. “Yes, I believe I will, sir,” he said, “if I am given no alternative. I will tell her the truth after I marry her. Not before then. I beg you to do it. The story should come from you. She needs the truth. You need to trust her with it. You need to set her free.”

“Free?” The old gentleman frowned. He drew breath to say more, but closed his mouth again.

“Please, sir?” Kit asked softly.

Lauren had fully expected the day before the dowager’s birthday to be a busy one since she had committed herself to helping the countess with the last-minute preparations. But looking back on it later, she marveled that any day could be so eventful and still contain only twenty-four hours. She had never lived through a more tumultuous, emotion-packed day.

It began after breakfast when she was already busy with the countess in the latter’s private sitting room, drawing up a written schedule for the next day’s division of labor. The earl and countess would officially greet all comers during the afternoon—outdoors if weather permitted—and judge all the contests that had been announced in the village and the surrounding countryside a month or more ago. Kit and Lauren would organize and run the children’s races. The countess would . . .

But there was a knock on the door and at the countess’s summons it opened to reveal an apologetic Aunt Clara, with Gwen behind her.

“I am so sorry to interrupt you, Lady Redfield,” Aunt Clara said, lifting her right hand to reveal an opened letter, “but I simply could not wait to let Lauren know the news.”

Lauren got to her feet. She had noticed Gwen’s suppressed excitement at the same moment as she saw the ducal crest at the head of the letter—the Duke of Portfrey’s crest, that was.

“Elizabeth has been delivered safely of a boy,” Aunt Clara announced before they all disgraced themselves by falling into one another’s arms and laughing and crying and exclaiming.

“The Duchess of Portfrey?” the countess asked, getting to her feet and hugging Lauren. “Well, this news is as good an excuse for an interruption of work as any I have heard. Do sit down, ladies, and I will have a pot of chocolate brought up. I am quite sure Lauren is ready to hear every sentence of that letter. If she is not, I am.”

The duke had written that his son and heir had arrived earlier than expected, but with ten fingers and ten toes, a powerful set of lungs, and a voracious appetite. Elizabeth was recovering well after a long and difficult delivery. As soon as mother and child could safely travel, he was intending to take them to Newbury Abbey so that the newborn Marquess of Watford could become acquainted with Lily, his half-sister, and Elizabeth could be fussed over by her own family for a month or so.