Page 47 of The Unlovable Lady

“Then tell me,” she whispered, though part of her wished never to hear it.

Augusta was quiet for a long moment. Then the dryness went out of her face entirely, and what lay beneath it was old and grieved and tender past anything Rosalind had words for.

“Your mother loved a man who was not her husband.”

The fire crackled in the grate as Rosalind sat frozen, quite certain she had misheard and yet knowing in her bones that she had not. Mama. What was her aunt saying? What could she possibly mean by it?

“I shall tell it to you plainly, for you are owed the truth whole, and I cannot do it any other way.” Augusta’s voice was low and even and careful. “Cecily married Marbury because it was a good match and her family wished it. She did her duty by him, and she was not happy. You have heard me say the marriage was a cold one. It was colder than I ever told you.”

Rosalind could barely form the words. “She loved someone else, and that is what you are trying to tell me.”

“Somewhere in the cold of it, yes. I shall not tell you his name, for I do not mean to, and it does not signify, for he is long gone out of this world.” Augusta drew a slow breath. “What matters is the fact, and the fact is this. She loved him, and you, Rosalind, are the child of that loving.”

“No.” The word burst out of her before she could think, and she could not call it back.

“Yes.”

The room seemed to tilt around her as she struggled to take it in. Her mother, her quiet and gentle mother, had loved a man she could not have and had carried the secret to her grave. What else had she carried behind that closed, sorrowful countenance? How much of her life had been lived where nobody could see it?

Rosalind’s hands trembled and wanted a task, some glove or fold or pin to set straight, though there was nothing in her aunt’s quiet parlor that needed setting straight. She pressed them hard together in her lap.

“You are telling me that my father is not my father.”

“I am telling you that the man who raised you may not be the man who fathered you.” Augusta reached across the small space between the chairs and laid her hand over Rosalind’s, warm and dry and certain. “Now hear me, for the world will not say this kindly, and I shall say it once and exactly. You were born in wedlock. Do you understand what that means?”

Rosalind shook her head slowly, for her thoughts would not hold still long enough to grasp any of it.

“You were born Cecily Hartley’s daughter under Edmund Hartley’s roof, and the law of England knows nothing of any other man, nor ever will. You are the Earl of Marbury’s lawful daughter, Lady Rosalind Hartley, and not one word of tonight changes that.” Augusta’s hand pressed hers. “No one can unmake you, and whatever is coming for you, it is not the law and never was.”

“Then what is coming for me?” Her voice shook. “Something is coming, or you would not have told me at all.”

“Talk.” The word fell flat and exact. “The world’s worst weapon and its only one against a woman who has done nothing it can lay a hand on. They cannot take your name, so they will whisper that you have no right to it, and a whisper cannot be answered and need never be proved.”

“And that is what you felt tonight at the cards, is it not?”

“It is. And a whisper against a girl who has just made herself visible enough to be worth pulling down is the most dangerous thing the Ton owns.”

Rosalind stared at her aunt’s hand over hers and did not see it, for her thoughts had flown far away, first to a cold hall in Hampshire, then to the Hill Street drawing-room and the night of the green gown, her father standing by the second window with his snuffbox turning once in his fingers. Cecily. Your mother was... He had never finished the sentence but had looked away to the dark glass and the December street instead, and she had thought him merely too tired to reach for his own daughter.

Her breath caught hard in her throat. “He knows,” she said, and her voice came out strange to her own ear.

Augusta’s hand tightened over hers. “Say it to me,” she said quietly. “Say the rest of it. I will not say it for you.”

“My father knows.” The word caught in her throat, and she pushed past the catch, for she had no other word for him. “Or he does not know, for you said yourself that no one can prove it, but he wonders, and he has always wondered.” Her voice began to shake, and she let it shake. “That is what I could never read in him. He looks at me as a man looks at a sum that will not come out even, and all my life I believed it was I who would not come right.”

“Oh, my dear child,” Augusta murmured.

“I thought I was wanting in some way I could not discover and could not mend, however I tried. And it was never me at all, was it?” Tears burned at the back of her eyes. “It was this. He never quite claimed me because a part of him has spent six-and-twenty years uncertain whether he ought.”

“Yes,” Augusta said, very low. “That is the grain in it. You have read your whole life by it without ever once being given the key.”

“And the Countess.” The understanding came whole, and cold with it. “Selina suspects. That is the edge she has for me that she has for no one else, not because I outranked her daughters, but because she believes I am living proof of a sin she despises, set above her own children and wearing a name she thinks I have no right to.”

“Yes.”

Rosalind was quiet. She had expected tears, but none came. Instead something in her chest seemed to loosen.

“It does not make me less, does it?”