Page 72 of Unseen

Aunt Adelaide frowned at me, clasping her hands together and shaking her head. “No, I do not understand. What are you saying, girl?”

I attempted to close the distance between us, but when I reached out to take her hand, she jerked it away. “He left me nothing. He left me destitute. The annuity, the endowment, it’s all gone.”

Adelaide bit her lips together and shook her head. “No, you are mistaken. He signed an agreement, your father has a copy of it in his study. I have seen it myself, I was there when they signed it.”

“Acton signed a new testament, a year ago.” I tried again to take her hand, but she turned away from me shaking her head. “Aunt, please, you must listen to me!”

“No!” She rounded on me, her finger darting in the air. “No! I will not listen to you, you are lying to try and justify your marriage!”

“That is what you think of me?” One lonely, hot tear could not be held back, and slid down my cheek. “You think me so cold and cruel that I would lie about my family’s destitution? That I would see my father cast out onto the street only so I could secure a handsome husband? You were my mother in almost every sense, and this is how you speak to me?”

Adelaide put a hand to her head, shaking her disagreement once more, throwing her hands up and quickly clasping them together again. “Evangeline, I am sure you are mistaken. The agreement was-”

“That I bear him children.” I interjected, and shrugged myshoulders. “Two years into our marriage, he had given up hope of me bearing him an heir. So he went to his lawyer, a disdainful fellow called Mr Fisher, who stood in this house and laughed and mocked me as he told me that the will had been changed. Acton left me my jewels, and his mother’s tapestries. Nothing more.”

Adelaide’s mouth fell open, so shocked was she that for a moment she could not speak at all. She put a hand to her chest, and gasped.

“My god. How could he?”

“Because he held all the cards, and we, none.” I hung my head, my cheeks burning. “I failed in my duty to him, as a wife.”

“But you lay with him? Like I instructed, remember? You knew what to do.”

I laughed bitterly. “Yes, Aunt, I knew very well my duty. And I fulfilled it, every time he required it.”

“Then I do not understand why you did not bear a child.”

“That is certainly neither here nor there now.”

“No!” Aunt Adelaide rushed at me, taking my hands and shaking her head. “No, listen to me, if we take you to a doctor, who can confirm that you are healthy, and able to bear a child, then we can contest that will.”

“What?”

Adelaide nodded emphatically. “Yes! If Acton felt you had failed in your duties, but we can show that it was not your fault, then the will is null and void. Or at the very least, we have a case. And your… marriage is not a necessity. We can have it annulled.”

“No.” I shook my head, pulling my hands from hers. “No. That is not possible.”

“Evangeline, be reasonable. No one need ever know.”

I scowled at her, taking two steps back. “No one need ever know? So what are we to do while we wait to see thisdoctor? While I live in this house, as both a widow and a wife?”

“This is not the time to think of yourself.” Adelaide snapped, drawing herself up and straightening her bonnet. “You must think of all of us, what this marriage has done. How it has made us look.”

“Made us look?” I did not mean to shout, but it was too much. It was too late. The years of hurt, of abandonment, the deep pit of dread that had pooled in my stomach since the day my engagement to Acton was announced - they all came bubbling to the surface. “How it made us look? How do you think it made us look when you all married me off to a man old enough to be my grandfather?”

Adelaide’s mouth dropped open in outrage. “How dare you!”

“How do you think people spoke of us, when you all stood by and let that man, that old man, take a young maid to the altar, and make her his wife?”

“There was nothing to say, Evie, it was a valid marriage!”

“For whom? For me?” I jabbed my fingers into my chest, sure I looked wild now, but not caring all the same. “A valid marriage for me? All the books you read to me as a child, not one had a prince charming with thinning white hair and a walking stick!”

“You are being ridiculous now!”

“You were all ridiculous! You all sold me like a cow, to be bred so that you all may keep your comfort!”

Adelaide sputtered, her cheeks flushing violently purple and the veins at her temples popping out under her pale skin. “You ungrateful, insolent girl! You were handed off into a good marriage with a decent man who treated you like a queen!”

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