Page 60 of The Duke's All That
“No, you need to know. You have begged me for years now, asking me to let you in to my most secret heart. And I, fool that I was, locked you out at every turn.” She closed her eyes for a moment, gathering her strength before, opening them again, she looked her sisters in the eye. “I’ll begin with why I went to Scotland with Iain. I told the truth when I said that Mrs. Campbell’s death brought up something that needed to be taken care of, and that is why he came to Synne for me. But what I did not tell you is that he learned I was not dead all this time as our father let everyone believe, and he wanted to secure a divorce from me. Because we were married.”
Both girls blinked myopically at her. “Married,” Elspeth repeated, as if the word did not make any sense.
“Yes. Which, naturally, leads me to the rest.” She took a fortifying breath and launched on, telling her sisters in as gentle a way as she could manage the whole of it: how she had loved Iain and married him with the intent of heading to Montreal to start a new life; how she had returned to the house to say goodbye to them but that her father had caught her; how he had made her believe that Iain had betrayed her, then sent her off to an asylum, where she had stayed for a year until, finally, he brought her back home in preparationfor finding husbands for the younger girls. They gazed at her with horror and grief and disbelief as she spoke, not interrupting, simply listening.
When she fell silent, however, Millicent, whose face had gone as pale as the sea foam made by the churning waves at the shore, spoke.
“Oh, Seraphina,” Millicent whispered, her eyes welling with tears. “An asylum? He sent you to one of those awful places?”
“No wonder you were so altered when you returned,” Elspeth said thickly. “How you must have suffered.”
“That was why I agreed to take you away from Father,” Seraphina explained, “so you would not have to suffer as I had. You were ready to rebel against his plans for you to marry those awful men, and I had no doubt, none at all, that he would have done the same to you once he even guessed at your intentions to leave.”
The girls paled, no doubt the reality of how close they had come to that fate beginning to sink in.
“That is the reason for your nightmares, isn’t it?” Millicent asked mournfully. “You still suffer from your time there.”
Seraphina felt the blood leave her face. “You know about those?”
“Of course we do,” Elspeth answered before giving her a sad smile. “Our walls are quite thin, you know.”
“We ached to go to you when they took hold of you,” Millicent added. “But we knew you would not wish it.”
“We did not imagine, however, that they were brought about by your time in an asylum,” Elspeth rasped, her eyes wide and full of a pain that Seraphina had never wished to put there.
Then she said something that further tore Seraphina’s heart in two.
“We believed you had nightmares from having to sell yourself in order to keep a roof over our head and food in our bellies those first years.”
Seraphina blinked back the hotness in her eyes. “You know about that as well?”
“Of course we do,” Millicent replied. Though tears poured freely down her face now, she continued, her voice thick. “And we can never apologize enough for the horrors you had to shoulder to keep us safe.”
“No, you will never apologize for that, do you hear me?” Seraphina demanded. Her throat burned, and she swallowed hard to relieve it, but it only grew worse as she gazed into the grieving eyes of her sisters. Reaching out, she took their hands in hers. “I would do it all again if I had to, a hundred times over.”
They squeezed her hands tight, their eyes full. Though there was grief freshly etched into their beloved faces, and though she suspected there was some guilt in their hearts as well, she could not detect a bit of anger or disgust. No, their love for her was still as clear as it had ever been.
She shook her head slowly. “But… aren’t you angry at me? Aren’t you sickened by what I’ve revealed to you?”
The smiles on their faces, as watery as they were, only grew. “You silly thing,” Elspeth said gently. “We could never be sickened by what you have done, especially as you did it for us, and out of love. We’ll love you forever, Seraphina.”
Unable to speak for probably the first time in her two and thirty years, everything suddenly appeared out of focus. It was only when she blinked and her gaze momentarilycleared, however, a strange warmth tracking down her cheeks, that she realized why. And when her sisters, seeing her reaction, exclaimed and enveloped her in their arms, she finally gave herself up to it, letting the sobs rip freely from her chest, feeling the burden of nearly a decade and a half wash away in cleansing tears.
Chapter 27
One Month Later
Seraphina, perhaps you should take the afternoon off and go for a walk on the beach,” Elspeth said.
Seraphina, who had been arranging and rearranging fans and perfumes on a small table in an attempt to keep busy, started and glanced up at her sister. No matter that she had been trying to distract herself, her mind had been elsewhere—namely back in Scotland, with a certain duke whom she had not been able to put from her mind for even an hour since her return no matter how she had tried.
Though after the letter she had received that morning, succinctly informing her that her marriage to Iain had been successfully dissolved, she did not wonder at her distraction. Her deep and aching sadness, however, was another matter entirely.
Her sisters knew of the finalization of the divorce. Seraphina’s new openness with them had not stopped at that emotional evening when she had returned to Synne. Ithad taken practice over the past month, of course, years of holding her cards close to her chest having made it difficult to confide her troubles to others. Which really was putting it mildly.
But she had told them of the divorce—and had been rewarded with their vigilant eyes on her all day. Like now, as they both watched her with concern.
She flushed, frowning. “Nonsense,” she replied. “I cannot leave. It’s the middle of the day.”
