Page 50 of The Widow's Scandalous Gentleman
“I am grateful for the chance to offer it.”
They stood in silence for a breath.
Miss Ivy Fairweather approached the carriage with a folio pressed to her chest—her best work wrapped in cloth and care. Her features were still, but in the tension of her hands lay the knowledge that this journey meant more than exhibition—it meant survival.
Her fingers moved in elegant precision. Kit, beside her, translated with quiet authority.
“She says her paintings will speak plainly where words fall short. That they are not pleas, but evidence—of what’s possible when difference is respected, not pitied.”
Thalia met Ivy’s eyes and nodded once. “Then let us carry them where they must be seen.”
Kit himself held a satchel of papers—manuscripts that had weathered draft after draft in the safety Seacliff had offered. “I would rather my work stand trial than my silence,” he said, half-smiling. “If I am to be judged, let it be for something I wrote with purpose.”
Miss Violet Ashworth followed at a dignified pace, her upright posture undimmed by years. Her valise was modest, but her presence was not.
“We will not hang back,” she said firmly, stepping into the space between them all with the easy command of one who had once held entire theatres in the palm of her hand. “If this is to be a reckoning, let it be a truthful one. And let us deliver that truth ourselves.”
Two carriages—sent from Vexwood—waited at the front of the house.
Thalia paused by the open door of the carriage. Behind her, trunks had been secured. Within lay proofs, hopes, and the fragile shape of what might yet be salvaged.
Jasper stood nearby, composed but subdued. He had offered to accompany them not as mediator, not as protector, but as someone who knew which corridors bent and which ones led nowhere.
“I do not know what awaits us,” Thalia said quietly as she settled into her seat.
“Neither do I,” Jasper replied, climbing in beside her. “But I no longer believe it will end as we feared.”
Outside, Ivy, Kit, and Violet boarded the second carriage. Ivy held her folio close. Kit tightened his grip on his satchel. Violet’s calm gaze met the road ahead as though daring it to disappoint her.
The doors closed.
And as the wheels began to turn, as Seacliff Retreat receded behind them, no one spoke.
But the silence did not carry grief.
It carried intent.
They were not leaving to plead.
They were travelling to be seen.
Chapter Twenty-One
“I find myself entirely astonished,” said Lord Jasper Vexley, standing before the tall windows of the Blue Drawing Room, “by the transformation that has occurred in this house over the course of merely three days. What I expected to be a negotiation—delicate, perhaps reluctant—has become something far more: a shift in understanding I scarcely dared hope for.”
Afternoon light streamed across the Persian carpets, catching the carved edges of chairs and sideboards that had stood through generations of family conferences. The furniture remained, stately and unchanged. But something in the air felt different. Jasper’s voice, usually even, now carried a note of something quieter and rarer: wonder.
What had begun, Sebastian had claimed, as a modest house party to soothe recent tensions had clearly become something else entirely. The guest list alone—carefully assembled and arriving by the hour—spoke not of private reconciliation, but of public reckoning. Vexwood Hall, the seat of old certainties, had become a stage.
Thalia Greaves joined him at the window, watching the footmen carry in crates, the footfall of arrival, the clipped commands of stewards. Somewhere outside, music was being rehearsed. Not for diversion, she knew—but for effect.
“The transformation has indeed been… remarkable,” she said, measured. Her expression remained unreadable, though there was something softened at the edges. “Though whether it proves enduring—time will show.”
Her dress was of sapphire silk, the kind of deep, unapologetic colour that spoke not of mourning but of conviction. It suited her. As did the new set to her shoulders. The woman who had once built a sanctuary from near nothing now stood in a house that had once questioned her purpose—and watched as it prepared to open its doors in her defence.
“Your brother,” she added after a pause, “is not a sentimental man. Which makes his reversal all the more significant. Or all the more precarious.”
Jasper smiled faintly. “I have wondered the same. But I believe it’s real. I’ve never seen him listen as he did these past days—not to me, but to them. Especially to Miss Fairweather.”
