The Silent Governess(71)
In the hall, Herbert withdrew a single gold guinea from his waistcoat pocket and pressed it into Olivia’s gloved hand. “This is yours, I believe, Miss Keene. You won that long-ago contest and you won today.”
“I think we both won,” she said. “Thank you for speaking out.”
Pulling his gaze from her hand, he looked up ruefully. “Would you have let me keep silent, had I not?”
She smiled gently but shook her head. “I have been silent long enough.”
Chapter 50
It was all the romance of the nursery and
the poetry of the schoolroom.
—HENRY JAMES, THE TURN OF THE SCREW
The carriage made its way to the far end of Northleach, to the mottled grey-stone prison and magistrate building known as the House of Correction. The arched doorway was flanked on either side by imposing two-story walls.
Edward waited in the carriage with her mother, while Mr. Smith offered Olivia a hand down. The constable led Olivia through the magistrate’s building and into a small visitors’ room near the keeper’s house. Then he disappeared, taking the magistrate’s order with him.
Several minutes later, a keeper opened the door and Simon Keene shuffled into the room, head bowed and hands clasped together in front of him as though manacled, though no physical restraint bound him.
Her father looked up and started. Clearly no one had told him who had come to see him. Nor why.
“Livie! I did not think to ever lay eyes on you again.”
Her heart was so full to see him that for a moment she could not speak. When she did not, his hopeful expression faded.
“Come to say good-bye?” he asked dully. “Or to rail at me once more?”
“Neither.” She sat at the table and gestured her father toward the second chair across from her.
He slumped down. “Surely you’ve heard I’m done for. It’s the noose for me. Or transportation. Fatal the both of them.”
“No. You are being released. Did they not tell you?”
He frowned. “Are you dreamin’, girl? Out to raise my hopes and dash them as I have disappointed you time and time again?”
“You are innocent.”
“Ha! I did not embezzle a farthing, but I am guilty of far worse. It is why I don’t care what they do to me now—I have made peace with my maker. I wish I might have told your mother how sorry I am. Begged her pardon—yours as well. If you might forgive me, I could die content enough.”
“I do forgive you,” Olivia said. “And I hope you will forgive me.”
“Forgive you? For what?”
“For thinking the worst of you.”
He looked away. “I have given you prodigious cause.”
“Perhaps,” she allowed. Later, she would confess all that she had thought him guilty of. But not now, not here. He looked low indeed, yet there was an odd new light in his eyes, a peace in his countenance she had not before seen. “Never mind that now. I have had a look at Sir Fulke’s books and—”
“Did you indeed?” he interrupted, brows high. “And how did you accomplish that?”
“Lord Brightwell and his son are acquainted with Sir Fulke, and—”
“Brightwell again. I might have known. Has he claimed you as his own?”
“No. The point is they convinced Sir Fulke’s son and solicitor to give me an hour with the account books, and do you know what I discovered?”
He shook his head absently, his eyes flitting about her face, as though taking an inventory and committing it to memory.
“The money had been taken over a period of only a few months, more than a year ago. It had been categorized as petty cash, yet withdrawn in large amounts which, when summed, rounded to the pound. Not the work of an accomplished clerk like you, even had you been working for Sir Fulke at the time, which you were not. You are far too clever for such a hack job.”
“Who was it, then? Not his steward, I hope? Seemed a decent man to me.”
She shook her head. “It was Herbert Fitzpatrick, Sir Fulke’s own son. And with good cause, I gather. Do you remember him? The Harrow lad who won that contest in the Crown and Crow?”
“Won?” He humphed. “You let him win—that’s what.”
She leaned across the table and looked him in the eye. “You are right, I did. Will you never forgive me for it?” Tears blurred her vision, and she was twelve years old all over again.
Tears filled his drooping brown eyes, and her heart ached to see it. “Me forgive you? When it’s I who was worse than the devil to you? You who never did me a wrong—well, if you don’t count that one contest. . . .” He attempted a grin, which only served to push the tears from his eyes and down his cheeks, thinner than she had ever seen them.
He sighed and slumped back. “I have not had one drop to drink since that night I came the fool to Brightwell Court. I have been praying too, for the first time in my life. That parson, Tugwell, he helped me see—not the error of my ways, for I knew them all too well already—but what was wanting in me. I am far from perfect, I know, but I am changed and changing still. I know it is too late for Dorothea and me. When news of my hanging reaches her, wherever she is, she will no doubt wed her Oliver after all. I hope she will finally be happy.”
Olivia shook her head. “She did not leave you for him. She felt she had to flee because someone was threatening her. Nearly killed her.”
His face darkened, thunderstruck. “What? I shall kill the fiend! Who is he? Who?”
“This is exactly why she did not tell you. She knew you would murder the man and end up hanging for it, and she did not want that.”
He shook his head regretfully. “Well, it is what I get in the end, at any rate, and I would have rather given my life to protect her.” His voice grew thick with emotion. “I would, you know. I would give my life for her.”
“I know you would,” whispered Dorothea Keene.
Olivia looked over her shoulder. Her mother stood timidly in the threshold. When Olivia looked back at her father, his mouth was slack, expression stunned. He stared at Dorothea as though not believing his eyes. As though for the last time.
“You gave your life for me long ago,” she said quietly. “When you married me, even knowing I carried another man’s child.”
He slowly nodded. “I loved you then, and I love you now. Livie too, though she don’t belong to me.”
Dorothea shook her head. “But she does. I did visit Brightwell Court once after I lost the first child, but I was never unfaithful to you. I have told you before, and I will tell you until you believe me. She is your daughter. Yours.”
Still he stared at his wife, disbelief evident in his expression, but whether disbelief of her words or of her very presence, Olivia was not certain.
“Why are you here?” he asked breathlessly, “Why are you telling me this, when you had already made your escape? When you were already well and free of me?”
Tears brightened Dorothea’s eyes. Her whisper grew hoarse. “Perhaps I do not wish to be free.”
Hope flared and faded in his dark eyes. “Well, free you’ll be, and soon now. I’m to be hung or transported, and men don’t come back spry and whole, if they come back at all. Still, I am glad you’ve come. I asked God to let me see the both of you once more, and He has answered.”
“Did you not hear a word I said, Papa?” Olivia exclaimed. “You have been exonerated.”
He shook his head in wonder, a rare twinkle in his eyes. “Figured it out when neither the steward nor I could, did you? Caught that Harrow boy out at the last.”
She nodded.
“That’s my girl. My clever girl.”
Olivia’s throat tightened, and her heart squeezed to hear him say those long-missed words. She reached across the table and pressed the guinea into his hand, much as Herbert had done. “He returned this.”
Simon Keene held the coin in his fingers, turning it this way and that. “Of all the things I have lost in my life, this is the very least I’d want returned to me.”
He placed the coin back in her hand, pressing her fingers for a lingering moment.
“You are free to go, Father,” she whispered. “We are all of us free.”
Olivia finally understood what Mr. Tugwell had tried to tell her. This was how it was for every fallen creature. Christ bore the penalty we each deserve, to purchase our freedom.
He shook his head. “I cannot take it in. Free to go . . . where?”
Olivia glanced at her mother. It was not her place to invite him home.
“You will be going back to your Lord Brightwell with his riches and title, no doubt,” he went on. “And I would not blame you. Not a bit of it.”
“Listen to me,” Olivia said. “Lord Brightwell is a very kind and generous man, but he is not my father. That is your title, whether you accept it or not.”
He studied her, wanting to believe, she could tell, but afraid to do so.
“The man may be an earl,” Olivia continued, attempting a grin, “but he is no scholar in arithmetic, I assure you. In fact, he makes rather a muddle of it.” She slowly shook her head, looking him directly in the eye. “I long ago inherited your dark hair and mind for numbers. There is no disinheriting me now.”
He lifted thin lips in a wobbly smile. “Never.”