Page 82 of Bound By her Earl

Oh good, Benedict thought sardonically. He had so hoped to be forced to explain every sordid detail.

“Well,” he said, feeling as uncomfortable as he ever had in the whole of his life, “you are aware that she was, er, associated with Theodore Dowling?”

At the mention of the dead villain’s name, a shadow of pain crossed the Duke’s face. He turned aside for a moment, as if he needed to pause to collect himself. When he spoke, however, his voice was steady.

“I did hear of that,” he said. “I gather she was taken in by the rogue. Poor thing,” he added, indicating that he trulydidn’tknow Priscilla as nobody who knew her—not even those who liked her—would refer to her as apoor thing.

The Duke turned back to face Benedict fully. “I am afraid that I don’t see why you have brought this to me, Sir,” he said, not unkindly, though his voice was stiffer than it had been previously. “As you may imagine, I still find it…difficult to discuss the terrible events that took my daughter from us.”

“Of course,” Benedict murmured. “And do let me express how very sorry I am to drag this matter back into the present. I know that Lady Grace’s loss is extremely painful for your family. Ockley still speaks of her fondly and often.”

The Duke’s expression flickered, too quickly for Benedict to fully parse his reaction. Again, he wondered what was going on between father and child that would make a mere reference discomfit this polished man.

“Forgive me for indelicacy, but—do get to the point, My Lord.”

“Yes, of course,” Benedict said again, clearing his throat. “The thing is, I have uncovered letters between yourself and my mother that are…indelicate.”

The Duke’s brows arched in the picture of surprise. “Do you know what?” he muttered, eyes darting as he thought. “I had nearly forgotten about that.” His gaze cleared, became piercing. “Yes. There was an incident, several years ago. Your mother—and I beg your pardon for speaking so unflatteringly about her—approached me for a liaison. I rebuffed her. She did not take kindly to the rejection.”

Benedict huffed a humorless laugh.No, she wouldn’t, would she?

“May I assume,” the Duke went on, “that this is the indelicacy to which you refer?”

“I do not relish speaking so frankly,” Benedict began. He really, really did not. He would have preferred almost any conversation under the sun to this one. “But, to clarify, the letter we found was more threatening than, ah, intimate.”

The Duke’s brow furrowed. “Yes,” he said. “I remember such a thing. ‘You’ll regret turning me down’ and the like?” Benedict nodded, and the older man sighed. “She did send something like that; after the first missive, I returned the others, unopened. Eventually, she stopped sending them, and I assume she’d moved on…” He trailed off, then looked at Benedict with wide, wide eyes. “And she did. To Dowling. I remember being relieved at seeing them together as I thought it meant that she had forgotten all about me. And I quickly moved to other concerns because it was only a month or so after that when Grace—” He broke off, clearing his throat violently.

There was a long, painful moment where the Duke remained silent. He was uncharacteristically hoarse when he spoke again.

“I never thought the two incidents were related, but… Well, we assumed it was Hawkins, you see? And then by the time we learned it was Dowling, learned that we’d all been tricked by him, it had been so long since I’d heard from Priscilla, so I never thought…”

This time he trailed off so slowly that Benedict wondered if the other man had forgotten he was not alone. Benedict was just about to stammer an awkward apology and leave when the Duke whipped his head back around.

“But you think,” he said, a faint note of accusation in the words. “You think she had something to do with it. With my daughter.”

Benedict sighed. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I suspect. I have learned that my mother was apparently blackmailing Dowling, and when we discovered her letters to you as well…” This time it was Benedict’s turn to trail off. “The coincidences seemed too great,” he finished.

The Duke’s laugh was shockingly bitter. “Coincidences,” he echoed. “Coincidences and clues and hints. It was supposed to beover,” he said savagely. “With Hawkins. They hanged Hawkins, and we were meant to have time to heal—not that a parent can ever come back from that sort of thing, you understand. To lose a child at all is an unspeakable tragedy, but to lose a daughter like my Grace—a shining example of a girl who had been protected and coddled and adored by all—to have that child snatched out from under your nose when she it meant to be safe?” He shook his head. “It defies comprehension.”

Benedict understood how the Duke had gotten such an ardent political following. Even his regular conversation carried the cadences of a rehearsed speech. The man was visibly bereft and utterly sympathetic.

“I am sorry,” Benedict said. “Not just for speaking of this painful matter, but for my mother. I should have?—”

“No,” the Duke interrupted gently. “You are not responsible for what others do. You are your own man, Moore. That is all you can be.”

“You are too generous.”

The Duke shot him a bittersweet smile. “For all that I have suffered great tragedy, I have been blessed enough to see generosity from a hundred different sources. It is no recompense for what I have lost, of course, but the sympathy of others, their kindnesses, has proven a great solace in hard times.”

It was painful to watch an upright man like this one relive the most dreadful thing that he must have ever experienced. Benedict, certain he would get no more answers from this avenue, felt suddenly desperate to leave, to hold his wife close to him and offer prayers of thanks thatshehad not been snatched away.

“I’m going to confront my mother,” he promised the Duke. “I’m going to find out the truth.”

The Duke’s eyes flashed a warning. “Do be careful,” he cautioned. “Someone who could commit such a hideous crime, someone who could manage to hide it for years, leaving two men dead for a crime they never committed…someone like that would be very, very dangerous, indeed.”

This seemed, to Benedict, to be an expression of grief leeching through Graham’s good sense. Benedict was going to confront his ownmother,after all, not a madman wielding a cutlass. Even if she was guilty of these dreadful sins against Lady Grace and her family—and he suspected she was—she’d not dirtied her hands herself.

But correcting the Duke seemed pointless as well as unkind, so Benedict let the matter lie. He stood, offering a polite bow.

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