Page 92 of Duke It Out
“Sorry, what on earth were you thinking,Your Grace.” The words drip with irony.
I sigh. “Janey?—”
“Don’t you Janey me. That girl has worked her backside off for the best part of three months, done nothing but respect this place, make herself useful, win everyone’s heart and you’ve chucked her out like yesterday’s leftovers.”
There’s a silence. I stare at the bottle and let out a long, slow exhale.
“I thought she’d found something,” I say finally. “I thought?—”
Janey uncrosses her arms and closes the door, leaning back against it.
“Please sit,” I say, gesturing to the chair on the other side of my desk.
Janey looks at the chair with distaste but sits down, crossing both her arms and legs in disapproval. The clock chimes nine o’clock.
“You thought what?” She crooks a brow. Her tone is anything but warm.
“That I wasn’t… legitimate.”
She blinks. “Excuse me?”
“My father said something once. Years ago. I don’t even remember what started it – one of his drunken rambles when he spat poison. But he said back then I wasn’t like the rest of them – that I didn’t belong. That it was all because I wasn’t the true heir.”
I glance up to see Janey frowning at me, an expression of confusion on her face.
“You weren’t the what?”
“The true heir.” After all the years of carrying it around it feels alien to say the words aloud.
“You’ve carried that around for goodness knows how many years and never said a word?”
I nod once, briefly.
“Rory,” she says, leaning forward and resting her chin on her folded hand as she looks at me. “That is pure and unadulterated bullshit. I’ve heard some crap come out of your father’s mouth,” she looks up at his painting scowlingdown at us and snorts. “But that absolutely takes the biscuit.”
She gets up, walks out of the room and disappears. I hear her footsteps in the corridor and the sound of the library door opening then banging shut a moment later. I take another glass from the cabinet and pour myself a drink, and one for Janey when she returns. If she returns.
She comes back five minutes later with one of the diaries that have been haunting my dreams for months but this one is black leather, not red. There’s a stack of papers, too. She places them down on the desk and shakes her head as I offer her a drink.
“I have to drive back to the cottage, remember.”
I watch as she flips it open and flicks through the pages, eyes narrowed as she focuses on the handwritten words.
“Here.” She turns the book around and passes it across the desk. She taps the page with a finger. “Read that.”
It’s not his writing. It’s my mother’s, neat and careful compared to his expansive scrawl.
I shouldn’t have ridden. He was drunk again, and I had to get away and now everything’s broken. It’s my fault. The baby’s gone.
I look at the date and it punches the breath out of me.
“She miscarried before you were born,” Janey says softly. “She kept diaries too, but she wanted them locked away in the library. I’d say it tore the marriage apart, but those two should never have been together. Your father was…” She tails off.
I don’t need her to say any more. To the outsiders he was unpredictable, charming, mercurial. To the people who knew him well, he could be impossibly cruel.
“That’s what your father was talking about. I heard it more than once. It wasn’t you. It was never you.”
The floor shifts underneath me.
