Page 21 of Fatal By Design
“A stop where?” he asked.
Audrey gestured toward the rutted lane. “The family graveyard. It’s this way.”
ChapterEight
Haverfield had never truly felt like home to Audrey. It was where she’d lived most of the year while a child, excepting the rare trip to London when they would occupy the townhome where her father would often stay while Parliament sat. As Audrey grew older, and certainly after she and Philip had married, she had started to look back at her memories with newfound clarity and realized that her parents had not been in love. They had not even really liked each other.
The few memories she’d retained after all these years were of them apart rather than together, and after he’d died, her mother had never truly seemed to mourn the loss of her husband. Perhaps that was because she was already engaging in an affair with her brother-in-law, Peter. The pair of them turned out to be a perfect match, and it left Audrey wondering why and how her father had come to marry her mother in the first place.
What did she truly know of her father?
As Hugh stopped the phaeton next to the brick columns flanking the entrance to the family plot, she remembered back to when she was younger, and how desperately she had wanted her father and James to still be alive. Her mother and uncle had been at best, neglectful, and at worst, unkind. When she’d been sent away to Shadewell, she’d lamented the loss of Papa and James even more bitterly. Although, she had no true indication that her father would have acted differently than her mother and uncle. Perhaps he still would have sent her away. Maybe James would have grown to be arrogant and stopped doting on her as she grew up.
It was entirely possible her memories of them were romanticized because she had never been given the chance to find out who they would have been. What life could have been like had her father and James not died was a question she had never quit asking; more so when she’d been younger, though less so now.
Greer opted to stay in the hooded phaeton, as the misting rain had not relented. Audrey thought perhaps her maid also suspected she and Hugh might want a few minutes alone.
However, she wasn’t certain Hugh would wish to converse with her. Last night, when he had reacted just as poorly as she imagined he would to the truth about Philip, she’d tossed and turned in bed with regret. But she could never have continued to lie to him, no matter how destructive the truth proved to be. He’d been angry, yes, but there had been something more behind his anger. Disappointment, perhaps. And why shouldn’t he be disappointed? Audrey felt it too.
“I haven’t visited their graves in years,” Audrey said softly as they walked a narrow foot path that ran through the graveyard. Trees in full leaf surrounded the two acres that held most of the Edgertons laid to rest over the centuries.
“I don’t believe you need to visit a headstone to be able to talk to the person you’re missing,” Hugh replied, keeping pace beside her.
“Do you talk to your mother?” she asked, intrigued. “Or your father?”
He took a moment to reply. “No. I do think of them though. Lately, I’ve been trying to remember more about my father. I never thought I would hold his title. His responsibilities. I wish I’d paid more attention to him.”
In the spring, Hugh had questioned whether he could be a proper viscount; he’d been concerned he would not be able to rise to the task. She’d known, of course, that he would do well. It was far more difficult being a Bow Street officer, she imagined, than a viscount, but the change in circumstance would still be a trial. He would miss his work fiercely.
The grave markers for her father and James had worn a little; moss had grown along the base of the stones and settled into some of the carved letters. A small vase sat on the ledge of James’s grave; it held a recently wilted nosegay. Audrey crouched and touched the browned petals.
“It appears Lady Edgerton does have a heart after all,” she said, noting the second date chiseled into the granite. The tenth of August.
“My brother succumbed to his fever first.” She shifted her gaze to her father’s gravestone. “My father passed the next morning.”
Hugh lowered himself into a crouch beside her, his attention on the headstones. He remained quiet as she returned in her mind to that wretchedly hot day. Confined to the upper floors at Haverfield, locked into her nursery with her nanny to keep her safe from the fever James had returned from Eton with, she had drawn pictures to give to her brother when he was well again. He would have just three weeks at home before the term restarted and he’d leave to return to school. During that time, he would take her to the pond and catch frogs, like they always did, and if they had the chance, they would put them in their mother’s bedside drawer. She could still remember the frog picture she’d nearly completed when the housekeeper, Mrs. Banks, had finally come to release her from her stuffy prison.
“When I was told that James had died, and that my father had followed him, I didn’t understand what that meant. Followed him where? Why would my father leave to follow James when I was still here?” Audrey sighed, noticing that there was no vase of week-old flowers for the late baron’s gravestone. Did her mother care so little for him? Or had he done something to anger her?
“So, I left too,” she went on, recalling the panicked shouts of her nanny and the maids as her six-year-old legs had sprinted her across the lawns and fields and into the woods, away from the sobbing staff and her insensible mother, still moaning James’s name.
“I ran for hours. I was lost but I didn’t mind at all, I just had to keep going. I found a deer trail eventually, then a footpath, and then I entered a beautiful field full of wildflowers. A pair of boys was there. One playing with a wooden sword, the other capturing butterflies in a jar. When they saw me, they looked so frightened.” Audrey glanced at Hugh, who was watching her, engrossed in her story. “I had burrs in my clothing and in my hair. I had scratches all over my skin from running through the woods. I was a fright, though I didn’t know it. But they took me to their mother, and she and her servants doted on me all afternoon, feeding me ices and cake. She wiped away my tears when I told her why I’d run away from home.”
The kindness the Duchess of Fournier had shown her that day had changed Audrey; she’d seen what a mother’s love should be.
“The boys,” Hugh said. “They were Philip and Michael? You had found your way to Fournier Downs?”
Audrey nodded. “They were as brotherly to me as James had been.”
Hugh’s brow furrowed, and then he straightened his legs and extended his hand to her. She took it, and he helped her stand, her legs uncramping. He kept her hand in his, then drew it to his lips. He kissed the ridge of her knuckles, encased in black lace.
“I am glad you found them,” he said. He was in earnest, and for the very first time, her imagination configured a different scenario. One in which she’d entered the flower field and found not Michael and Philip, but a boyish Hugh. He would have been about their same age. What would have happened if she’d met him then?
But all the what ifs could bury her if she let them.
“Philip cannot come back,” she whispered. They were completely alone in this graveyard in the wood, but irrationally, she still feared being overheard. Hugh lowered her hand but kept it clasped within his own.
“He is still out there. An axe hanging over our heads,” he replied. “If he isn’t careful, if he makes one misstep and is discovered…”
