Page 28 of The Duke's Bride in Disguise
Chapter Six
The next morning, after a restless night of tossing and turning, Ava decided to add an amendment to Lady Emily's plan. As well as repelling the Duke of Kilbride, Ava was going to find out exactly who her parents had been.
Emily will be grateful, she told herself, as she hurried down the stairs to breakfast. She had risen well before noon, in order not to miss Lord Fairfax, and the marquess looked up from his paper in surprise as she entered the dining room.
"It's not like you, my dear," he said affectionately, "To be up so early."
It was half past ten.
"I did not sleep much, Papa," Ava replied evenly, as she took a seat at the table. She waited impatiently for the footman to bring her customary hot chocolate, and took an appreciative sip, before she launched in to the first step of her plan.
"What happened to Lord and Lady Darlington's daughter, Papa?"
Rather than tip-toe around the subject, or try to discover what had happened through subterfuge, Ava had decided to ask Lord Fairfax straight out about the missing Darlington girl—the girl whom Ava was beginning to suspect was her mother.
It was, she knew, an outlandish assumption, but when she added the fact that Miss Darlington had disappeared twenty years ago—around the time of the twins' birth—to the fact that Lady Darlington quite clearly had ill feelings toward Mr McCasey, it all started to make sense.
McCasey had told her that she reminded him of a girl he had once known—indeed, at the theatre he had looked as though he had seen a ghost when he had first spotted Ava. And Laura had been right; Ava did share the same unusual colouring as the esteemed actor.
Something happened between McCasey and Miss Darlington, Ava thought with conviction, and that something led to the creation of Emily and I.
"Eh?" Lord Fairfax lowered his paper and looked at her quizzically, "Why on earth do you want to know about all that?"
"We spotted Lady Darlington in the park yesterday," Ava said evenly, as she applied a thick layer of jam to her bread, "And Kilbride reminded me that her daughter had vanished twenty years ago. I'm sure that Mama told me the story when I was younger, but I seem to have forgotten the details..."
"Well, if your dear Mama told you," Lord Fairfax said, "Then I don't see the harm in repeating it. Miss Darlington—Anna—up and vanished a few days before you were born. It caused quite the scandal; though of course, your Mama and I were distracted from all the fuss, when you decided to make your appearance into the world."
Lord Fairfax cast Ava an affectionate glance, so filled with love that for a moment, Ava felt a stab of jealousy toward her twin.
