Page 95 of The Mistletoe Countess
“She’s saying something. Do you hear her?” Grace’s question spurred him farther down the hall. “Can you make it out?”
Three syllables.
“The last word isme,”Grace murmured, his sweet bride not intimidated in the slightest.
The words became clearer as they stepped over the threshold into his brother’s office.
Frederick’s breath halted. “Forgive me.”
Icicles of awareness slid a chill of cold sweat down his neck. What sort of fictional world had Grace brought into his real life?
Bent over Edward’s desk, the moonlight draping a luminescent glow over her contorted face, stood his mother. She wept as she scanned his brother’s desk, shifting through the pages, eyes fixed and unblinking.
“Mother?” the word scraped over his dry throat, barely making a sound.
“She’s sleepwalking,” Grace’s voice came near his ear. “Do you see her face?”
“Charles,” her wild cry upheaved with a new rush of volume. “Edward.”
Frederick couldn’t move, transfixed by the scene before him, haunted by a myriad of questions. What drove his mother to such grief that she’d seek consolation in her sleep?
Her body shuddered beneath the weight of her sobs.
He’d never seen her weep, and now in the ghostly light, tears rained over her sunken cheeks, her hair a wild mass around her face. The pale light highlighted her hollowed eyes and reflected off the silver streaks in her dark hair. Mother circled the desk, blindly sifting through the papers.
“Tell me you forgive me.” Pages fluttered to the floor as she continued her perusal and finally, as if defeated, quit her task. “Where? I must find it.”
With those words, she stepped to the far bookshelf and escaped out the servants’ entry in a wisp of white. Frederick followed her, entranced.
When they reached the dimly lit Great Hall, only the emptiness of the room greeted him. Grace’s warm fingers slid into his. Had she been there all along? “I thought it was her, but I never imagined…”
“There’s more than grief there.” His voice came scratchy. “Regret?” He met Grace’s gaze. “Guilt?”
She breathed out a sigh as she searched his face before bringing his hand to her lips. “Let’s go to bed, Frederick. Rest. Pray. And discuss this in the morning. There’s nothing to be done now that can’t wait.”
He looked up the stairway, fighting the inclination to run to his mother’s room for immediate answers. Did she know something about Edward’s death? Father’s? She’d begged forgiveness for both. What did that mean?
“Let her sleep.” Grace wrapped her arm through his, tugging him toward the stairs. “I doubt she even knows what she’s doing, and drawing attention to it at the wrong time won’t bring any answers.”
“I don’t understand this.”
“We’ve uncovered something hidden for a long time, I think, and so dark it emerges in your mother’s sleep. We must be very careful from here on out, Frederick. I fear we’re nearing the end of the game, the darkest part of the story, and someone doesn’t want us to discover the truth.”
Frederick sat on the edge of the bed, his naked back turned to her as he stared out the window. At the sight of him, Grace’s heart squeezed with a mixture of fascination, empathetic ache, and something deep she couldn’t quite name. What they’d uncovered, the questions surfacing from their discovery, weighted the room with threatening possibilities. Why would Lady Moriah beg forgiveness of her deceased husband and son?
Grace swallowed a gathering lump in her throat. Or worse, what had she done?
“You said during your meeting with Parks you felt certain he knew something about Celia.” Grace pulled the duvet up around her body and scooted closer to the edge of the bed. “Did she have the sort of personality to harm your brother?”
Frederick pushed a hand through his dark mass of hair and sighed. “It seems too harsh to speak aloud, but yes. Now that I consider everything. She chose self-preservation at all cost. At one point, she even had my father wrapped around her finger. That’s the only way he would have agreed to Edward marrying a woman with nothing but her charm to recommend her.”
“Did she foresee the financial downfall of Havensbrooke?” She slid her palm down his back, attempting to offer comfort. “Gain some sort of widow’s allowance upon Edward’s death?”
“She had to have known about the finances, and yes, she received an allowance, but also”—his head came up, gaze fixing to hers—“she met someone with more money. Gavin Campbell, a businessman who’d gained his sudden wealth through industry. Or at least that’s what I’d heard a few weeks before I returned home.”
“I suppose she won’t be a widow for long then,” Grace whispered, trying to conjecture the missing pieces.
“She’d wait for at least the mourning year or fear being cast out of all good society.” Frederick’s brow creased.
