Everything she believed of herself had been turned on its head.

Something was pressed into her hands—a generously filled glass of whiskey. She wanted to laugh: Had Vere forgotten her limited capacity for liquor? Instead she had to bite her lip to force back tears.

“He abused Andrew and Charlotte Edgerton to me every chance he had. I understood that even were the two judged kindly, most people would still see Charlotte Edgerton as loose and her husband foolish. Yet—”

She blinked hard. “Yet I loved them—I believed them dashing and larger-than-life. I imagined that as they drew their last breaths, their greatest regret was that they could not watch me grow into womanhood.”

Instead, when her father drew his last breath, his greatest regret must have been that he could no longer torment Elissande and her mother to his heart’s content.

The thought seared her. Instead of generous, affectionate, if overly impulsive Andrew Edgerton, her father was a man who laughed gleefully at the possibility of her having to raise a passel of moronic children.

She saw her reflection in the mirror on the wall. Her husband was wrong. It was not that her bruises were going to be ugly, they already were: red welts turning purple, a cut across her lips, one of her eyes swollen nearly shut.

Her own father had done this to her, with distinct pleasure at her pain and injury.

She had believed freedom was as easy as physically escaping Highgate Court. But how did she escape this? For as long as she lived, Edmund Douglas’s blood would pulse in her, a daily reminder of the unbreakable ties of kinship that now forever bound her to him.

She turned away from the mirror, pushed the glass of whiskey back into her husband’s hand, and made for the door. Up the stairs, down the corridor, into her room. She opened the treasure chest and took out all the mementos she had so cherished over the years.

“Elissande, don’t do anything rash,” said Vere.

She had not even heard him, but he was in her room with her.

“I’m not going to damage them.” Even if the mementos no longer held the same meaning for her—it was a knife in the heart to look upon them and remember the life she believed she could have had if only Andrew and Charlotte Edgerton had lived—her mother would still wish to have a few keepsakes by which to remember her sister. “I only want to burn this chest.”

“Why?”

“There is a secret compartment in the lid. When I was a little girl he showed me the key slots and told me that one day I would find the keys. I know now what’s in it.” She had to clench her teeth against an upsurge of disgust; she felt entirely unclean. “It must be his diary.”

And the painting that had hung in her room at Highgate Court, with the thorny red rose arising from a pool of his blood, that had been his hint to her all along, hadn’t it?

“This chest would produce a great deal of fume in the grate,” said her husband. “I have the keys for the compartment. Why don’t I open it instead?”

She stared at him; she’d forgotten his field of expertise. “When and where did you find the keys?”

“One in the safe at Highgate Court, when we visited after our wedding, the second tonight on Douglas’s person.”

He left briefly to retrieve the other key from his room. She set the chest on top of her dresser. He fitted in the keys and turned both at the same time. The bottom of the lid sprang open half an inch or so. He carefully pulled it down until a small, cloth-wrapped package slid into his palm.

Opening the square of blue broadcloth revealed a leather-bound volume, with the initials G. F. C. embossed in a corner.

“There is a note here for you.”

“What does it say?” She did not want to touch anything that had been in Douglas’s hands.

“‘My Dear Elissande, Christabel Douglas never died. Ask Mrs. Douglas what happened to her. And—’” Her husband stopped and glanced at her. “‘And may I live forever in your memory. Your father, George Fairborn Carruthers.’”

It was as if Douglas had punched her again. At least he need no longer regret not silencing him sooner with the chloroform. He always meant to have the last laugh from beyond the grave.

She grabbed the diary from Vere’s hands and threw it across the room. “God damn him!”

The tears that she’d tried to keep back streamed down her face. They burned where Douglas had hit her.

“Elissande—”

“That’s not even my name.”

She’d always loved her name, which combined Eleanor and Cassandra, the names of Charlotte and Andrew Edgerton’s mothers. She’d relished the care and thought that had gone into its creation, the exotic, musical syllables, the aspirations that Charlotte and Andrew Edgerton must have had for their daughter to bestow such a grand name on her, one not every girl could carry off.

Much of her life she had seethed in powerlessness. But never had she felt as powerless as she did this moment—stripped of everything that had ever mattered to her.

Behind her, her husband placed his hands on her arms. Then, very gently, he wrapped his arms about her middle and held her against him.

And she wept for all her broken dreams.

* * *

When she had no more tears, he disrobed her and changed her into her nightdress. Then he lifted her, carried her to her bed, and tucked her in.

He extinguished the light and left her room. She lay with her eyes open, staring into the shadows, wishing she hadn’t been too proud to ask him to remain with her for a little longer. But to her relief—and a bittersweet moment of happiness—he came back in the next minute.

“Are you thirsty?” he asked.

She was. He pressed a glass of water into her hand—that must have been what he’d left to get. She drank almost the entire glass and thanked him. He pulled a chair next to her bed and sat.

Perhaps he was right. Perhaps she was grateful for every little kindness shown her. But this was no little kindness on his part, to stay with her on the darkest night of her life.

He took her hand in his. “Elissande.”

She was too worn-out to remind him that Elissande was not her name.

As if he’d heard her, he said, “It’s beautiful, this name with which your mother rechristened you.”

Her heart skidded. She had not thought of it that way.

“It’s beautiful for all the hope with which she endowed it, the bravest moment in an otherwise timid life. That she dared to hide her daughter in plain sight is testament of her love for you.”

She’d believed that she had no more tears. Yet her eyes prickled hotly again as she remembered her mother’s desperate valor.

“Do not forget it, Elissande.”

Tears spilled from the corners of her eyes, past her temples, into her hair. “I won’t,” she murmured.

He gave her a handkerchief. She held on tight to it—and with her other hand she held on tight to him.

He skimmed the back of her hand with his thumb. “When I did my reading on the artificial synthesis of diamonds, every article I came across mentioned the fact that a diamond consists solely of carbon, which makes it kin to both blacklead and coal. Douglas is your father—I don’t dispute that. But whereas he is nothing but a lump of coal, you are a diamond of the first water.”

She was hardly that. She was a liar and a manipulator.

“Your mother would not have lived to this day were it not for you—of that I have no doubt. When she was defenseless, you defended her.”

“How could I not? She needed me.”

“Not everyone watches out for the powerless. You would have profited far more by flattering Douglas—or you could have left by yourself. It takes moral fiber to do the right thing.”

She bit the inside of her lip. “Keep talking and soon I will believe myself a paragon of virtues.”

He chortled. “That you are not, and probably never will be. But you have both strength and compassion, neither of which Douglas understood or possessed in the least.”

He smoothed away the wetness at her temple, his touch as light and careful as a miniature painter’s brushstrokes.

“I have watched you these past days. A life under Douglas could easily have made you brittle, anxious, and resentful. But you have been incandescent. Don’t let him take it away from you. Laugh at him instead. Have friends, have books, have a ball with your mother. Let him see your days suffused with pleasure. Let him see that even though he devoted his life to it, he’d failed to ruin yours.”

More tears tumbled into her hair. Mrs. Douglas was right: Elissande was a fortunate woman. The man she’d wronged the most had turned out to be a true friend.

She thought of her mother, safe and sound in her room, never to be mistreated again. She thought of herself: still her own mistress—that would not change. She thought of the coming morning—even the darkest night did not last forever—and surprised herself with a desire to see the sunrise.

“You are right,” she said. “I will not let him diminish me from beyond the grave, just as I never allowed him to take a piece of my soul while he yet lived.”

* * *

When Vere was sixteen, he and Freddie were summoned from Eton to attend their father on the latter’s deathbed.

Being a dying man had not rendered the marquess any less vitriolic than usual. With Freddie in the room, he had instructed Vere to marry soon and reproduce fast, so that there would be no chance for the title and the estate to pass on to Freddie.

Vere had held his tongue because of the presence of a physician and a nurse. But he’d grown angrier and angrier as the evening progressed. Finally, deep in the night, he could stand it no more. His father might be at Death’s door but he needed to be told that he was a despicable man and a wretched excuse for a father.