That thought brought her to her feet, the sudden fire in her blood driving away her residual shock at having seen him.
He’d been just as impossibly tall, perhaps taller, and one of his lenses had been smudged. His face was familiar to her and yet so much colder than she remembered. In fact, the last time she had seen him he was—
Don’t, she told herself. Thinking of what they’d been to each other, or what she’d thought they’d been, only made her heart break.
It was all too clear that she’d been wrong and that the Fates had never brought them together at all.
When she appeared in the nursery doorway, she saw that Guinevere was down for her nap, her wispy pale blonde hair fanning out over the pillow.
It had been a surprise when her hair had grown in blonde, considering that both of her parents were dark. But perhaps the Stredwick lineage that had given her brother nut-brown hair had something to do with that.
A healthy child, Guinevere had her mother’s roundness of face, and when she smiled, she flashed a dimple. But only on the left side of her cheek, just like her father. Her eyes were a changeable blue that seemed to grow darker each day, as if on the cusp of turning a rich river-stone brown, and there was no mistaking the flecks of gold that were undeniably like Lucien’s.
Since her daughter was not a sound sleeper, Meg quietly tiptoed away and went down to her own bedchamber.
She rang for Bryony immediately and informed her of the news.
“Then, we’ll be gone for a long while, I should expect,” Bryony said without hesitation. “We’ll manage just fine. I’ll start packing your things straightaway.”
Meg squeezed her hand with affection. “I don’t know what I would do without you. I’ll go to the attic with you to fetch as many valises as we can carry. We cannot tell the other servants. Not yet, at least. I’ll have to speak with Aunt Sylvia first.”
“Don’t you fret. It’ll all turn out right in the end.”
Meg tried to smile, but she remembered thinking that same thing when she’d left Italy. And as far as she could tell, nothing was turning out the way it was supposed to at all.
Chapter 21
In a pickle
Two hours later and with her bags packed, Meg went in search of her aunt. But she was informed that Lady Hullworth was tending to a matter with the master gardener.
This did not come as a surprise. Aunt Sylvia practically lived in the gardens that she had designed and cared for during the years that her husband had been the Marquess of Hullworth. Crossmoor Abbey had been his estate until an outbreak of typhus had taken Sylvia’s husband and eldest son, along with Meg’s father.
This family knew too much about loss, but also a great deal about love. And that was the very reason Meg knew her aunt would understand her need to leave.
She refused to lose her daughter to a man who hadn’t shown an inkling of interest since her birth.
Resolved in her decision, she returned to the nursery to prepare Guinevere for their journey. Instead, she found the nurse in the hallway, looking frantic, her face pale with concern.
Meg stopped at once. “She’s done it again, hasn’t she?”
“I only turned away for a second to retrieve the doll she wanted from the top shelf,” the nurse said, fretfully chewing on her thumbnail. “By the time I stepped down from the stool . . .”
Meg nodded and quickly scanned the surroundings for her little escape artist.
It wasn’t the nurse’s fault. Ever since Guinevere could walk, she’d dart off without anyone the wiser. It had happened to Aunt Sylvia, to Maeve and Myrtle and Ellie, even to Brandon when he was watching both his son and his niece.
Usually, Guinevere would take her cousin with her, and locating the pair of them was much simpler as there was often giggling involved.
But Brandon and Ellie had taken Johnathon with them to visit the north estate and then to close up Maeve and Myrtle’s house for the winter. Since Guinevere was without her favorite cohort, there was no telling where she’d run off to this time.
Unless . . .
“Yesterday, we’d had a picnic in the garden, and there were fuzzy caterpillars munching on the leaves. Then last night, I tucked her in with a story of a caterpillar who became a butterfly named Guinevere,” Meg said, already turning on her heel. “I’ll look there. You check all the rooms with butterfly collections.”
The nurse nodded, and Meg dashed downstairs.
Once outside, Meg could hear her daughter’s giggle rising from the walled garden, and she sighed with relief.
Stepping beneath the ivy-shrouded archway, she called, “Sweetheart? Are you in here—”
She stopped in her tracks.
Lucien was there, sitting on the stone bench beside her daughter.
“After your less than cordial greeting to me earlier, your term of endearment comes as quite the surprise. But you were always rather changeable, were you not, ma petite louve?”
Her heart lurched painfully. “Don’t call me that.”
“I should hardly know what to call you, then. Lady Avalon, Miss Parrish, Mrs. Arthur or . . . Margaret Stredwick?”
Meg felt cold, frozen in place. She wanted to get her daughter away from here as quickly as possible, but she couldn’t seem to move or make her feet cooperate. How many different ways could he ruin her life, if he chose to?
“More, more,” her daughter said, the words sounding rather like mo, mo because her rosebud mouth refused to form certain letters like Rs and Ls. But that didn’t stop her from pointing excitedly to the butterflies as she tugged on Lucien’s coat and repeated her favorite word.
Lucien chuckled when she climbed up to stand on the bench so that she could put her hands on his cheeks and direct his attention to the cerulean butterfly. He obliged her with a grin, listing the Latin name and scientific classification. “That is the Adonis Blue, Lysandra bellargus.”
If Meg weren’t a pillar of fear, she’d almost think the sight of them together was sweet, with their heads close, her daughter’s blonde ringlets brushing Lucien’s cheek. He was patient with her, too, obeying her every rude command.
He glanced over his shoulder. “She’s quite an inquisitive child. Your brother’s, I presume?”
“My brother’s?”
“Brandon Stredwick, the Marquess of Hullworth, married to the former Elodie Parrish,” he supplied with that knowing look. “It is astonishing what one can discover in a small country village in a matter of minutes. And it seems that you weren’t lying about having an older brother, after all. Though, I never would have guessed he would be so well-esteemed in society. That you could have a brother with such an unblemished reputation. It must be difficult being the black sheep of the family, all the secrecy involved in hiding who you really are.”
She’d told him exactly who she was in the note she’d left. And she was mortified to recall the beseeching, almost pleading, words she’d written.
Come to me, Lucien. I will be waiting for you. With all my heart . . .
But never once, in the last two years, had he bothered to find her.
Not that it mattered any longer. “What are you doing here?”
“As I said, you stole the book that is my legacy, and I will not leave here without it.”