a few of the children paused in their play. Richard rubbed one knuckle over the eye that was not pressed against Wren and snuggled closer.
“Jessica,” Anna said soothingly, laying a hand upon her sister-in-law’s arm. But Jessica jerked it away.
“It makes no sense,” she said. “It is stubborn nonsense.”
“I am sorry, Jess,” Abigail said. “I have explained to you time and again that I will never try to cobble together the tattered remnants of my old life. You have chosen to believe that eventually I must change my mind. It has been six years, Jess. It is the difference between eighteen years old and twenty-four. I am a different person than I was all that time ago. I am sorry. I know you have been hurt too. But I cannot— Well, I cannot heal your pain. Only you can do that.”
The anger went from Jessica as quickly as it had come. “I am finally to believe you, then, am I?” she asked, though it was not really a question she expected to be answered.
“I will be staying here when everyone else leaves,” Abigail said. “It is what I want to do, Jess. It is not because Harry needs me. He does not, though his coming here has made it possible for me to come home too. And it is not because I fear that at any moment I will be driven out of London over the scandal of my birth. I do not care to be in London or to be part of polite society. I need to live my own life on my own terms, and for the next while at least that is going to be done here.”
Jessica nodded unhappily and turned to watch Nathan and Jacob, who were building a precarious tower of wooden bricks.
“Oh, Abby,” Camille said with a sigh before smiling at Andrew, who had come to sit on her lap, story time being over. “I thought at the beginning that you would be the easy one. You were so sweet and placid and accepting when we went to live with Grandmama Kingsley in Bath while I hid and raged. But you were not the easy one after all, were you? You pushed everything inside and have not even begun to recover.”
“Oh no, Cam,” Abigail protested, grimacing and then laughing. “I will not be made into a figure of tragedy. I am not staying here to lick my ever-open wounds and live out my life in unhappy seclusion and self-pitying misery. I am coming home. Because I want to be here to live my life. Because it is where I think I can be happiest. For now at least.”
No one understood. But how could they? She was on a journey she could not explain in words even to herself. She did not know what the next step would be and had no idea what the final destination was or even if there would be one. She knew only that she must take one step forward at a time and that she must do it herself, even when that made her family unhappy. For they all seemed to believe that if she could only find a place in society and a kind husband who would disregard the blot upon her birth, all would be well in her life. Once upon a time it had been her sole aim to make her come-out, find an eligible husband, and live happily ever after. But no longer. That dream belonged to another lifetime. She did not even feel nostalgic about it.
“Abigail,” Anna said, getting to her feet, “will you come walking outside with me? I see that the rain has stopped.” She did not extend the invitation to anyone else.
Six years ago Abigail and Camille had resented Anna because she had suddenly appeared in their midst, their father’s only legitimate child. She’d come straight from her orphanage in Bath, where she’d grown up unacknowledged by him. She arrived the sole inheritor of their father’s vast fortune and unentailed properties, which meant they and their mother and brother were stripped of everything that had made up the fabric of their lives, their titles included. Their very identities, it had seemed. Even at the time, of course, they had realized that Anna was undeserving of their resentment. She had suffered terribly too, though her suffering had been done before the big discovery, whereas theirs had just begun. She had grown up as an orphan, knowing nothing of her father and his