anyone found out, I would be ruined. He took me to see a woman who supposedly could… could get rid of the child. I refused. Couldn’t do it. He said if I didn’t, I was no longer welcome in his house.”
She looked down at her hands, realizing she was gripping the folds of her skirt. Her jaw ached with the effort of holding back a flood of tears.
“I knew my grandmother had gone to Lyons with my mother. They were staying at a sanatorium run by nuns. I had nowhere else to go. I certainly couldn’t return to London. So I sent word to my grandmother to expect me, then took the train to Lyons. I… I never said good-bye to Greta.”
“Did you ever see her again? Or him?”
“No. Not until today.”
“What happened when you arrived in Lyons?”
“My father met me at the train station.”
“Your—”
“He’d come to visit my mother a fortnight prior. I didn’t know.”
And then it was as if she were no longer in the room with Alexander. The smell of coal swept through the air, the screech of wheels against the train tracks, voices rising from passengers, porters, vendors selling their wares on the platform.
And there stood her father, waiting for her, unaware of her disgrace. His glasses perched on the end of his nose—the wire frames appearing so fragile against his features, his coat flapping about his legs like the wings of a crow. Lines of worry furrowing his brow, concern over his wife, his mother-in-law, his daughter.
“What is it?” Sir Henry had asked. “What’s happened?”
She couldn’t respond, could only fold herself into his arms with the dreadful knowledge it might be the last time he would ever want to embrace her.
And so it had been. But never—thank the good Lord a thousand times over, thank her father a million times—never once since the day Jane was born had Sir Henry Kellaway withheld his affection, his genuine love for the girl.
“Did you tell him?” Alexander asked.
“Actually, I told my mother.” She gave a humorless laugh at the utter absurdity of the statement. “I don’t know why. I hadn’t seen her in several years. She was… they kept her on laudanum. I thought she didn’t even know I was there, but I had a burning need to tell someone the truth. So one night I sat beside her bed and confessed all.”
“Did she respond?”
“No. At the time, I didn’t even think she’d heard me. But the next day she told my father.”
“What?”
“She’d heard it all. Understood it, even. And she told my father what I’d told her. My father confronted me that night, and I had to confess a second time.”
“What did he do?”
Lydia fell silent.
If p is a prime number, then for any integer a, ap − a will be evenly divisible by p. The sine of two theta equals two times the—
No.
She suppressed the proofs, the theorems, the identities, the equations. Suppressed everything that made any sense. Forced the dark memory to the surface. The side of her face bloomed with an old, latent pain.
“He was enraged. He…” She touched the side of her face, shuddering as memories ripped through her—the pain of the blow, her father’s shock over his lack of control, her own fierce belief that she deserved any violence he chose to exact.
He inflicted no more—the one strike upon his own daughter was enough to stun him into immobility. For three days, he didn’t speak to her, didn’t look at her. Then one morning he and Charlotte Boyd called Lydia into a private room and explained in cold, blank tones that she would adhere to their plan or be left to fend for herself.
“It was my grandmother’s idea,” she told Alexander. “She said we would remain at the sanatorium for the time being. I think she and my father might have sent me off immediately if they hadn’t realized I was the only person who’d gotten through to my mother—even with such a disgraceful secret. So my father told me to continue to sit with my mother and try to reach her.”
“Did you?” Alexander asked.
“For several weeks, yes. Until it became clear her condition was worsening. My father spoke with the nuns about keeping me there during my confinement, and they agreed.
“No one else knew about my condition except Dr. Cole, and of course there was no danger of him telling anyone. So my grandmother said that after the child was born, we would tell people it was my mother’s. My father