When a Duke Loves a Governess (Unlikely Duchesses #3) - Olivia Drake Page 0,83

grandfather! That truth whirled in her mind. She’d been wrong all these years. Mama had been referring to her father, not to Tessa’s.

“It can’t be,” he muttered brokenly. “This is some ploy.”

“No, it isn’t,” she said in a strained voice. “Florence was my mother. Lady Florence, it would seem, though she never breathed a word of that. Look, I have her pendant.”

Opening her shawl, Tessa lifted the dainty gold necklace and held it out to Lord Marbury. The acrimony faded from his features as he took it into his trembling hands and ran a knobby finger over the engraving. “I gave this to Flossie on her eighteenth birthday. ’Twas shortly before she ran away. I never saw her again. How did you come by this?”

The quaver in his voice touched her heart, and she realized he didn’t even know his daughter was long dead. Kneeling before him, she gave an abbreviated account of what little she could recall of her early life, including her mother’s death and glossing over her days in the foundling home. “I worked in a millinery shop for a time, then took a post as governess to His Grace’s daughter. Carlin is the one who identified the coat of arms on the pendant.”

“Then who was your papa?” Lord Marbury asked.

“I-I don’t know. I thought you were, milord. You see, when she gave me the pendant, her last words were, Hide this … find him … father…”

“And pain,” the duke added. “She was telling you her family name was P-a-y-n-e, though given the circumstances, it’s understandable why you would misinterpret it.”

“Lud, Carlin, you’re right!” Thunderstruck, she glanced up at him, then returned her gaze to her grandfather. “Then where did James come from?”

“James is my given name,” Lord Marbury said, his gaze absorbing her features as if to make up for all the lost years. “Perhaps that is why Flossie chose it. And if she was living under an alias, it explains why I was never able to find her.”

“But … why did Mama run away? Why would she turn her back on a lady’s life to become a maidservant?”

“I fear ’twas entirely my fault,” the marquess admitted. He glanced into the fire, the flames lighting his stark features. “As a girl, Flossie always had a wayward streak. Her mama had died young and I left her at my country seat in the care of servants. She grew up charming and lovely, but she was also saucy and strong-willed. Rather than allow her a London season where I feared she might embroil herself in scandal, I deemed it best for her to have a solid, dependable husband in the hope that bearing children might settle her down. But the marriage I arranged to Bucklesby wasn’t to her liking.”

“The Earl of Bucklesby?” Carlin asked, one eyebrow cocked. “He must have been thirty years her senior—and as dull a dog as they come.”

“Forty is a perfectly respectable age for a nobleman to wed, as I myself did.” Then Marbury’s brusqueness dissolved into a look of wretched remorse. “Ah, but Flossie would have nothing of him. And though she begged and pleaded, I was foolish enough to be adamant. On the morning of her wedding, she went missing. Her bed hadn’t been slept in. I searched for years, but she’d vanished from the face of the earth. Had I heeded her wishes, found a man more to her liking, I would never have lost her.”

The fire whispered into the silence. Tessa imagined her mother as a spirited young lady, pressured to wed a man old enough to be her father. Poor Mama! She must have been truly horrified by the match to prefer servitude over it. And once she’d borne a child out of wedlock, it would have been impossible for her to return home.

Lord Marbury’s bony hand sought Tessa’s. “But now you have come to me in my old age. My granddaughter. I never envisioned such a miracle.”

The misty look in his eyes touched her deeply. Never had she imagined having a grandfather. “It’s truly a marvelous dream,” Tessa murmured.

He studied her closely for another moment; then he gained his feet with the help of the cane. “Come, there is something you must see.”

He led them slowly up two flights of stairs and into a dim bedchamber. Carlin strode to the window and opened the blinds. Sunlight bathed the room in brightness, and Tessa could see feminine touches in the rose print wallpaper and the daintiness of the furniture