Chapter 26

CHAPTER 26

Evie did not know how long she had been sitting there on the floor of Daniel’s study, wishing that he would come back. Hoping that this was nothing more than a horrible nightmare that she would soon wake up from.

Her numb hands still held onto the towel and ice he had gently pushed away before he left her.

When the door finally creaked open, the cold and the wetness had already seeped into her morning dress.

“Oh, my poor, sweet child!”

It was the Dowager Duchess—or Aunt Caroline, as the older woman had instructed Evie to call her after the wedding.

Could she still call her that now that Daniel intended to end their marriage?

The tears she had been holding back finally burst out of her when the older woman gathered her gently into her arms. She did not say anything, simply rubbing soothing circles on her back as Evie wailed.

“Aunt Caroline, h-he does not want me anymore…” She hiccupped miserably. “H-he wants to annul the marriage⁠—”

“Oh, Evie!” the older woman sighed sadly. “Daniel is a fool—most men are, unfortunately, even the good ones. But if you think he neither wants nor needs you, then you could not have been more mistaken, my dear child.”

“B-but he said so himself!”

“And like I said, most men are fools.”

Evie let out a bitter laugh. “My brother is, too. I don’t think I shall ever forgive him.”

“Do not worry about the Duke of Blackthorn for now.” Caroline smiled with a mischievous glint in her eyes. “Your grandmama is currently downstairs, trying to make him see reason, although I would not object if she took a bludgeon to his head to do so!”

“Serves him right.”

She could always count on her grandmother to do what needed to be done. At the moment, Evie did not trust herself to not want to run her brother through with a rapier.

Or shoot him.

Fortunately, she was a poor shot who did not even know which end of a pistol to point.

“I know everything feels a little overwhelming right now,” the Dowager Duchess murmured, stroking her hair gently. It reminded her so much of how she had fallen asleep in Daniel’s arms last night, and Evie burst into a fresh round of tears.

“Daniel is a good man,” Caroline continued, the cadence of her voice a soothing balm to Evie’s terribly wounded heart. “Even after all that he had been through, all that he had suffered… Why, he would have been well justified if he had thrown me out of Ashton Hall!”

Evie gasped and drew back from the older woman. “Why would he do such an awful thing?”

Even more worrisome was why she would say such a thing.

The Dowager Duchess looked at her sadly and tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear affectionately.

“Because, my dear, Daniel is not truly my nephew as we had the world believe—he is the illegitimate son of the late Duke of Ashton.”

Evie sucked in a harsh breath at the shocking revelation. It was so absurd, but in a strange way, it made a lot of sense.

Daniel never acted like all the other titled noblemen who had been born knowing their place in Society. No, there were times he most often acted like a ruffian, and she had simply chalked it up to just another aspect of his insufferable behavior towards her.

“I shall see who I need to blackmail to make sure we can get this marriage annulled.”

His words echoed hollowly in her head. She had initially thought that he simply meant to bribe or coerce his way into getting what he wanted. She did not think that he would actually blackmail someone into securing an annulment.

“Daniel might have been the son of a duke, but his childhood was far more miserable than you can imagine,” the Dowager Duchess told her in a sorrowful tone. “His mother was a maid in the estate that the former Duke took a fancy to, but like many of us in the ton, our marriage had already been arranged by our parents. Before we were wed, his father sent his mother away with a pittance to ‘provide’ for her and the result of his dalliance.”

Provide? More like he meant to silence her with a meager amount!

Evie had never met the former Duke of Ashton before, but in her heart, she had already developed a keen dislike for the man who threw out a poor woman who was carrying his child.

“Many years into our marriage, we realized that I was barren,” the older woman sighed despondently. “I could not bear children, no matter how much we tried. We had consulted countless physicians, and I had to endure the endless tonics and herbs that were forced upon me in the hope that I might conceive a legitimate heir, but alas! It truly was not meant to be. It was then that his father recalled his dalliance with his maid and that she had already been with child when he had sent her away…”

“So, he sent the poor maid away, and when he was in need of an heir, he wanted them back?”

Evie was dumbfounded. She had heard all sorts of sordid tales, but she had never imagined that Daniel and his mother had actually been the victims of such a heartless man.

“Precisely. You have to understand, my dear, the old Duke was not a very nice person…”

Oh, he was definitely not just “not nice”—the man was a coldhearted beast!

“And did he find them?” Evie asked her.

The only ray of hope in this tragic tale was if the Duke had actually found them and provided handsomely for them. It was not unheard of for noblemen to have paramours and children out of wedlock, but they were provided for, and some were even educated to the same standards as their legitimate heirs.

Unfortunately, Caroline shook her graying head. “By the time he found them, poor Ann had already died, and Daniel was already a young man who wanted nothing to do with the man who shunned him and condemned him to a childhood of poverty and misery.”

Evie’s eyes widened in horror. “What do you mean?”

“Ann, Daniel’s mother, managed to hold onto the son she bore only for a few scant months before the Duke’s money ran out. After that, she could no longer provide for the babe, so the moment he was weaned, she surrendered him to an orphanage in the hope that they might be able to at least feed him.”

Evie gasped, her hands flying to her mouth in horror. She could only imagine how horrible it had been for Daniel.

Orphanages were the last resort for children of the very poor or the deceased. They were mostly overcrowded with hardly enough to feed all the children in their care, relying solely on the mercy and charity of others.

“You can only imagine how he reacted when the former Duke summoned him to bestow this ‘great honor’ of a title on him.” Caroline laughed in derision.

“I gather he was not pleased about it?” Evie smiled a little.

“Oh, not only that, but he also spat in the man’s face and told him to shove his title up where…” the older woman trailed off, her face turning red. “In any case, the boy was quite rude, and rightly so! If it had been me, I might have taken a vase to his head as well!”

Despite her heartbreak, Evie could not help but chortle at the older woman’s recounting of how the former Duke tried to entice his mostly forgotten son to take on the mantle, years and years after he all but scorned him for his lowly birth.

“But he is the Duke of Ashton now,” she murmured. “That means he must have accepted the title and his father’s offer.”

“On the contrary, it was I who convinced him to take his birthright.”

Evie looked at the older woman in astonishment. “You did? B-but how?”

She knew firsthand just how stubborn Daniel could be. He would never have accepted anything from the former Duke without a good reason.

“I was already old, and if Daniel refused the title, it would have passed on to a distant cousin who would have made a mess of things,” the Dowager Duchess scoffed. “Seeing as I had no children of my own, I took it upon myself to approach him and propose an arrangement that would benefit the both of us.”

Evie raised an eyebrow at this. “Meaning?”

The Dowager Duchess smiled, seemingly pleased with herself. “You have to know that by the time his father started recognizing him, Daniel had already made a name for himself—although not in the way most gentlemen did. While the ignorant fool wiped away his inheritance, his own son had acquired a great wealth for himself. When my husband died and Daniel still refused to accept his inheritance, I personally went to see him and pleaded with him to have mercy on me.”

She took a deep breath and continued. “I was a childless widow, and whoever inherited the titles and estate of the Duke of Ashton could very well throw me out without a shilling to my name. Thus, I proposed that we come to an agreement—Daniel would accept his inheritance under the pretense that he is some distant nephew of the Duke of Ashton, and I would enjoy his protection for the rest of my days as his aunt.”

The Dowager Duchess reached for her hand with a sad smile. “Daniel would never acknowledge being his father’s son, but he took pity on me on the account that I had suffered the former Duke’s existence for the better part of two and a half decades. In a sense, we were comrades in arms. Survivors of my husband’s selfishness, if you will.”

Evie smiled at her. “You are not wrong, of course.”

Caroline smiled and patted her hand. “Knowing him for as long as I have now, I can assure you with utmost certainty that he cares for you, my dear—more than even he realizes, I would say. I can only hope that he comes to his senses before it is too late.”

As much as she wanted to believe the older woman’s words, Evie also knew that there was nothing that could change Daniel’s mind once he had already set it to something. He was so strong and resolute, and it had been one of the things she had admired about him.

“I cannot do anything about it, Aunt Caroline,” she told the older woman brokenly. “He has already refused me—again. How could I possibly stay here any longer?”

The older woman looked at her with great sadness in her gray eyes. “I know, my dear child. Sometimes, I wish I could take a stick and beat some sense into him, but Daniel is a grown man, and he would have to come to these realizations by himself.”

But what if he never did? What if Evie left and he truly forgot about her?

Pain unlike anything she had ever known ripped through her.

How could Daniel so easily turn his back on her when she would go to hell and back for him?

The Dowager Duchess must have seen the doubt and pain on her face, for she squeezed her hands in sympathy and reassurance.

“He will come to his senses,” she promised Evie. “You will see.”

Such beautiful words, imbued with so much hope…

Evie only wished that she had enough left in her to be able to grasp onto it and never let go.

Instead, she smiled sadly at the Dowager Duchess. “Aunt Caroline, I will never forget your kindness during my entire stay here in Ashton Hall, but I am afraid that I must return to Blackthorn Estate.”

She swallowed past the lump in her throat. “I c-cannot stay here—not while Daniel is in the process of securing an annulment. I-If any of you need me, I shall be at my brother’s residence…”

It would not only hurt her to see him, to be so near and so distant at the same time. It would be a devastation capable of shattering her entire world, but with such agonizing slowness that even breathing would be a torment.

“Will you at least consider all the things I told you, Evie?” The Dowager Duchess looked at her with such sadness that she felt as if her heart would break all over again.

“I do not know, Aunt Caroline,” Evie whispered brokenly. “All I know is that I need to get out of here—at least for now.”

The older woman patted her cheek gently. “If you ever need anything, please do not forget that this old woman will always be here for you.”

“Thank you so much, Aunt Caroline… for everything.”

Evie finally managed to get up from the floor with a little help from the Dowager Duchess. It was rather laughable, really, that she should require assistance from a woman who was nearly three times her age, but her legs had already failed her.

Now, she had to look towards a future without Daniel in it, and it was so bleak that she wanted to crumple back to the floor in a heap and just carry on crying.

But she was Lady Evelyn Fitzroy-Stanton, and she could no longer stay on the ground. She would not linger where she was apparently not wanted. She would return to Blackthorn Estate and nurse her broken heart if need be.

Maybe with enough time, she might even learn to live without it.