“I’m in need of a new land agent,” he said, setting his hat on his head. “The previous one retired last year, and I’ve been lax about finding a suitable replacement. When I do, I shouldn’t be gone from the house as much, and I’ll have more time to spend with her. But you can let Zora know that I should be home this evening. We can have dinner again tonight. A proper dinner,” he added, smiling. “In the dining room. At the table.”

  “Perhaps the picnic needs to become a birthday tradition?” She stepped up to him and adjusted the collar of his coat, the folds of his neckcloth, everything that had been shifted out of place during their lovemaking.

  He placed one hand over hers, stopping the fussing of her fingers over his heart. “The first of many new traditions, I hope.”

  She nodded. Her throat felt thick but her heart was full. But the happiness she felt was still fragile, and she worried that if she wasn’t careful it might shatter like glass before her eyes. “I’ll go and see to Zora, before she can come storming out of the house in search of us.”

  A quick kiss that turned into something more lingering, and Julia strode briskly away from the stables, across the lawn, shielding her eyes from the brilliant light of the sun that had already melted all of the frost beneath her swiftly moving feet.

  Chapter Eighteen

  * * *

  Zora decided that she was interested in the human body later that morning. She began her inquiries at breakfast, asking about how the lungs knew when to draw in a breath and how hearts continued beating even when someone was sound asleep. This led to a discussion about various organs and digestion and myriad other topics that were most likely not appropriate for a period of time involving the consumption of food, until Julia finally declared a postponement of the subject until something could be found in the library to help answer all of their questions.

  That was how they spent the morning, poring over an old edition of Hooke’s Micrographia and drawing their own illustrations of various plants and insects they had seen around Langford, while Julia promised they would order more books concerning the human side of things.

  After lunch, Zora went to the kitchen with Ellen — to fetch the kitten a saucer of cream and any leftovers that might be sitting about — and Julia took herself upstairs to make certain all of the paints and ink had been put away after their illustrative work that morning. It was while she was fitting everything back onto the shelf that she noticed the glint of something hidden behind a small stack of books. She reached into the shadow and retrieved the small silver comb that Zora had shown her the day before, the one from Mrs. Halberd’s jewelry box.

  “Oh, Zora.” Julia sighed and turned the comb over in her hand.

  The room at the end of the hall was unlocked, just as before. She opened the door with a feigned carelessness, as though stepping into the former Mrs. Halberd’s bedroom did nothing to heighten her anxiety. But there was sweat on her palm as she turned the doorknob, and her heart skipped a beat as she crossed over the threshold.

  The jewelry box was still on the dressing table where Zora had left it, still gleaming as though a maid had swept a duster across its surface only a few minutes before. She raised the lid and tucked the comb inside, nestling it on its bed of blue velvet along with the other sparkling trinkets. As she closed the lid, a sliver of white caught her eye, a slip of something like paper sticking out from behind the edge of the velvet.

  Later, she would wonder why she didn’t simply shut the lid and walk away. But the curious part of her strove for dominance, and she pinched the corner of paper, tugging at it until the entire bottom — a false bottom, as it made itself known — of the box lifted upwards. She hadn’t noticed it before, how the inside of the box didn’t match the overall size of it. Tucked underneath the layer of velvet was a thick stack of folded papers. Letters, she realized, stuffed together so tightly they moved as a single clump until she separated a few of them with a flick of her thumb.

  She flipped one of them over, tilting it towards the light streaming through the window. The writing across the front was faded, and her eyes were fatigued from all of the drawing she had done with Zora that morning. But she saw the swoop and slant of the first few words, and her heart clenched inside her chest as though a hand had inserted itself behind her ribs and squeezed.

  Julia knew it, her husband’s handwriting.

  She could still leave them there, unread. Stuff them back into the jewelry box, pretend she had seen nothing. Pretend that…

  Unbidden, her hands began to flip through the letters. There were dozens in all, some more faded than others. And all of them written by her husband.

  She blinked. She would have expected tears in her eyes, but instead it was astonishment that made her eyes feel dry and her throat close up as though she was suddenly parched.

  They weren’t hers to read. They had belonged to Mrs. Halberd, to her husband, she reminded herself. But neither of them were still counted among the living. So who was there to tell her that she was infringing on someone else’s private thoughts when she was the nearest living relation to the person who had authored them in the first place?

  She put the jewelry box back together and shifted it back to where it had been before she’d opened it. The letters she picked up, stacking them neatly again, pressing them together and tucking the bulk of them behind a fold in her skirt in the hope no one would see them clutched in her hand should someone catch her leaving Mrs. Halberd’s room. She thought of Zora, still down in the kitchen with Ellen, and prayed the kitten would prove to be a distraction for a few more minutes, at least.

  Her own room seemed dark in comparison to Mrs. Halberd’s, situated on the other side of the house as it was. She shut the door behind her, standing against it as though she expected someone to break it down and accuse her of stealing from the former mistress of the house. By the time she crossed to the window, a feeling of sickness began to roil in her stomach. She was torn between wanting to read the letters still clutched in her hand or throwing the lot of them into the fireplace, to be burned into a smoking clot of ash.

  Because she knew what the letters would say. Even as she opened the first one, the paper as fragile as an autumn leaf between her fingers.

  Dearest Anna…

  She read every word. She knew her husband’s handwriting well enough, had read enough copies of his sermons to skim across it quickly without having to pause and decipher any peculiarities of his penmanship. In her head, it was his voice reciting the words, lifting them from the page and flinging them at her feet like a gauntlet.

  … until I see you…

  … the pleasure of your touch, your kiss…

  … I want to be inside you again…

  … when we can be married…

  She started at that. There was a date at the top, from over a dozen years earlier. Before she had married him and become Mrs. Benton, perhaps even before Mrs. Halberd had become Mrs. Halberd.

  Quickly, she searched through the rest of the letters, trying to sort them into chronological order, though not all of them were dated. The most recent ones were less faded, less worn at the corners and creases, and she saved those for last. Like sliding a knife into the wound as slowly as possible.

  … my tiresome wife…

  … your fool of a husband…

  … the earrings I gave you, the emeralds so striking against your complexion…

  And she couldn’t stop reading. Minutes ticked away, possibly an hour or more. She read on because she feared if she stopped, she would curl forward and be violently sick at her feet.

  … our child…

  … our daughter…

  … Isadora…

  “Mrs. Benton?” There was a light knock on the door before Zora stuck her head into the bedroom. “Mrs. Benton, did you forget? We were going to take a walk this afternoon.”

  … our daughter…

  Julia snatched up the letters scattered across the windowsill, holding them to her chest like she could staunch the bleeding with that flutter of pages. She didn’t turn around. She found that she couldn’t. Not yet, not yet.

  “Um, give me a minute.” Her voice sounded nothing like her own. “C-could you go and play in the nursery for a little while? Just a few minutes, at the most. I have a bit of a headache and I want to give it a chance to go away.”

  She heard Zora take a few steps into the room. Dear God, but Julia could not bear to look at her right then, not without losing the last thread of control she had over her emotions. “Should I fetch one of the maids? Mrs. Holland has some headache powder, and she can—”

  “No, no.” Julia waved an errant hand. “Only a few minutes rest, that’s all I need. Put on your boots and find your gloves and… and I’ll be right there.”

  “Very well.” And there was the soft retreat of her footsteps, followed by the click of the door closing behind her.

  Julia dropped to her knees. She didn’t cry. It seemed unusual to her, that she couldn’t even dredge up a single tear or a hitch in her breathing to mark this new knowledge pitched at her out of nowhere. But she stayed there on the floor, her fingers digging into the edge of the rug as she lowered her head, as her shoulders slumped and she tipped onto her side, as the room spun slowly around her.

  Just a few minutes of rest, she thought. That was all she needed.

  ***

  “Julia?”

  She opened her eyes to darkness.

  She was still on the floor, but even as she nurtured that thought, strong arms slipped beneath her and she was carried over to her bed.

  “Alexander?” She still did not sound like herself. Beside her, Alexander lit a candle on the nightstand, and she winced at the sudden illumination.

  It all came back to her in that moment: Mrs. Halberd’s jewelry box, the hidden letters, her husband’s looping scrawl. She jerked upright, scrabbling for the edge of the bed even as Alexander grasped both of her arms and held her still.

  “Julia?” He peered directly into her face. “Julia, what happened? I returned home and Zora told me you weren’t feeling well. When I knocked on the door, you didn’t respond. Are you ill? Should I send for the doctor?”

  “The letters…” She tried to wrench free of his hands, her only thought for the letters still over by the window, the letters that revealed everything about his wife’s affair, about Zora’s true parentage. She couldn’t let Alexander see them. Yes, he had known his wife was unfaithful to him, but to have the details written out across the page, and in Frederick’s own words…

  Oh, she didn’t want him to know. Not about her husband, not about Zora. It was too cruel, too cruel that the man for whom she could never bear a child had been father to the little girl now in her care.

  “Julia, what letters? What are you talking about?”

  She stopped struggling. The concern in his face nearly tore her heart open all over again. “The…” she began, but cut herself off. She wasn’t ready to say it, the words sticking to the roof of her mouth like an acrid taste. “Where is Zora?”

  “She’s in the nursery. She’s having her dinner. Why?”

  … our daughter…

  “The letters,” she said, as though she would’ve endured any amount of pain in place of the one she was about to inflict upon him. “Over by the window, on the sill. I-I found them today, and…”

  He went to the window and gathered up the letters, right where she had left them. She expected him to bring them over to her, but instead he stood with his back towards her, and she heard the slide of paper against paper as he shuffled through them.

  He sighed. And with that rush of breath, she realized how very wrong about everything she had been. “I take it you’ve read them?” he asked, still not turning around.

  Her fingers sought out the edge of the blankets, the edge of the mattress, anything to grab onto before the world tilted again and tipped her into uncharted waters. “Alexander?”

  His shoulders dropped. When he finally turned around to face her, the shadows from the candlelight made him appear as though he’d aged a decade in as many seconds. “I’m sorry, Julia. I didn’t want you to find out this way.”

  Her gaze dropped to the letters in his hands and back again to his face. Why didn’t he look surprised? Where was the shock, the revulsion she had endured only a few hours ago? Why was he not cursing her husband for sleeping with his wife, for fathering the daughter that should have been his? “You knew.”

  He winced as though she’d crossed the room and slapped him. “I did, yes.”

  “For how long?” Surely not for years. Surely not when he’d asked her to come to Langford, to be Zora’s governess. Because she didn’t want to believe that he’d knowingly put her in charge of her husband’s illegitimate child.

  “Before my wife died…” And he paused there, slapping the letters against his thigh as he took two steps towards the bed. His gaze leapt over everything but her, and the halted sound of his breathing told her that he didn’t want to say any part of what he was about to tell her. “Some months before she died,” he began again. “We had a fight. We always fought, but this was…” He ran his free hand over the top of his head, then gripped the back of his neck, his shoulders rising up again as though in preparation for his next words. “I always knew that Zora wasn’t my daughter. I knew from the moment Anna told me she was with child that I couldn’t have been the father. And after Zora was born, she became more restless, more unhappy. Here, with me. It wasn’t long after that she told me she was going to leave. That she would take Zora, and she would run off with…” Finally, his gaze darted towards her and held. There was agony in his eyes, and she could not tell if it was for the pain he’d already lived through, or the pain he was about to inflict on her.

  “Go on,” she said. There was no reason to continue dragging it out. She already knew the truth. The first blood had already been spilled. Now, it was just a matter of rubbing salt into the wound.

  He began to pace across the room, though he didn’t come any nearer to where she was on the bed. “I didn’t know it was him, at first. Your husband. Not until… Oh, I think Zora was at least a year old when I found out. When she told me. That was when I discovered the history between them—”

  “Cornwall,” she blurted out, thinking back to what Mrs. Cutler had mentioned to her in the village. “They grew up together, didn’t they?”

  He looked at her strangely. “How did you know?”

  “Village gossip,” she admitted. “I only learned of it this week.”

  “Well.” He started another round of pacing, both of his hands now gripping the stack of letters as if he could tear them to scraps with a turn of his wrist. “They wanted to marry, even then. Before they’d ever met either of us. But your husband was poor, and my wife was expected to marry well, to resurrect her family’s fortunes. And a country vicar wouldn’t do. So if they couldn’t have one another under the law, they…” He cleared his throat. “They found a way to be together.”

  Julia buried her face in her hands. “She brought him here, then. As vicar.”

  “So they could be near one another,” he said, confirming her words. “I don’t know why I didn’t suspect at first. I was too trusting, and they seemed to work hard at keeping everything secret. At least in the beginning. Even when I found out Anna had been unfaithful, I never would’ve thought…”

  “No, of course not.” Not Frederick. She never would have thought that about Frederick. Who had always been so pious and upstanding, who had been unerringly rigid in his views on what he believed the Bible categorized as sin. “Even when people hurt us, we too often bow our heads and try not to think the worst of them.”

  For seven years she’d tried not to think the worst of Frederick. Even as he had torn her down, as he made her believe she was not someone who could be loved, who could be desired, she had taken the burden of her marriage’s faults upon herself.

  And all that time, he had been having an affair.

  “God, I was such a fool.”

  It was as though her husband had been two entirely separate individuals; the man to whom she’d been married, the one who railed against decadence and carnal desires from the pulpit, and also the man who kept a mistress and gave gifts of fine jewels to his lover. At home with her, he had always been cold and distant, prudish and ready to spit out shaming words at her if she dared to add too much lace to the edge of a gown or take too long styling her hair. And always — always — he had made her feel like a broken, cursed thing because of her inability to give birth to a healthy child.

  Though none of her deficiencies had ever stopped him from crawling atop her in bed at night, like an animal rutting himself to release.

  The man who had written those letters was a complete stranger to her. A man of passion, a man who gave gifts. A man unafraid to receive physical pleasure and eager to give it in return.

  Which one had been the real Frederick Benton? Or had he been all of them, only showing various sides of himself to whomever he chose?

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” She looked up at Alexander. He had ceased pacing at her question, his expression stricken. When he gave no immediate reply, she continued speaking, the words coming out like poison draining from a wound. “You asked me to come here, to be Zora’s governess, and yet you knew that Frederick… that he… How could you do that? How could you ask me to come here and help raise my husband’s child?”

  She knew he was in pain, just as she was. It was there in every line of his face, every gray hair and every shadow edging his features. But he’d had years to let it erode into something dull and aching. For her, it was fresh and biting, making her want to lash out, to throw off some of the injury before it could settle into the marrow of her bones.

  “Do you know what it was like to lose every child I tried to bear? When I would feel the pains come on and it was always too soon, and all I could think was that I had done something wrong, that I wasn’t fit to be blessed with the… the crown of motherhood,” she said, stealing one of Frederick’s horrid phrases.