Page 91 of Song of the Caged Duchess

“I’ll ruin you,” Lady Harcourt hissed.

“You’ll do what you feel you must,” Hugh said.

She stared at him, her eyes narrowed to slits.

“We’re traveling to Cliffdall Manor,” he said. “We plan to see Lady Esther, in hopes of reconciling. I thought it was my duty to let you know.”

“You’re not goinganywherewith my daughter,” Lady Harcourt all but snarled.

“I’m going with him, Mother,” Lady Eugenia said. “Betsy will come with us. But I’m going. And you can’t stop me.”

She turned to Hugh. “Will you wait, please, while I get my traveling cloak?”

“Of course, My Lady,” Hugh said. “Take your time.”

Don’t take too long, though.

The prospect of being left alone with Lady Harcourt was more than a little frightening.

She eyed him sourly as Lady Eugenia went to the coat cupboard. “I don’t know what you said to my daughter to make her change her mind,” she said. “But I intend to find out.”

“Her mind was never set on me,” Hugh said quietly. “I never had her heart.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“No, it isn’t,” Hugh said. “And it might behoove you, Lady Harcourt, to speak to your daughter about this matter. You would do well to get to know her, to ask her what’s truly in her mind. It’s not too late for her to live the life she wants, and you can help her have that life if you truly care for her.”

“You know nothing of my daughter,” Lady Harcourt said.

“On the contrary,” Hugh said. “As difficult as it may be for you to hear this, I know her better than you do. I see things in her that you haven’t been able to see.”

Lady Harcourt fumed.

“If you doubt me,” Hugh said, “ask yourself this. Did you ever think she would be able to stand up to you the way she is today? Did you ever imagine that she would respond to our engagement by telling me that she didn’t really want it?”

Lady Harcourt said nothing.

Lady Eugenia reappeared, wrapped in her traveling cloak. “I’m ready to go,” she said.

“Eugenia,” her mother said. “Don’t do this. If you do, I won’t be able to help you. I will have done all I can to help you make a worthy match. If you really want to see the Duke back in the hands of your duplicitous cousin, after all I’ve done to help the two of you, then I wash my hands of you and your future.”

“You have to do what you feel is best, Mother,” Lady Eugenia said. “And so do I.”

She turned and walked out of the Manor.

Hugh hesitated for only a moment, then followed her.

He caught up with her out on the drive, where she stood alongside his carriage. She was shaking. “I can’t believe I said those things to her,” she said.

“You were very brave,” Hugh said.

“If only I had been brave earlier!” Lady Eugenia was on the verge of tears, he saw. “It’s my fault you and Esther are apart in the first place. I never meant to give my mother the information she needed to make you doubt Esther. But you see how she is. She pushes and pushes—”

“I understand,” Hugh said gently. “She was cruel to you, and she broke you. It’s not your fault. Of course you wanted to please your mother. Of course you wanted to give her something, if it would make her leave you be.”

“If I had known what would come of it, I never would have told her anything,” Lady Eugenia said. “But when she asked me to tell her about how you’d met—well, I thought the story would be as charming to her as it was to me. I thought it would make her see that you and Esther were meant to be together.”

“Instead, she saw it as a way to drive us apart,” Hugh said.