She started downstairs in a daze. Bailey and several of the maids and footmen stood at the bottom, pale and anxious.
Eden did not begrudge them their concerns. They had not only lost a master this day but likely their positions as well. As long as Winstowe lived, they had all been able to maintain the fiction that wealth and plenty were endless, money a concern unbefitting such well-placed members of the ton.
That fable had reached its inevitable conclusion.
The front door opened before Bailey could perform the service. Aunt Claudia stood on the threshold, rain dripping from her pelisse. She removed it and handed it to the footman, fingers already busy with the ties of her bonnet.
“I came as quickly as I could,” she said. “The messenger—” She broke off as she met Eden’s eyes. “Oh, my dear.” She opened her arms, and Eden walked into them as she had done so many times for as long as she could remember.
Claudia drew her into the morning room and pressed her into the chaise longue. “When?”
It was so like her aunt to drive to the heart of the matter. There was something deeply comforting in such practicality. “Only moments ago,” Eden said. “I was with him.”
“I am sorry,” Claudia said. But Eden knew that all her pity was for the living, not the dead.
“Whatever he may have done—whatever you may have thought of him—he did not deserve any of this. Nor did you. You cared for him with no thought for yourself during this past month, and you are worn to a nub. There is nothing more you could have done.”
“No thought for myself?” Eden rose and moved with aimless steps toward the marble mantelpiece. “When did I ever do anything with no thought for myself?” She stopped before the ornate mirror hung over the mantel, hardly recognizing the sunken-eyed, brittle creature in the reflection. “We all pay for our follies, do we not?”
“You have paid for your husband’s. Now you are free of him.”
Claudia’s merciless judgment left Eden cold to the bone. Had this not been her beloved aunt, the woman who was dearer than a mother to her…
The woman whose unsentimental pragmatism was so very reassuring. Who spoke aloud what Eden thought and despised herself for thinking.
She took a careful breath. “There is at least one folly that is mine alone. One that Spencer had no part of.” She turned to face her aunt. “He had a farewell gift for me, a final declaration.
“He gave me back my son.”
Claudia did not allow her face to show so much as a flicker of astonishment. She had been the one to teach Eden how to confront the world as if nothing mattered, as if every little trouble could be cast aside with a casual wave of a well-gloved hand and a satirical laugh.
But this she had not expected. The young woman who stood before her was more than merely exhausted and distressed by the long weeks of Spencer’s illness and her own preposterous sense of guilt. The drastic changes in the niece Claudia knew—the niece who had most of the ton wrapped around her smallest finger—should not have lasted long beyond Spencer’s death. Claudia had counted on Eden’s natural resilience.
Now she knew that Spencer had found a way to poison Eden’s life even from beyond the grave. For Eden’s eyes were filled not with returning sanity but with tears of hope.
Ruinous hope.
“Your son?” Claudia said, rising quickly. She hurried to Eden’s side and took her hand. It felt terribly thin and fragile, as if it might snap with the slightest of pressure. “I do not understand. How could Spencer claim to know such a thing? How could even he be so cruel?”
Eden shook her head. “I do not care why he told me or how he discovered it. He said that my son is alive, in the countryside, living with some family—” Her desolate gaze took on the first real brilliance it had shown since Spencer’s illness. “My son, dear Aunt. You and Papa told me he had died.”
There was as yet no accusation in her voice. No suspicion, only bewilderment and hesitant joy.