“My dear God,” the vicar said, and it did not sound like a blasphemy. “Oh my dear God, he lied to us, Alma, and we believed him. But look and see and tell me if I am right. Could this not be our Anna standing before us here?”

His wife merely moaned and clung to the fence.

“Gramma?” Anna said. She did not know where the name came from—it just came. “Oh, Gramma, I did not die.”

Twenty-one

Avery always felt more relaxed in the country than he did in London. It was as if he took off an armor he unconsciously donned for society and allowed himself to be the person he had always wanted to be. He had never blamed his parents for the child he had been. He had never even really blamed the boys and masters at school for spotting the weak one among them and pouncing upon him to make sport of him. Everyone had his own path to follow in life. And they all—the negative forces in his life, and the positive too—had had a hand in directing him to his own path. He would have things no different. He rather liked his life. He liked himself. But he liked his country life best of all.

He had undertaken this journey for Anna’s sake. But he had found himself relaxing as soon as London was behind them, despite the fact that traveling long distances usually made him restless and irritable. He had found himself not wanting the journey to end, for he had feared there might be disappointment awaiting his wife and perhaps real pain. He could not do anything to shield her from whatever was to be, however. He could only be there with her. She needed to do this.

Those who knew only his public self might have expected him to feel nothing but disdain for the small, pretty village where her grandparents lived, and for the humble vicarage beside the old Norman church, and for the elderly, slightly stooped, amiable vicar and his small gray-haired wife with her overlarge cap, whose one servant worked in the mornings only—except Sunday, which was a day of rest for all workers.

“Except the vicar,” that gentleman observed with a chuckle.

As it happened there had been no disappointment lying in wait for Anna, though there was plenty of pain to go around. The truth had been instantly apparent to Avery even before they all stepped inside the vicarage and disposed themselves about a cozy square sitting room generously decorated with crocheted doilies and china figurines and pottery jugs. Only the details of the story needed to be filled in.

To the Snows, Riverdale had only ever been known as Mr. Humphrey Westcott. He had said nothing of his courtesy title or of the fact that he was heir to an earldom. They were amazed—and perhaps unimpressed—to learn that their daughter had been Viscountess Yardley, not simply Mrs. Westcott. They were quite sure she had never known it herself. Avery exchanged a glance with Anna and knew that she was remembering their wedding a few days ago—Miss Anastasia Westcott to Mr. Avery Archer.

“Alice went to Bath to be a governess,” the vicar explained. “She met and married Westcott there before we even knew of him. All was rosy for a while. They had rooms there, and then Anna was born—Anastasia they christened her, but Alice always called her Anna and so did we. Then her husband started disappearing for weeks at a time, and she got sick with what turned out to be consumption, and the rent was in arrears and the landlord was after her for it because Westcott was never at home, and there was not enough money for food. Finally she begged a ride with some people she knew and came back here, bringing little Anna with her, and he made no more than a token protest. He came here once and blustered a bit—we never warmed to him, Alma and I—but he did not stay. He never sent her any money and only one or two letters, which always came through a solicitor in Bath. Never any gifts for the child. After Alice died, we talked it over, my wife and I, and decided the decent thing to do was let him know, though we did not expect it would matter much to him. It mattered to us. Our daughter, our only child, was gone, and little Anna was wandering all over the house, looking lost and asking where Mama had gone and when she was coming back.”

He stopped to blow his nose loudly into a large handkerchief.

“But he came,” he continued, “and he insisted upon taking Anna away with him even though we begged him to leave her here. She was all we had left, and Alma had been more mother than grandmother to her while Alice was ill. He took her anyway, and he never wrote. It was thirteen months before he finally did—just a brief note regretting to inform us that his daughter, Anastasia, had died of typhoid fever. He did not reply to the letter I wrote in reply.”

“He took me to Bath,” Anna told them, “and left me at an orphanage there as Anna Snow. He never came back, but he did support me all through my childhood and right up to his recent death. He had already remarried before my mother died. They had three children, my half brother and half sisters. The marriage was bigamous, of course, and the children illegitimate, a fact that has caused endless anguish since the truth came out after his death. His title and entailed properties have passed to my second cousin and his fortune to me. I suppose he feared to leave me here with you lest somehow you discover and expose the truth.”

“If we had not written after Alice died, Isaiah,” his wife said, “perhaps he would have forgotten all about us and left us alone. Perhaps Anna would have grown up here where she was loved. Oh, what a dreadful wickedness. I grieved for you, Anna, dead so soon after Alice, until I took to my bed and would have stayed there if I had not suddenly realized that if I died too I would leave your grampa with a burden too heavy for any mortal shoulders to bear. But in my heart I have grieved ever since. You were such a . . . lovely little child. And you grew up all alone in an orphanage? So close to here? Only in Bath? Ah, my heart aches.”