Free A bucket of ashes by P.B. RYAN Page B

Mead said, “I shall keep in touch. In the interest of discretion, I take it I should address any correspondence to you, Viola, rather than to Miss Sweeney?”
    “Yes, do,” Viola said. “I’ll be making it a point to get to the mail before August does, in order to intercept any communications from Mr. Sweeney or Mr. Skinner, but one can’t be too careful. If August were to get wind of this, God knows how he would react.”
    Oh,
thought Nell,
I have a pretty good idea.
    *   *   *
    “Dr. Greaves had to leave,” Martin told Nell as she wheeled his mother into the parlor. “I told him he’d be better off spending the night than driving home in the dark, but he said he had patients to see early tomorrow morning, and that he had a very good carriage lamp. He asked me to apologize on his behalf for not saying goodbye to you.”
    Dismayed, Nell said, “How long ago did he leave?”
    “Just now.”
    Excusing herself, Nell lifted her skirts and sprinted through the house and out the front door. She saw a dark figure in a top hat walking away along the lamplit path that led to the carriage house. “Cyril!”
    He turned, paused, and came back, removing the hat as he climbed the steps of the front porch, bathed in amber lamplight from a large open window into the great hall. “I’m sorry to have left without saying goodbye,” he said “but I have some early-morning—”
    “I know. Martin told me. I just... I wanted to talk to you about what Cecilia said, about Will and I having been engaged.”
    He dragged a hand through his hair. “Is Duncan... Did he die in prison?” he asked.
    “No. No, he’s still alive. In fact, I’m petitioning for a divorce. That’s what Mr. Mead and Mrs. Hewitt and I were talking about just now. If I can get Duncan to agree to it, which I hope to God I can, Mr. Mead says the divorce might come through in just a few weeks.”
    Cyril, looking baffled, said, “If you’ve been married all this time, how could you and William Hewitt have been engaged?”
    “There
was
no engagement,” she said. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. It was all pretense, to provide a rationale for... the closeness of our friendship. Otherwise, we were afraid people would have thought I was his mistress.”
    “You aren’t?”
    The question took Nell aback for a moment, until she realized it wasn’t disrespect that had prompted it, but the natural curiosity of a man for whom she had once served in that very capacity. “No, I’m not, but people were starting to suspect that I was. It was generally assumed that
I
was the only reason he spent so much time with Gracie and me. I was part of the reason, but he also wanted to see Gracie.”
    Cyril pondered that about for a second, and then a look of revelation came over his face. “Of course.
Of course.
I’d always wondered why a Brahmin matron would be so eager to adopt the child of a chambermaid.”
    “Viola Hewitt is no ordinary Brahmin matron. She’s a born iconoclast. I’ve often thought she might have adopted Gracie even if Will hadn’t fathered her.”
    Leaning on the stone balustrade, arms crossed, Cyril said, “Does Gracie know he’s her father?”
    Nell shook her head. “He won’t let us tell her. He thinks it would just bring her misery.”
    “Because she’s illegitimate? She’s too young to understand the concept, and by the time she’s old enough, she’ll almost certainly have figured it out herself. Most adopted children were born out of wedlock.”
    “It’s not that. He thinks she’ll be ashamed that her father is...” Oh blast, why had she allowed the conversation veer down this particular path?
    “A gambler and an opium smoker?”
    “He doesn’t smoke it anymore,” she said quickly, hating the notion of Cyril viewing Will that way. “He hasn’t in two and a half years. Well, except for once, when he was... he’d just found out I was married, and that I’d kept it from him. He... he was upset.”
I thought you