“For starters, you shouldn’t have used me to gain access. I wanted to speak with Lady Emily, and now there is no chance they will permit me to be anywhere near her again.”

Everton groaned and rubbed his forehead. This day had gone from bad to worse. He kicked a stone into the street, only afterward realizing he should have made certain it didn’t hit anyone. Thankfully, the street was mostly clear. With his luck lately, he was surprised.

“I’ll write to her,” Mrs. Cuthbert said.

“There is no possibility that her parents don’t read her correspondence.”

“I’ll have one of my servants deliver a note to the butler or perhaps to a maid in the household. We have three weeks before the marriage. It isn’t time to give up yet.” Mrs. Cuthbert patted his arm as if he were a small child. In truth, he felt like one. “Now, where is your carriage? Or did you walk?”

He pointed with his chin to his carriage down the street. Mrs. Cuthbert nodded and gave him a slight shove in that direction. “I’ll discover what I can and send word to you.” He trudged toward his carriage. “And Lord Bryant,” Mrs Cuthbert called after him, “don’t let this get you down. We have had a good run, but you can’t save every young woman.”

She didn’t need to tell Everton that. That fact was engraved in stone in a churchyard sixty miles from his home.

“I cannot accept Lady Emily being forced into a marriage. She is too much like—” He stopped. His wife’s name never came easily to his lips.

“Rachel.”

Everton took in a deep, steadying breath. “Yes,” he said. “She is too much like Rachel.”

“Have you gone to visit her?”

“Rachel?” He said her name again. It came easier the second time.

Mrs. Cuthbert nodded.

“I have, several times. Her parents laid her to rest near their country estate. They didn’t feel that she deserved to be buried anywhere near the Bryant ancestors.”

Mrs. Cutherbert’s face puckered as if she had just been scalded by tea. “Whyever not?”

“She didn’t give me an heir. She ran away from me and back to them because she was unhappy, and do you know what they did?”

“They sent her back to you?”

“Yes. What kind of parents do that to their child? She was young and scared. The first brave thing she had ever done was to leave me, and they tried to send her back.”

“Tried to send her back?”

Everton nodded. He had never told anyone the full story of what had happened, but after his debacle with Lady Emily, he owed Mrs. Cuthbert an explanation for his behavior. “She never made it back. She slipped away from the groom and ran away again. This time, none of us knew where. The next news I received of her was of her death six months later.”

“Where had she gone?”

“She had been living with her nurse. She had helped raise Rachel, and in the end, she was the only person who had made her feel safe.”