“I would have done what I could to help.” The words slipped off my lips quickly. Too quickly.

He said nothing, but there was a knowing on his face. Then I heard my own voice in my memory, speaking of playing in those very same asylums. For what purpose? To perform for a band of hopeless inmates? I shuddered. Madness is a disease without a cure. Those people are broken in a way no one can truly fix.

I turned away from Harford’s look. “Well, it hardly matters after all. She has died, and I’m too late.”

His features pinched, and he looked down at his hands. “I wasn’t aware of that. ’Tis a shame. He’d have been heartbroken. It’s good he isn’t alive to find out.”

I clutched my hands in my lap, forcing my brain to comprehend what couldn’t be grasped. My father—he cared for no one. Loved nobody. “He was her guardian for years. If he cared so much for her, why not simply take her out and have her live with him? With us?”

His gaze shot up, searched my face. “Her guardian? He wasn’t ever her guardian, and that was precisely the problem. He had absolutely no legal say in what became of her. He was merely a friend.”

I narrowed my eyes. “We’re speaking of my father, yes? Of Winston Mourdant?”

He released a breath. “Ah. That’s the confusion. No, it isn’t your father I was speaking of at all—it was Marcel Beauchene.”

“Marcel?” My spine straightened, pieces of this wretched business slipping into place. All the maneuvering, the behind-the-curtain tactics. Yes—it couldn’t be anyone else. He’d not only allowed me to walk into this mess, he’d all but planned it. My heart could scarcely take it in.

“He knew you were to become her guardian and he saw his chance. He wished to train her, to bring her out into the theaters, but he needed you, her guardian, to see her value and get her out. It became complicated when you wished to leave your position, though.” The man lowered his bushy white head. “He came when you were sedated, after you admitted to them who you really were, and he told them something, signed something. Perhaps he claimed that he didn’t recognize you. That you weren’t Vivienne Mourdant.”

“Well, then. Perhaps it was another man who signed for you,” Thornhill had said, and his words smote my tender heart with the truth.