But it seemed Lady A couldn't. "I'm so happy to know Alice and Georgiana were together," she whispered, and waved her free hand toward her sisters.
With a teary smile, Lady C took over the story. "After Alice failed to follow through with the betrothal, Georgiana was next in line. When she turned eighteen, she begged for one London season before marrying Grimbald—"
"I never had been able to deny her anything," Lady A interrupted. "Georgiana was the sweetest child."
"I'm sure she was," Rachael said. Maybe Georgiana had lied to her—a lie by omission—but she'd loved Rachael and her siblings dearly. Georgiana had been a wonderful mother. In the past months, it seemed she'd forgotten that. "She loved you, too, Lady Avon—"
"Grandmama. Please call me Grandmama."
Rachael's heart swelled. "She loved you, too, Grandmama. She always wore gardenia perfume. I think that must have been because she missed you. Did she meet my father that season?"
Her grandmother waved a hand again, overtaken by emotion.
"That's when she met John Chase, yes," Lady B said. "She begged to marry him, but my sister's husband wouldn't hear of it. He'd made a promise and had no other daughters left to satisfy his debt to the man who had saved his life. Georgiana hadn't seen her sister in seven years, and she didn't want to disobey her parents and end up estranged like Alice. So she reluctantly agreed to go through with the ceremony."
"That sounds like Mama," Rachael said. "What happened then?"
Her grandmother was recovered enough to continue. "Like his father, Grimbald was an army man. He took a leave of absence to wed Georgiana and got her with child right away. Then he went back to his regiment, and she came home to London to live with us." Her voice dropped. "She didn't love him, so she didn't mind, really, and she was so looking forward to having her baby."
"Me," Rachael whispered.
"Yes. And then she received a letter saying her husband had been executed for treason. No details. She was furious with us, I'm afraid, for making her abandon her love and wed a traitor. She wrote a suicide note and jumped off the London Bridge, taking her baby with her. Her body was never found."
"Because she didn't jump off the London Bridge," Griffin said, "no matter that the note said she would. She ran to the countryside and married John Chase instead."
They could only guess what had happened after that. She hadn't wanted her child to grow up as the son or daughter of a traitor. She'd claimed she was Georgiana Woodby, a commoner, and stayed far away from London in order to avoid ever seeing her parents. Far away from any social situation, to avoid running into anyone she might have known in her previous life.
"Did she have asthma?" Rachael asked.
"Not at all," Lady Avonleigh said. "She was the healthiest of all my children."
"I thought so," Rachael said with a sigh. "So no one ever learned what had become of my real father. How he came to be labeled a traitor." She sighed again, but supposed it wasn't all that important. She'd been making much too much of the whole thing. Her mother had only wanted to protect her from being tainted by her father's shame, and she had new family now, and—
"Oh, I know what happened," her grandmother said. "After my younger daughter's death, I paid a visit to Grimbald's father."
"My grandfather? I met him at the Royal Hospital. But—"
"He's lost his mind, poor man, yes. But I talked to him a long time before that." Lady Avonleigh—Grandmama—shifted on the sofa to face Rachael and took her other hand. "It wasn't all that bad, my dear. If Georgiana had known, she might have forgiven him. Although I suspect she would never have loved him. She was in love with the Earl of Greystone."
Rachael's parents—the two she'd grown up with—had been very much in love. No matter how angry she'd been with her mother, she'd never forgotten that. "What did Grimbald do?" she asked. "What did he do that wasn't so bad?"
"It was during the war against the colonies in North America, just six years after Georgiana was born. He was much older than she was, you see—probably another reason she preferred the earl. In any event, he and a fellow soldier, one William Smith, killed a British officer to keep him from murdering a number of American civilians. They managed to convince the authorities that the man was shot by a revolutionary. And all was well for twelve years, until Smith fell ill in 1792 and revealed in a deathbed confession that the two of them had killed the officer."
"But if they killed him to save innocent people," Rachael said, looking to Griffin, "the officer might have been a bad man. They might have done a good thing."
"That officer probably was a bad man," Griffin said sympathetically. "But that wouldn't matter. If Grimbald killed a superior, he'd have been arrested, court-martialed, and convicted—regardless of how bad the man had been."
"It doesn't signify," Lady A said. "Not now. Instead of being sorry for everything that happened, let's just be glad we've found each other." She squeezed Rachael's hands, and her smile reminded Rachael of her mother. "I have a granddaughter."
"You have three granddaughters," Rachael said. "Don't forget Claire and Elizabeth. They're Georgiana's daughters, too." Watching her grandmother's soft blue eyes widen, she added, "And you've a grandson as well. Our brother, Noah."
Lady A was holding Rachael's hands so tightly, her own were beginning to hurt. But she didn't care. Her mother had only wanted to protect her, and her father most likely hadn't really done wrong, and Grandmama had welcomed her with open arms.
"I cannot wait to see your sisters and brother again." Lady B's smile resembled Georgiana's, too.
