The Heiress(47)

But those ten years with Andrew felt like a lifetime. In the best way.

They were the happiest ten years of my life.

I wasn’t used to happiness, and certainly not happiness that lasted so long. It made me soft. Stupid.

Worst of all, it made me think I was safe.

It was 1980. I had just turned forty, an interesting point in a woman’s life, the age at which she finally begins to feel like she might have finally become the person she was meant to be. I certainly felt that way.

Daddy had died not long after Hugh, just a few months later, and if he harbored any suspicions about Hugh’s death, they weren’t strong enough to make him change his will. McTavish Limited was mine, every holding, every investment, every zero.

Oh, Nelle got a lovely little nest egg, thanks to money Mama had put in trust. It was certainly enough to keep her happy for all her days, but when was Nelle ever happy? Besides, it was never the money that she cared about. It was the house, and that—every brick and board of it—belonged to me.

Daddy had put a caveat in the will that Nelle could never be cast out of Ashby House, that she was entitled to live there for the rest of her life. Still, I’d assumed that, with him gone and me and Andrew firmly installed, my sister would take Mama’s money and buy her, Alan, and Howell their own place.

I’m very rarely stupid, my dear, but when it comes to Nelle, I somehow always underestimate what a goddamn pill she can be.

She stayed on at Ashby, her and her horrid little family. By that winter of 1980, Alan was hardly ever around. He’d moved on from Violet to some other woman in town, and we all pretended he was busy with work. Howell was sixteen and had already crashed the gorgeous little Corvette Nelle bought him for his birthday, crushing it against a tree just at the base of the mountain. Wonder he didn’t break his fool neck, and in my darker moments, I often thought, Not a wonder. A shame.

But none of it was all that bad because I had Andrew.

He had a way of turning all these irritations and frustrations into funny little anecdotes. Oh, god, his impression of Nelle was a thing to behold! He could get that way she holds her mouth just right. And he was so good at poking fun at Alan’s cheerful blandness, Howell’s teenage entitlement, and things that would usually aggravate the fire out of me became things that, through Andrew’s alchemy, were funny.

He was the one who made me love the woods around Ashby as well, those woods I’d always had such a distaste for. But holding Andrew’s hand, seeing the leaves and the trees through his eyes, I fell in love with the land that surrounded my home. I even had new trails made, and we would wander them together, cut off from everything but each other.

You and me against the world, he would sing underneath his breath sometimes.

And so it was.

That’s how it felt that night in 1980, curled up on the sofa in the den with Andrew, watching the fire crackle in the fireplace. It was January, a wet mix of sleet and snow pattering against the windows. Andrew had one arm around me, idly stroking my hair, the other holding a book, one of those spy thrillers he always loved. I didn’t want him to lift his other hand from my hair, so every once in a while, he would murmur, “Turn,” and I’d reach up and turn the page for him, both of us amused every time, him joking that who would’ve thought a poor Yorkshire lad would one day have the lady of the manor flipping pages of a book for him.

I don’t believe in an afterlife—I’m sure you can understand why such an idea is abhorrent to me—but if there is a heaven, and through some mix-up of celestial paperwork I actually got to go there, this moment is where I’d want to spend eternity. Andrew’s hand on my hair, the fire before us, the snow outside, the crackle of pages turning and his soft chuckle in my ear.

“How’s your book?” I asked.

“Horrible,” he replied. “I’ve counted at least three plot holes, and the author has had to describe blood so often that he’s beginning to run out of synonyms for ‘red.’ I expect the next death to involve the word ‘vermilion’ at this rate.”

“And you’re loving it.”

“Very much.”

I smiled and settled back against his side, and to this day, I can’t say what made me say what I said next.

“When Duke died, I thought his blood looked almost black. But it was dark and there was so much of it.”

Andrew’s hand stilled on my hair, but the words kept coming out of me. “That’s why I can never read those thrillers of yours. They never seem to get it right. What it feels like, what it looks like, when someone dies violently. How much blood there is, the sounds they make. When Duke died, there was this rattling noise in his chest like nothing I’d ever heard before, but in those books, it’s always silent.”

I sat up then, looking at him, and he watched me with his sad eyes, interested, but not alarmed.

Not even when he said, “I thought Duke was already dead when you found him.”

And so I told him.

It was—more or less—the same version of events I told you, so you can go back and reread that letter if you want to. I can’t imagine what your face looked like as you learned the true story of Duke’s death, but Andrew’s never changed. I waited for shock or horror to sink in, for those dark eyes I loved so much to shutter closed to me, but he just listened and when I was done, he leaned over, his hand a warm weight on the back of my neck as he kissed my forehead.