“Your Grace, his death was so unexpected,” Duncan said. “A tragedy.”
“It was sudden,” Izzy put in.
Abigail reached across the table to take Izzy’s hand. “It must have been devastating. The whole country was in mourning with you.”
Ransom shook his head. “That’s no excuse. There are few true eventualities in life, but death is one of them.” He waved for more wine. “If you ask me, this Sir Henry Goodnight was no better than a cut-rate gin peddler or opium trader. He hooked people on his soppy stories, then just kept shoveling them more, not caring how many people drowned their powers of reason in that treacly swamp.”
Izzy thought that was going a bit too far.
“You don’t have to admire my father’s stories,” she said. “But don’t disparage the readers, or the notion of romance. Cressida and Ulric are just characters. Moranglia is entirely made up. But love does exist. It’s all around us.”
He put down his wineglass and turned his head, as if to survey the room. “Where?”
She didn’t know how to answer. “Am I supposed to point it out like an architectural feature? There it is, framed and hanging on the wall?”
“You said love is all around us. Well, where is it? There are four of us at this table, all grown adults. Not one romance. Not one instance of love.”
“But—”
“But what? Everyone knows your situation, Miss Goodnight. Doomed to spinsterhood by your father’s stories.” He gestured at his valet. “Duncan here spent ten years pining for one of the London housemaids. Irish girl with bouncy curls and a bouncier bosom. She never took a second look at him.”
Duncan made a halfhearted attempt at protest, but Ransom ignored it.
He turned to Abigail. “What about you, Miss Pelham? You seem lively, and by all accounts, pretty enough. Your father is a gentleman. Where are your suitors?”
Abigail stared at her half-eaten tart. “There was someone.”
“Ah. And where’s the someone now?”
“He left for the navy,” she answered. “My dowry is slight, and he was a second son with no fortune of his own. Matters never progressed beyond friendship.” She gave a little smile. “I suppose it wasn’t meant to be.”
Ransom propped his boot on the chair leg. “There. You see? Once again, cold reality trumps feeling.” He waved from Izzy to Abigail to Duncan. “Overlooked, unwanted, rejected. Not a happy ending in the lot.”
“That’s not fair,” Izzy protested. “Our own stories haven’t ended. And even so, we are but four souls in a vast world. I receive letters from my father’s readers every day. People from all walks of life who—”
“Who are desperate and deluded?”
“Who believe in love.”
He leaned back in his chair, nonchalant. “Same thing.”
“It isn’t the same thing at all.”
Izzy stared at him. She didn’t know why arguing this point had become so important to her. If he wanted to live out the remainder of his life bitter and alone, she supposed he had that right. But his smugness made her so prickly all over. And he wasn’t merely insulting love and romance. He was insulting her friends and acquaintances. Her own hard work.
The innermost yearnings of her heart.
This wasn’t an academic argument. It was personal. If she didn’t defend the idea of lasting happiness, how could she hold out any hope for her own?
She tried again. “Everyone . . . well, almost everyone . . . understands that my father’s stories are merely stories. But love is not a delusion.” To his disbelieving snort, she insisted, “It’s not.”
An idea came to her.
“Wait.” She rose from the table and began walking backward, toward the corridor. “Wait right there one moment, and I will prove it to you.”
She hurried up to the next floor, then down the corridor, and tapped her way up all thirty-four stairs to the turret. There, she rummaged through her saved correspondence until she found the envelope she wanted, and clutching it, raced back down.
She arrived breathless and triumphant.
“Here,” she said, clutching the weathered envelope. “Right here in my hand, I have proof that my father’s stories made a difference in people’s lives. Proof that true love will always triumph.”
“I shall brace myself.” The duke lifted his wineglass and drained it in one swallow. “Carry on.”
Izzy unfolded the letter and began to read.
My dear Miss Goodnight,
We have never met, and yet I think of you as a close friend. Perhaps even as a sister. My governess began reading me your father’s stories when I was but a girl of six, and for as long as I can remember, the good people of Moranglia have populated my dreams—just as I imagine they have populated yours. When I learned of Sir Henry’s untimely death, I wept tears for you every night for months.
I am grown now, as you must be. This year, my father engaged me to a suitor not of my choosing. He is not a cruel or violent man, but he is unfeeling and cold. I am sure he does not love me and probably never could. He intends to acquire me, and he has gone about his goal with less feeling and attention than other men display when buying a horse. I dread the prospect of a life with him.
This will all sound so familiar to you. Am I not just like Cressida in the thirty-fifth installment, when her father betrothed her to that horrid Lord Darkskull? Excepting the windowless tower and the helpful mice, of course.
And, in the same way as Cressida, my heart has belonged to another for years. Oh, Miss Goodnight. I wish you could know him. Like Ulric, he comes from humble circumstances. But he has proved his worth time and again, displaying such understanding and devotion as I have never known from my closest friends and family. I love him with everything in my soul.
I face a fearsome choice. But I have sought the counsel of my heart and come to a brave decision.
I will follow Cressida’s example and escape. With or without the helpful mice.
Doubt not. Tomorrow I shall be with my true love, and together we will embark on our life’s adventure. All thanks are due to you, Miss Goodnight, and to your dear father, who lives on in his tales and in a nation’s hearts.
A tear burned at the corner of Izzy’s eye as she lifted her head. “And it’s signed, ‘Yours in boundless gratitude, Lady Emily Riverdale.’ ”
She lowered the letter on a note of victory. There, now. He couldn’t possibly listen to that letter and be unmoved.