Chapter 5: What Desmond Feared
Desmond Vail did not wait to be summoned. By the time Isabelle's father sent for him, he was already gone from his townhouse on Larkhaven Row, along with a strongbox of documents his own solicitor later admitted he'd never been permitted to see the contents of.
It was Toby, oddly, who found the thread that led to him — not through any cleverness of investigation, but because he remembered something from Saint Meridian's that had never seemed important until now. A woman had visited the orphanage twice a year, every year, for as long as he could remember, asking the matron quiet questions about a boy she never named directly and never tried to take home. She always left a small sum of money "for his keeping" and always left before the other children saw her face.
The matron, tracked down and gently questioned by Isabelle's family lawyer, confirmed it at once: the woman had introduced herself only as "a friend of the family," and had asked, every visit, whether the boy showed any resemblance yet to a photograph she carried but never showed anyone else. She had stopped visiting eleven months ago.
The description matched Desmond Vail's housekeeper of nineteen years — a woman who, it emerged under far more formal questioning, had been paid a private allowance for over a decade to monitor "a matter concerning the Ravensworth succession" and report any developments directly to Desmond.
It was the housekeeper, frightened and unwilling to face prison for a crime that was never truly hers, who led investigators to Desmond himself, found three days later at a coastal inn in a town called Thistlewick Cove, attempting to book passage on a cargo vessel bound somewhere his name wouldn't follow him.
He did not go quietly, and he did not confess easily. But the ledger, the letter, the housekeeper's decade of reports, and — most damning of all — Marguerite Ravensworth herself, alive, found within the week in a modest cottage three counties away where she had been living under a false name ever since Desmond's men had "resolved" her situation by threatening the life of the newborn son she'd been told, falsely, had died at birth, made the outcome a formality rather than a mystery.
May you like
Marguerite had spent twelve years believing her child was dead. She had never stopped visiting Saint Meridian's twice a year anyway, some instinct she never fully explained even to herself insisting she look, just in case, at every dark-haired boy the matron let her glimpse from the doorway.
She had simply never been shown the right one.
