The Lady Wants A Fool (Bridgerton)

chapter twenty-four

"You need to sit down Bridgerton and you'll calm that temper of yours if you know what's good for you." The Duke glared at him and if he had any sanity left he would have sat down.
"I'll stand, thank you." He replied through clenched teeth.

"Have it your way." The Duke responded with exasperation.
He wanted the truth and he wanted it now. The Duke sensing this just stared at him openly, almost as if he reveled in Miles' pain.

"Just tell me the truth." He said in a small voice. Too small to call his own. The Duke glanced at the closed door as if he expected someone to enter. No one did. He let out a long sigh as he slumped back in his chair and ran his fingers through his dark hair.

"Where to begin?" He pondered to himself, Miles wanted to laugh.
"How about where Clarence is." He offered irritated. The Duke smiled sarcastically.
"I suppose that would be the best place to start." His heart took a dive and his chest felt tight. A lump had formed in his throat and no amount of swallowing would dislodge it.

The Duke took his time, he glanced around his study as if searching for the answer.
"Clarence, as you say, is here. Right upstairs, eyes tear stained and red." He deflated. Right there in the Dukes study he dropped to his knees and gasped for breath. It wasn't real. It wasn't happening, but if the Duke cared for his mental state it didn't show.

"Lyanna is a good woman." At The Dukes comment he scoffed.
"A good woman doesn't pretend to be a man." He pointed out, aware that his throat hadn't closed up as he initially thought it had. Fury flashed in the Dukes eyes, but he took a few steadying breaths before he continued.

"She lost her mother at seven, you couldn't understand unless you've felt that same pain. She didn't have anyone to look up to anymore, so her attention was all directed towards me. She changed after her mother's death, a change that only occurs when you've lost a piece of yourself and you no longer know how to carry on. I was also changed. I didn't know how to talk to her, and it seemed we fought and argued more than anything else." The Dukes face flushed with past pain.

"She started acting differently, she refused to wear any sort of dress, refused to listen to her governess. She rebelled in every way possible. There was a day when she had left in the early morning hours. No one had noticed, she was gone till dinner. We spent all evening searching for her. I found her, she was stuck in a fence. Her hair had wrapped around the wire when she had tried to crawl under it. You'd think that a normal little girl of eight would be frightened and scared being alone as the sun dipped down, far away from home. I started to berate her, yelling at her, I was scared and here she was tangled up in a fence smiling at me like she had just stolen sweets from the cook. I didn't have the heart to punish her. I just took out my knife and cut her hair where it was tangled around the wire. After that her governess had to cut off all her cute little curls, and when she came downstairs that next day I could have sworn she was my son, not my daughter." He took a deep breath as he thought of the past traumas.

"She's never been normal, even as a baby, she was always content, a mischievous look always gleaming in her eyes. If you want someone to blame Bridgerton, blame me. It was my lack of awareness that led Lyanna to masquerade as a boy. It was my failure as her father that I didn't realize she was struggling. I was too naive, blind to the truth staring me right in the face." Miles' body ached, but that was nothing compared to his heart and mind.

He didn't want to blame anyone. Was anyone really at fault? He tried to organize his thoughts while the Duke continued on.

"She must have overheard my butler and I discussing the future about the Duchy needing an heir. She must have felt betrayed, realizing that no matter how much I wished to pass down the title, that I could not. She wasn't a man. She couldn't inherit it. I think that's when the idea came to her to pretend to be a boy. It had been five years since her mother had passed, she had been unusually reserved those few weeks before she left. It was time for me to make my rounds. Check on my lands and estates, I should have known she was up to something. I should have noticed when she said she didn't want to accompany me, that something was wrong. But I wrote it off as a fathers usual worry and went ahead with my trip. I was gone for three days when a letter found me at a nearby town. You don't know fear like that, fear of losing the one thing in this world that keeps you tethered to it. I rushed home with all possible haste to find her governess in tears. She thrust a letter into my hands as she pleaded for forgiveness. It was Lyanna's hand that stared back at me on the page. I've went to Greece. That was all it said."