Chapter 718: Family Matters (Part Three)
"I think your mother would gladly take up whatever burdens she carried if she could have you back by her side," Isabell said softly, taking Ashlynn’s slender hands in her own. "I can’t say for certain, but I think that the reminders of you are why she left Blackwell Manor after returning from Lothian March."
Of course, Isabell only felt like that was part of the reason. After all, the countess knew just as well as Isabell did who had betrayed her eldest daughter to a murderous husband. She had lost one daughter to the schemes of the other one. How could any mother still live in the house that carried so many reminders of the children she’d raised to suffer such a tragic fate?
Try as she might, even as a mother herself, Isabell couldn’t imagine how the poor woman must feel. If Lassian ever did something so heinous to Issandra or vice versa, she couldn’t imagine forgiving the child who had betrayed their sibling. At the same time, she struggled to say that she would have the strength to see one of her children punished for their crimes against the other.
And Countess Maela’s situation was even graver. If she ever exposed what Jocelynn had done, she would have to expose her own crime of hiding Ashlynn away for more than twenty years. The stain of heresy over so many years would spread far beyond herself and who could say how many of her loved ones would suffer at the hands of the Inquisition before the Church was satisfied they’d rooted out the infernal influence of ’demons.’
Savaged by so many wounds to her heart and soul, with no one that she could share her agony with, was it any wonder she would want to escape any reminders of the life she’d lived in Blackwell Manor? After all, given his own role in arranging the marriage that had caused this tragedy, even her husband would struggle to become a source of comfort for his grieving wife.
"She left?" Ashlynn asked, snapping Isabell out of her thoughts and bringing her back to the present. "Where, where did she go?" Ashlynn asked, trying to understand where her mother would have run to if she couldn’t bear to be home. "Did she go back to live with her family?"
"That’s what your father said when I last spoke with him," Isabell said, though her tone suggested that she didn’t believe it. "Perhaps she has, but if that was the case, I’m sure we would have visited her when we passed through duCoumont County on our way to the frontier, especially since Jocelynn was with us."
Looking back, it had been one of the many signs that something was very wrong with the relationship between the Blackwells and the Lothians. Owain could be forgiven for taking the most direct route through Keating Duchy to return to Lothian March without making a lengthy detour to visit Duke Keating. After all, doing so would have added weeks to their journey.
But bypassing his mother-in-law’s family home when it would have added only a few days to their journey was a different matter entirely, especially if that very mother-in-law was currently visiting her aging parents and her elder brother’s family.