The prince and the orphan

Chapter 2

The pain of Anthony's death was latent, even after Candice left Lakewood deciding also to leave behind the Ardlay's last name. If only William had accepted! But no! He stubbornly continued with his decision and sent her to England to study alongside Alistair, Archibald, Neal and Eliza. Thank God that at least he put an ocean between us.

According to him, she also needed to overcome her grief.

"Her grief?!" I asked, laughing painfully. William looked at me with tenderness and compassion, answering:

"Aunt, Candy loved Anthony, and he loved her back, I know because he shared his feelings with me many times through his letters. Do you think he would wish for you to blame her? The same arguments you use in blaming her, are the ones I use to blame myself day after day, hour after hour, minute by minute, and even so I can't see my paint to be bigger than hers. We all suffer aunt, in pain and loss we're all the same."

Candice seemed to make progress in her studies in England, but even then I refused to support her or to accept her adoption into the family. Those times I visited my nephews at school or when I sent them gifts, I always excluded her; it's not that I did it without thinking, of course I thought about her once in a while!, for me she was the source of all my suffering and if I excluded her it was always done consciously. Maybe with my attitude she would be able to understand that she was not welcomed in our family, maybe that could make her renounce our illustrious name and maybe with some luck, William would take pity on me like the matriarch I am and would stop his crazy idea of turning her into a lady under our tutelage.

Yes, Candice could be full of charisma with eyes so much like Rosemary's, but like they say: "you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig"...

I thanked God every time that girl came to my mind that William had never met her personally, because his folly of adopting her had been only brought about by the letters Anthony, Alistair and Archibald sent him. I thought that if he had met her personally, undoubtedly he would've been able to see in her eyes the sparkle of Rosemary's, and then we would truly be lost!... Oh, how naive I was by thinking so...

Eliza and Neal kept me very well informed about all the embarrassment the girl put us through at school, in Scotland during the holidays and by abandoning everything in order to return to America running behind a boy... Utterly disgraceful!

And as if all that wasn't enough, I heard afterwards she had signed herself into a nursing school. Nurse!, a member of the Ardlay's?!...

That was more than enough to give me continuous headaches but it was then that George brought me the worst news of all: we had lost track of William, the patriarch had disappeared after abandoning one of his many crazy expeditions around the world and nobody knew where to find him. Our family's future was at risk and we feared for the life of my beloved nephew. Please God, not again!... All of this was that girl's fault! Always! Everything was her fault!

It didn't matter whatever George was telling me, I was convinced William was returning to America more than to take his place as the patriarch and to make his presentation in society, because someway or another he was worried about his protegee. When Candice left school without a word, not saying where she was going, was just before William left Africa; I asked myself if maybe his hasted return was prompted by his worries about her, by his need to find her. And it was right then we lost track of him.

I don't think I have ever lived days as distressing as those, what am I saying? It would've been simpler if they had just been days, but they were years! Years without knowing about him! Years without a word, without receiving a single letter, without a clue!, none of the detectives we hired around the world was able to find him. What was going to happen to us if William didn't appear? What if he was lost in the midst of a country fighting the Great War? We didn't even dare think about what we were going to do if he was dead.

George turned even more quiet and taciturn, and my health started deteriorating. On one side we didn't want to keep hoping, and on the other side, hope was the only thing we had to keep us afloat... We could not give up until we knew for sure William's whereabouts.

We disconnected almost completely from everyone, George even losing contact with Candice, there were more important matters to worry about than that girl studying to become a nurse; now I ask myself what would've happened if George would've kept in touch with her? We would've saved ourselves so many months of uncertainty!

It would seem that the pain of not knowing William's whereabouts was not enough for destiny. As it was then that Alistair enlisted as a volunteer in the Great War and no matter how much we tried to persuade him otherwise and even tried to forcefully bring him back home, there was nothing we could do about it.

Definitely, since Candice arrived in our family everything turned out for the worse!... Anthony's death, William's disappearance, and then Alistair's enlistment. The last thing I wanted was to see her face!

One day Archibald brought her sick to the mansion, I ordered her not to use our last name anymore; what did I care if she had pneumonia or not?! I did not want to see her!

That child, now a woman, was the cause of all our problems. I had to come up with something to kick her out of our family and I would start by forbidding her the use of our name... not that she really had use it to advance herself, truth was she never did, she never used the dresses that were bought for her, dresses fit for a lady and very much unlike those cheap cotton ones she always wore. It seemed like luxury itched her, she never gave importance to it and maybe that was one of the reasons I never could consider her a lady worthy of us.

I prayed to God to help us find William alive and decided that when we did, I would make him desist from his crazy idea of Candice keeping being an Ardlay. And if for any reason we didn't find him, I myself would make it happen no matter what.

Finally one day William came back safe and sound. George and I were relieved and filled with joy. At the beginning It was difficult for me to agree that William would take the reins of the company without returning yet to live with us at the mansion; he had asked me for my permission to be able to stay some more months with the person that had taken care of him during his amnesia. I couldn't agree from the start, but then I thought that maybe it was important for him to repay him somehow for all the trouble he had caused, and I agreed. And it was precisely during this time that I also begged him to strip Candice of our last name, recounting everything that Neal and Eliza had told me about her: that she had turned into a woman of questionable behavior and reputation, and that she shared an apartment with a men to whom we knew she was not married.

William listened with an impassive face, and once I had stopped ranting against her he lowered his eyes, and after a few seconds of silence looked back at me firmly and said:

"Aunt, I understand you have never accepted Candice as a member of our family. It seems that even after all these years you still think she is not worthy of us, and with good reasons, if you base your feelings in Eliza's and Neal's gossip. But I'm sorry if I cannot grant you your petition; I won't go into details now, but I would like to think that someday you will give me the reason. Now, if you excuse me, I'm leaving."

And without saying anything else or waiting for my reply, he stood up and left the room.

I was left extremely annoyed and at the same time disappointed in my nephew, couldn't he see the kind of woman he had welcomed into our family?!, and even so he decided to keep granting her our last name?... It was inconceivable!