Chapter 23
W hen Silas heard the gunshot as he raced through the thick woods, he began to hear another sound. It took him a moment to realize it was his own voice, howling in pain and horror as he pushed through the brambles and onto the shores of the Thames.
He saw Arabella there, crumpled on the ground and for a moment all he could do was scream her name into the night. But then she turned toward him and he saw, to his shock and relief, that she wasn’t harmed.
He threw himself down beside her, gathering her into his arms as she began to sob, her fingers digging into his jacket as she almost tried to claw her way into his coat.
“Shhh,” he soothed. “I’m here, I’m here.”
“He’s—he’s dead.”
It was Evelina’s voice that said it and that brought Silas back to reality. He looked to where the rest of them stared and saw there was a man lying on the shore. A gun smoked in his hand, a hole was in his forehead.
Arabella stopped sobbing and pushed at him, silently asking him to help her up. He did so and she rushed to her sisters, gathering them close as they trembled together.
“He shot himself,” she gasped out at last. “He was pointing the gun at me and then he shot himself instead. I was trying to give him a way out, I don’t know why he took this one.”
They collapsed together then, Silas watching the love that always glowed so brightly between them create a warmth that he knew would carry them through this awful truth. He looked toward his brother and found Reg watching him just as closely.
“I’m very glad she’s unharmed,” Reg said as he came to Silas and clasped his arm gently.
“At least physically,” Silas said.
“Miss Comerford,” Reg said, and then shook his head. “Arabella.”
She jolted at the use of her name and looked toward Silas’s brother. She left her sisters to hold each other and moved to him. “Y-Yes, my lord? I’m so sorry you had to be involved in this, that you were dragged into?—”
“I have no regrets in coming to your aid, only in my part in all this, which I’m sure Silas will tell you soon enough. But the guard will be coming, Arabella, and soon.”
She blinked, as if she were only just realizing that she would potentially be implicated in this death. That she might be seen as a suspect, even if she hadn’t done anything wrong.
Silas slid his arm around her. “We’ll get through it,” he whispered.
She looked up at him. “I don’t want to harm you or your family with all this.”
“You misunderstand,” Reg said. “I’m not telling you about the guard’s arrival to make you see that you’re in danger. I need to know what happened, if you can bear to tell it, so that I know how to make it go away. For you. For him, as well. And I suppose for us, too.”
“Make it go away?” she repeated.
He smiled. “You’ve been involved with many powerful men.
Enough that you should know we can make most distasteful things go away with the right pressures and payoffs.
And since you were clearly the victim in all this, I think the full weight of the title Pentaghast will have never been used for a better purpose than to ensure you are left unscathed. Please, tell us what happened.”
Arabella clung to Silas as she choked out the whole story of her father’s arrival, plan to make her death look like a suicide and finally his taking of his own life after she had offered him an escape.
Silas held her tightly, feeling her heart pound with fear and grief with every word. How he wished he could take some of that pain, lift its weight from her shoulders. But he knew from experience that he couldn’t. She would have to feel it. The best he could do was be there to hold her through it.
“I understand,” Reg said when she was finished. He dug into his pocket and offered her his handkerchief, which she used to wipe her eyes. There was a commotion from above them in the park. “I’ll meet them. And I’ll be sure they understand what truly happened.”
“What will you say that was, my lord?” Julia asked.
“The truth. That Mr. Comerford approached me tonight, very drunk, wanting to get in touch with his daughters to apologize for his long estrangement. And that we discovered him staggering down to the river after he couldn’t reach you.
We tried to stop him from acting a fool with his revolver, but it went off. Probably accidentally in his state.”
“You’ll make it appear accidental?” Arabella breathed. “That could never be believed.”
“Anything can be believed with enough power and influence. Why don’t you four go back to the house now? Go through the other side of the trail. I’ll handle it and come up later.”
Julia and Evelina each took one of Arabella’s scratched and shaking hands and started to take her up the path Reg had indicated. Silas stayed behind for a breath and then reached out his hand toward his brother. “I owe you,” he said.
To his surprise, Reggie pulled him in for a brief embrace. “Perhaps no one owes anyone anymore. Perhaps we can just start over.”
“I’d like that,” Silas said, and then turned away to let his brother manage the consequences while he tried to comfort the woman he loved.
* * *
A fter their return to the house, everything had become a blur. Arabella had been aware of Evelina and Julia tending to her, cleaning up her scratches and removing her torn gown to replace it with a nightrail. They’d even gotten the brambles from her hair.
Silas had been there the whole time, watching, mostly silent, sometimes helping. Evelina and Julia had stayed with her a while but eventually they’d gone to their own rooms and Silas joined her on her bed, his arms around her, his body heat the only thing keeping the chill from her bones.
The reality of what had happened was hitting now. Long waves of grief and terror that she knew would last a long time. They might fade eventually. They might soften. But they would be there.
“Would you like to try to eat?” Silas asked softly, his fingers threading through her hair gently. “You didn’t have supper or the tray Mrs. Barnaby put together.”
“I couldn’t eat,” she murmured, tracing the edge of his waistcoat with her fingertips. “I will later, I promise.”
He pressed a kiss to her temple. “I’ll hold you to that.”
She let out her breath in a shaky sigh and leaned away so she could look up at him. “When I saw you next, I thought I would be ending this between us. Not that you’d come tromping through the forest to save me.”
He stiffened. “I didn’t save you. You saved you. And we don’t have to talk about the other. Not right now. Not tonight.”
She shook her head. “But we must because we don’t know what will happen later. Tonight proved that, didn’t it?”
He sighed. “I suppose it did.”
“Do you know what I was thinking while my father was dragging me to my death?”
“No.”
“I thought of my sisters, of course. Of how devastated they’d be if they thought I killed myself. Or if I didn’t survive full stop. But there was peace there. We have said all our hearts to each other a great many times. Evelina and Julia know I love them. I know they love me.”
He smiled. “They do. It’s a wonderful thing.”
“And that’s why you haunted me most. Because you and I have danced around whatever is between us for weeks. And I hated that you wouldn’t know that I…I love you.”
His eyes went wide. “You love me?”
“I do. And worse than that, I know you love me, too.”
There was a softness to his expression at that. And then he laughed, though there was little humor to it. “Worse than that? You don’t want me to love you?”
She shook her head. “I do want that. Oh God, the idea that you could love me, that you and I could fit together after so many years of never feeling like we fit at all? That’s poetic.
That’s perfection. That’s everything. But that doesn’t mean it won’t cause pain. That’s why I was going to walk away.”
He let out his breath in a long sigh. “You think loving you will take away from my life.”
“It will.” She shrugged. “That’s just fact.”
“You are sunshine through clouds, Arabella Comerford. You are fizz in champagne. You are ribald laughter at a good but particularly wicked joke. You are beautiful arias sung by a master. You are a good meal after a long fast. Those are the things that make the world go round. They make life worth living. If you don’t think that you are worth any troubles that might come to pass because I love you, then you don’t understand love or me. ”
She stared at him. “I don’t understand love.”
“I didn’t either.” He touched her face. “But I do now. Through your eyes. Won’t you please let me teach you through mine? Let me dance with you and flirt shamelessly with you and make love to you at parties behind hedges and marry you over an anvil in Scotland because I have no patience?”
Now the air was gone from her lungs. “You want to marry me?”
“Yes. I said I wasn’t the kind of man who became someone’s protector.
Turns out I just misunderstood why.” He shook his head.
“This is terribly unromantic considering what you went through tonight. But as you pointed out, we don’t know what will happen tomorrow.
So I can’t wait. I won’t wait to tell you what I want.
But you can wait to give me the answer if you need to. ”
There was a swell of emotion in her. It crested over top of the pain.
That was temporary, she knew, but for now it was wonderful.
The emotion was love. And it was the knowledge that if she said yes to this man he would brighten her life and hold her fears and give her joy and music and laughter for the rest of her life.
And so Arabella Comerford, who had somehow thought she knew everything, let go of what she believed and said, “Yes.”