Chapter 4
“I… heard an animal in distress!” Thalia blurted out, the cold wind cooling the sudden heat in her face. “I hoped to rescue it.”
Henry did not need to know that the animal in distress was her, and that if he had arrived just five minutes later, he would have entered an empty room. There was a ledge just below the window, wide enough to accommodate her, with plenty of stone embellishments along the walls to use as handholds.
The construction and layout of the manor might have been unfamiliar to her injured memory, but there was a part of her that seemed to know that if she just followed that ledge, she would find a way to get down to the ground. An instinct.
As if I have escaped this way before, though if I have been here for four years, I guess it must not have been a successful escape.
“I hear no creature,” Henry said, close to her now, a hand extended though she was not certain if he meant to pull her back from the windowsill or push her right out.
“You must have scared it,” she replied.
Her heart quickened at his proximity, her entire body responding to him in a manner that confounded her: her breath shallowed; her blood seemed to rush faster in her veins, roaring in her ears; her stomach twisting into knots, while that heat continued to radiate through her face and down her neck, her skin prickling.
It is fear, she mused, suspicious of her reaction to him. I must have been scared of him before; that is why I am shaking, why I cannot breathe.
“Get down,” Henry instructed in a voice that was not at all gentle. “Either you will fall and face certain death or you will catch your death of cold, perching there.”
When she did not immediately obey, he swept forward and scooped his arms beneath the bend of her knees and around her upper back, and lifted her off the sill himself. An intimacy of touch that stole what little breath she had left from her lungs, for she had never been held by a man before.
Not that she could recall, anyway.
Too shocked to protest, her throat tightening as her heart raced all the faster, she did not have to endure the surprising embrace for long. Henry set her down almost as quickly as he had picked her up, as if his only concern was getting her away from the window.
I suppose it would not look too good if I were to fall to my death, now, would it? she mused angrily, if only to prevent herself from thinking about the way he had picked her up with such casual ease.
“If I must lock these windows, I will,” he said gruffly, taking a step back as if the proximity made him just as uncomfortable. “Do not lie to me about animals in distress, Thalia; it is beneath you. You were attempting to escape, but, wife, you will stay here until you are entirely recovered.”
Thalia hurried to wrap the two sides of her housecoat tighter around herself, keenly aware that she was wearing a dress beneath; it would not help her argument if he saw that she had dressed for an escape.
“At first, I sought fresh air,” she tried again. “Then, I heard a noise. I thought there might be an abandoned nest or that a… cat had got stuck somewhere. In my condition, do you think I would try to climb down the side of a manor?”
“I do, actually,” Henry replied, his eyes narrowing as he searched her face. Perhaps, looking for the wife within the woman who had no memory of him. “I think the situation has made you more reckless.”
His turn of phrase gave her pause, as she looked at him in turn, hopelessly trying to decipher the expression on his face. “More reckless than what?”
“Pardon?”
“More reckless than what? Was I reckless while I knew you?” she pressed, aware that this was what she had wanted earlier: an opportunity to have an audience alone with her husband, to ask whatever she desired to ask.
Considering her plan of escape had already been scuppered, she figured she might as well gain some information. Knowledge was power, after all, and if she could learn about the missing four years, maybe her memories would start to return.
Henry shrugged. “That is a complicated question.”
“As you have informed me that I am not going anywhere, it appears I am in no rush,” she retorted. “I have all the time in the world to hear your answer.”
“It is a matter of perspective,” he replied stiffly. “What I would call reckless, others might call reasonable. But this is not the time for such a discussion. You are supposed to be resting.”
He moved as if he meant to usher her back toward the bed, but if she spent one more minute lying there, staring at the unfamiliar canopy, willing her brain to function properly, she would truly lose her mind.
As such, she veered away from him and sat herself down in the chair that belonged to a lovely writing desk.
My writing desk…
She glanced for a moment, distracted, at the inkwell and the quills and the paper that someone had already cut for her.
How many letters had she written here? Who had she written to?
Did she have to be careful about what she wrote?
Had they been happy correspondences, or lengthy letters of misery and terror?
The lingering agitation in her body seemed to suggest the latter, but she could not go digging through the drawers of the desk for evidence of those missing years until Henry was out of her private domain.
“How long have we been married?” she asked, though that had already been answered somewhat.
“Four years,” he confirmed.
She nodded slowly. “So, you married me even though you knew I had been in a terrible accident? You married me even though I must have been in an awful state at the wedding?”
“I did not know about the first accident, and there was nothing amiss with you at the church,” he said, looking away.
A sure sign that he was not telling the full truth, but the first accident was not what interested her presently, anyway; she could pick that story apart later.
“How did I come to fall down the stairs?” she asked bluntly.
He did not return his gaze to her, his blue eyes fixed upon the diamond-hatched pattern on the still-open window. Clearing his throat, he walked to it and pulled the window shut.
“I do not know,” he answered at last. “All I know is what you have just said; that you fell down the stairs. The ones leading down from the north tower, I believe, though I have no notion of what you were doing up there. There is nothing in that tower.”
Thalia frowned, unsatisfied. “But how can you not know more than that? Were you not here? Is it not a husband’s prerogative to know what happened if something befalls his wife?”
The north tower? Her mind was not forthcoming, that great void offering nothing back as she searched for an answer as to why she might have visited such a place. She could not even picture what it might look like.
Henry expelled a frustrated sigh. “Ours was—is—a marriage of convenience, Thalia. I knew very little of what you did, and the same is true of the reverse.”
“I would not have allowed that to happen,” she shot back, the reaction almost visceral within her veins. “No… I would never have agreed to such a thing. Indeed, the night that… the carriage overturned, I was on my way to see you, to… yes, to tell you to rescind your offer.”
Almost every memory before that accident was perfectly preserved, but there was some fogginess leading up to the accident.
She remembered arguing with her father, though the details were fuzzy, and she remembered setting out with the determination to claim back her own fate, but what she had intended to actually say to Henry was unclear.
Henry began to move toward her, and as he reached the writing desk, he braced his hand upon the worn surface and leaned in, eyes glinting. “Are you calling me a liar?”
Heart thundering wildly, and knowing she should be terrified, Thalia peered up to meet his intense gaze.
She suspected she should say something to placate him or just say nothing at all, so it was something of a surprise to her when the first thing that came out of her mouth was a bold, decisive, “Yes.”
“I see.” He withdrew and clawed a hand through his silky, dark hair, turning his back on her.
Breathless, her hand to her racing heart, Thalia took in the admittedly marvelous silhouette of him in the low light of the darkened room: such broad shoulders, tapering to a fine waist, his posture almost regal, his figure athletic as if he rode often or walked great distances for his leisure. Boxed, perhaps?
What do I know about you that I have forgotten?
Do I know anything, if what he says about us is true?
She still could not and would not believe that she had conceded to a marriage of convenience.
Unless, of course, that first accident had done more harm to her head than anyone had thought, dazing her enough to consent to such a wretched thing.
“Not everyone is conspiring against you, Thalia,” Henry said in a low, tired voice, his back still turned.
“And whether you believe me or not, I am not a villain. I am keeping you here for your own safety. If you knew yourself, you would be glad to be in your own bed, for this is your home. You have been living here since our wedding and have never sought to leave before.”
“I do not believe you,” she shot back, shaking afresh while her skull pounded with the strain of trying to remember.
He shrugged. “I will not go back and forth trying to convince you of the truth.” He dipped his chin toward the door.
“But those maids are all dear to you. You employed them. You decorated the rooms here to your taste. You run this household excellently. You are content here, as far as I am aware. Why, these days, it is more your home than mine.”
“And that must be so easy for you to tell me, when I cannot know for myself,” she insisted, rising from the chair.
Maybe, she might be more inclined to believe him if he could look at her as he spoke to her. His decision to keep his back turned spoke volumes of deceit, for what husband would not look into his wife’s eyes if he had nothing to hide?
“As I said, I will not waste effort trying to convince you,” he replied. “When your memory returns, you will see for yourself.”
“If it returns,” she corrected, frowning. “Perhaps, you do not want me to remember.”
His shoulders stiffened, his tone harsher as he rasped, “What utter nonsense.”
“Is it? You can just say what you please and I cannot refute it. You do not have to tell me how I actually ended up marrying you, when the wedding day is unknown to me. You do not have to tell me how I actually came to fall down the stairs because I cannot remember it,” she argued, her mind ablaze with the fear of understanding that something terrible had happened to her, but no evidence of how or when or why.
“I mean,” she continued, her mind feverish with possibility, “I do not even know if my fall was an accident or not. Was it? Can you look me in the eyes and tell me it was? Can you convince me of that, at least?”
She had no reason to believe that it was anything but an accident, aside from the fact that no one seemed to be able to tell her the truth of it.
The maids had not known. Her supposed husband claimed not to know.
She could not remember. Yet, something felt so intensely… wrong about the entire thing.
Instead of saying something to ease her racing mind, Henry simply turned, an almost appalled look upon his face, and muttered, “I will not entertain this. Goodnight, Thalia.”
A moment later, he was gone, out of the door, leaving with the speed and silence of someone who definitely had something to hide.