Chapter 30
E mily woke up on the fifth morning with the same grief sitting on her chest that had driven her to bed the night before. For one foolish second, she lay still and waited for the day to feel different.
It did not.
The room was warm, and the curtains had been drawn a little to let in the morning light. Somewhere further down the corridor, she could hear a maid move with a tray.
All of it was ordinary, but none of it touched the ache in her.
She turned her face into the pillow and wished for the sky to darken again so she could wallow a little more in her hopelessness. However, fate was not in the mood for that, as a knock came right as the last word of that wish escaped her mind.
Before she could answer, Frances’s voice drifted through the door. “We are not letting you hide in bed all day, darling. Not today.”
Emily closed her eyes.
Oh, dear Lord.
The door opened, and Frances entered with a tray. Sybella followed behind her, already dressed and carrying the look of a woman who had no intention of indulging nonsense for long.
“I brought breakfast,” Frances announced. “And flowers. I know flowers cannot mend a heart, but they do improve a table.”
Emily pushed herself upright, as refusing would have taken more strength than she had. “You are both relentless.”
“That is because you are loved, Emily. Never take it for granted,” Frances said.
Sybella set the flowers by the window and looked at her sister properly. “You look rather pale.”
Emily nodded. “Thank you, Sister. Always trust you not to mix your words.”
Sybella shrugged. “It was not an insult.”
“It was definitely an insult.”
Sybella’s mouth shifted just enough to count as sympathy. “Yes, but an affectionate one.”
Frances placed the tray on Emily’s lap. “Eat something.”
Emily looked down at the toast and tea as though they belonged to another woman’s life. “I am not hungry.”
“You have said that for two days,” Frances huffed. “It is getting tiresome.”
“Mama…”
Frances sat on the edge of the bed and brushed Emily’s hair back from her face. “I know,” she said more softly. “But I still mean to fight you on it.”
Emily took the cup. It was much easier than resisting anyway. She brought it to her lips and drank a little.
By the time Frances got her as far as the morning room, the whole effort felt absurdly large.
She had put on a day dress and had allowed Sybella to button the back when her own fingers fumbled.
Then, she had crossed the corridor and the stairs and the last few yards into the little room overlooking the garden, as though each piece of distance required its own separate agreement.
Frances kept talking, too brightly at first. “The weather is decent, and the roses have finally stopped embarrassing themselves. We could sit by the window. Or walk later. Or both. I refuse to have all three of us go stale indoors.”
Emily sat, thanks to the way she was guided into it, then folded her hands in her lap and looked out at the lawn. Sybella took the chair opposite and said nothing for a while. That helped more than Frances’s brightness did.
Frances poured tea again. “Time is ugly in the beginning. I know it feels impossible now, but things do settle. They do. One day, you will wake up and breathe without noticing the effort of it.”
Emily stared at the cup her mother had placed before her.
“And sometimes,” Frances continued, still too hopeful, “what feels like an ending becomes the beginning of something better.”
That seemed to strike the last chord in Emily. She set the cup down before she spilled it.
“It is not that sort of hurt,” she said.
The room suddenly fell quiet.
Frances leaned back a little. “Then tell me what sort it is.”
Emily looked from her mother to her sister and knew with exhausted clarity that she could not go on nodding through brave little sayings as if this were some ordinary disappointment. She was too tired.
“It is not something I can outwait,” she explained. “That is what I am trying to tell you.”
Sybella’s expression flickered.
Frances continued to speak, more carefully now. “Is it because you love him?”
Emily laughed once, but there was no humor in it. “Because everything reminds me of him.”
No one interrupted.
She looked back toward the garden. “It is the stupidest things. A chair. A cup. A child asking a question in exactly the wrong tone. The silence in a room.” Her throat tightened.
“I cannot even look at a path without remembering that he once told me about some place near the edge of his estate where he went when he wanted to get away from the world. His resting spot, he called it.”
The words were out before she thought about them.
Sybella cocked her head. “He told you that?”
Emily realized too late what she had admitted.
“It was only talk,” she said.
“Well, men do not mention the places where they go to be alone unless they mean something by it,” Sybella pointed out.
Frances looked at Emily with a tenderness that made it harder to sit in the room.
Emily pressed on anyway. There was no point in stopping now, or she might start crying again.
“It is not just him,” she sighed. “That is what I have been trying to explain and failing to explain. It is Harriet. Theodore. Gilbert scratching at a door. Breakfast in that ridiculous family sitting room. The sound of them in the hallway. The way the house was beginning to feel…” She stopped.
“Like home,” Frances finished gently.
Emily nodded once, and at that moment, a knock sounded at the door.
Frances called, “Come in.”
A maid stepped in holding a small, folded paper and something soft in her other hand. “For Her Grace,” she announced.
Emily froze before the girl had even crossed the threshold.
The maid held out the note, and when Emily took it, she immediately recognized Theodore’s slightly crooked handwriting at once.
Harriet wants to know whether you are cross with her still. Gilbert refuses to sleep in his basket. I told her neither fact can be her fault. Please answer if you can.
Emily read it once and then again because the words blurred on the first attempt. The maid still held out the second item—a ribbon. One of Harriet’s. Pale yellow and badly tied, as if sent in a hurry.
“The courier said the little girl said you would recognize it,” the maid elaborated.
Emily took it and closed her fingers around it. “Thank you.”
When the maid had gone, the room remained very still. The silence felt almost crippling, and it wasn’t until Frances spoke that she was able to take a breath.
“Oh, darling.”
Emily shook her head sharply because if her mother pitied her too much, she would not be able to keep hold of herself.
“This is what I mean,” she mumbled. “It is not pride. It is not only him. It is all of it.” She looked down at the ribbon in her hand. “I was beginning to belong there.”
Sybella got up and came to stand behind her chair. Her hands rested lightly on Emily’s shoulders. “I know,” she soothed.
Emily swallowed.
For a while, they stayed that way. Frances by the window, quieter now. Sybella at her back, steady and unsentimental. The garden outside unchanged. The note and ribbon on her lap proof of something she had been trying not to express too much.
At last, Frances exhaled. “What do you need today?”
Emily looked down at Harriet’s ribbon, then out at the bright morning she had no wish to meet. Then, she proceeded to give the first most honest answer she could.
“I do not know,” she sighed.
The confession stayed in Adam’s coat all morning like a hot weight he could not put down and could not stop touching.
He crossed Huxley Manor with the letter still tucked in his pocket and saw the house in broken pieces, not because anything in it had changed its place, but because he had.
The study was the first place he needed to look. The broken mirror had been cleared, and the spilled ink had been scrubbed. Everything in the room had been brought to order. Adam noticed that as he remained standing in the doorway and thought of Emily there, her face bright with hope.
He turned away from the room before memory could pin him in it.
The hallway outside was worse. She had walked there.
Laughed there with Harriet. Moved through those spaces with that quick warmth that made the servants smile and the children run faster to meet her.
He had watched her in these very hallways, wanting her, resisting her, convincing himself that resistance was a virtue when all it had really been was fear all along.
A footman nearly ran into him with a tray. “Beg pardon, Your Grace.”
Adam stepped aside. “What is that?”
“Tea for the morning room, Your Grace.” The footman glanced down at the second cup on the tray and corrected himself too late. “Tea for Lady Harriet, Your Grace.”
Adam looked at the second cup anyway. Light, with honey. Emily had taken it that way every morning she sat with the children.
The footman followed his gaze and stood still as if that might help him disappear.
“Go on,” Adam ordered.
The footman bowed and scurried away.
It was a small thing. Two cups on a tray. One habit formed in days instead of years. Yet it struck him harder than the opera had.
Emily had not stayed at Huxley Manor for long, not really. She had not needed long. She had entered the house and begun altering it simply by living in it.
He walked to the morning room anyway and found it empty except for Gilbert, who sat in front of the fireplace with his head lifted toward the door.
The dog saw him and dropped his ears.
“Disappointed?” Adam asked.
Gilbert gave a small whine and looked back toward Emily’s chair.
Adam stood very still, and soon, Mrs. Fenwick appeared in the doorway carrying folded napkins. She saw him, then Gilbert, and hesitated.
“Has he been doing that long?” he asked.
“Since breakfast, Your Grace.”
Adam looked at the dog again.
“He sat there yesterday as well,” Mrs. Fenwick added. “Lady Harriet tried giving him bacon, but the poor thing would not move.”
Gilbert thumped his tail once and then fixed his stare on the empty chair again.
Mrs. Fenwick spoke more carefully. “Shall I have the flowers removed from the mantelpiece, Your Grace? Her Grace liked them changed every morning. There seemed little point in that today.”
Adam heard the title and the preference and the quiet fact inside both.
“Leave them,” he ordered.
Mrs. Fenwick nodded and withdrew.
Adam crossed the room and touched the back of the chair.
It was ridiculous to be undone by furniture, yet the room held too much evidence of her .
The cup that had been hers. The chair. The dog.
For the love of God, Harriet’s ribbon was still tucked into the corner of the cushion.
He could even see Theodore’s book abandoned on the side table because Emily had once asked him about it and he had come back with two more.
The letter in his pocket no longer felt like a revelation. It started to feel like an accusation. He had spent years living under those final words without ever seeing the confession that explained them. He had thought the letter would free him, and it had. It had removed his excuse.
He was not his father.
He could see it clearly now. Emily in gold silk. Emily sad. Other men watching her. His own panic rising under the simple fact that she might soon be free of him and that every admiring glance would then belong to a world he had no right to fight.
Then the house party. The ballroom. Whitechapel. Harriet’s laughter. Theodore’s trust. The children in the morning room. Her face when she had looked at him as if happiness were right there, plain and possible, if only he would stop fighting it.
“I could make you happy if you let me. And you could make me happy too.”
Adam sat down because his knees suddenly felt weak.
She had not asked for fantasy or for him to become some bright, fearless hero out of a circulating library. She had asked for courage, that was all. The simple courage to take the love already being offered and answer it honestly.
And he, foolish as he was, had answered with fear.
Gilbert jumped lightly onto the chair opposite and stared at him with the grave, accusatory patience of a creature who seemed to judge him for everything.
“Yes,” Adam uttered. “I know.”
The dog tilted his head, and Adam let out a short breath that might have become a laugh in another life.
“I know,” he said again.
But knowing it did not bring her back. It wouldn’t. Not unless he did something about it.
The letter had freed him, but he still needed to do the work.
He rose from the chair and went to the window. Everything in Huxley seemed to stand before him and say the same thing in a different form.
She had been here. She had changed this place, and she had changed him. If he stood still now and let her go because he had only just learned a truth he should have acted on sooner, then he deserved every lonely year that followed.
The question was no longer whether he deserved Emily. That question was useless. The real question was now something entirely different.
Was he stupid enough to lose her now that he knew the truth?
He looked down at the folded letter in his hand, then slid it back into his coat pocket.
“No,” he said aloud.
No, he wasn’t.