Chapter 14
The news travelled faster than orders. By the time Edward had given instructions for the carriage to be readied, sent word to Mrs. Hargrave to have a trunk packed for Isla, and spoken of which papers would follow him to London, his mother knew.
Of course she knew. Wexford Hall itself seemed to report to her.
She waited for him in the great hall, black silk a sharp stroke against the pale stone, jet beads catching the late-afternoon light. The sound of the servants preparing for departure echoed behind them.
“You are leaving,” Lady Eleanor said. She did not make it a question.
“For London,” Edward replied. “Portman Square.”
“At your wife’s insistence.”
“At my decision,” he corrected.
Her nostrils flared. “Strathmore’s roof burns in Perthshire and suddenly my son forgets he has obligations in Hampshire.”
“The estate will not collapse in my absence,” he said. “I have left instructions.”
“You have tenants to see to. Accounts to balance. A hundred matters that cannot be addressed from a carriage.” Her eyes sharpened. “And yet you throw your plans aside to go chasing after your wife’s family dramas.”
“Her family’s seat has burned,” he said. “That is more than drama.”
“Old houses burn.” The words came too quickly, too coolly. “People rebuild. Or they do not. Either way, it is not your concern.”
“It is my concern,” he said, “while my signature stands on the marriage register.”
“You take this arrangement too seriously,” the Dowager said. “We both know what it is. An expedient. A patch. You do not owe that girl your life.”
“I owe her what honor requires,” Edward said. “And more than that, I owe myself. I do not leave a woman to face this alone.”
His mother’s mouth thinned. “You would not have said that last year.”
Perhaps not. But last year I had not found a wild hellion in my stables. I had not been required to carry her to safety.
“Last year I had not carried her through a ballroom,” he said. “Last week I vowed before God to share her burdens.” He held her gaze level. “I will not break my word because the smoke rises from a house farther north than you prefer to look.”
Color touched her cheekbones. “You let sentiment rule you. Again. It will ruin you. It ruined your father.”
“My father had no sentiment,” Edward shot back, harsher than he intended.”
“He did not,” the Dowager agreed, “I was speaking of you. Indulging your emotions and running away to sea …”
Edward held up a hand. He glared at his mother.
“Do not speak it. Do not say what I think you are about to say.”
Behind them the rustle of skirts. Isla was coming down the stair with Mrs. Hargrave in tow and Edith Godwin staggering along behind under the weight of a hatbox.
Isla wore a dark travelling cloak over a simple gown, no ornament beyond the tightness at the corners of her mouth.
She paused when she saw the two of them, reading the air with that quick accuracy he had come to recognize.
“Are we ready?” she asked.
“Almost,” Edward said.
Lady Eleanor’s gaze slid to Isla and grew colder. “My son is abandoning his duties to indulge your distress, Lady Isla. You have a talent for turning men away from their proper roads.”
Isla’s hand tightened on the balustrade. “Your son chooses his own road. He is not a horse to be led by a bit.”
“On the contrary,” the Dowager murmured. “He has always been too easily led. First by ships. Now by you.”
“That is enough!” Edward said, the old word of command coming back without effort.
He stepped slightly closer to Isla, not touching, but present, in a way his mother could not mistake.
“We go to London. You have my itinerary. Giles will consult you on any pressing matters. Wexford will not fall down in three days.”
“You underestimate what can be lost in three days,” Lady Eleanor said. “I have not that luxury.”
He saw, in that moment, not the formidable Dowager but a young woman watching soldiers ride out and coffins come back. For a heartbeat he almost softened. Then she looked at Isla again and the shutters slammed down.
“You are leaving your home vulnerable,” she said. “For strangers.”
“For my wife,” he said deliberately, in Isla’s hearing. “And her family. Which, by law and vows, are now mine.”
Lady Eleanor’s expression did not change, but something in her went rigid. “Very well. Run to them. When they ask for your purse to rebuild the ashes, remember this conversation.”
He inclined his head as if she had blessed them. “Good day, Mother.”
He offered his arm to Isla. She hesitated only a fraction before taking it. Together they crossed the hall to the waiting carriage. Behind them, he did not have to look to know his mother’s gaze followed like a shadow.
***
He had expected the road to knock his thoughts into a dull rhythm. Instead, every turn of the wheels seemed to grind questions deeper. Isla sat opposite him, hands folded tightly in her lap, looking out the window with the fixed attention of someone trying to outrun imagination.
Her profile was all bones and resolve. He wanted to say something that would ease the tension in her shoulders and could not think what would do it without breaking too many of his own rules.
“I overheard. I wasn’t eavesdropping but I could hear,” Isla said.
“What?” Edward asked.
“About your father,” Isla replied.
Edward wanted to be impenetrable. To exist behind high walls that Isla could not breach. He betrayed himself by looking at her. She was looking back at him. For a moment her eyes were the world. She bit her lower lip, drawing his attention there. His mouth was suddenly dry.
How can she not hear my heartbeat. It thunders!
“What about my father?” Edward asked.
“I am not prying,” Isla said, “I merely wish to know you better. To … be friends with you.”
Edward nodded, telling himself that friends would be the smoothest course. He tried to ignore the flash of disappointment that he had felt at the pronunciation of the word, friend. His mother’s last words hung in the confined air. When they ask for your purse …
Is this the overture? A burning house in Perthshire, a distressed sister in Hampshire, a brother in London whose finances already hung by threads.
“Life would certainly be tolerable if we were friends,” Edward admitted, keeping his words short to not betray himself further.
“We are thrust together. And we have much in common. I see no reason we cannot live together in friendship,” Isla said.
What comes next? A request for funds to rebuild? A plea for a house in Hampshire to tide them over?
He knew too well how such things were managed. Marriages were made as currency. Alliances shored up crumbling walls. Men went to rich wives when their own lands failed. Why should the Drummonds be different? And then there was Lord Deverell.
He had told himself then he would not condemn Isla for rumors born of men’s amusement. He had told himself he would seek facts. He had arranged for his solicitor, Latham, to make discrete inquiries. But he could not ignore the pattern which Morlich seemed to suggesting was present.
I will visit Latham. He will tell me what progress has been made.
“You say it with such conviction,” Isla said.
Again, Edward looked at her. Again he found himself pinned by her eyes. Held fast in place. He remembered the kiss.
Are you genuine? Your poetry, your riding. Your lips.
“A book would have helped,” Isla said suddenly, startling him. “I should have thought to bring one. Keats for preference. Or Wordsworth. Anything but another newspaper.”
He felt his face close before he could help it. The mention of verse dragged that library intimacy into the carriage with them.
“You have had little appetite for reading of late,” he heard himself say, and the chill in his tone surprised even him.
Her gaze snapped to him. “I have had little appetite for anything that is not information,” she said. “If I could read a letter from my brother instead of a column of speculation, I would happily leave Keats in his drawer.”
He should have apologized. “You have many drawers to choose from. You seem adept at finding exactly the right … volume … for the moment.”
The implication hung between them, ugly the moment it left his tongue. Color rose in her cheeks It was not the pleased flush he had seen when they quoted lines at each other, but the hot prick of anger.
“If you are suggesting that I chose poems as a way to catch you,” she said slowly, “then you think rather less of me than I thought you did.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Honesty warred with caution; neither won gracefully.
“I am suggesting,” he said at last, “that I have allowed myself to forget what brought me to your family in the first place.”
“An accident,” she said. “A fall. A choice to be decent.”
“And your brother’s need,” he said. “Which I am now riding toward with an open carriage and an open door.”
“And you resent it,” she said.
He did not deny it quickly enough.
She turned her face back to the window, jaw tight. “Next time I will break my head in private. It seems it would have been less trouble to everyone.”
“That is not what I meant.”
“It is what you said.”
The wheels clattered on. The countryside slipped by hedges, fields, the occasional milestone.
Inside the carriage, the silence hardened to something brittle.
When he glanced at her again, her mouth was pressed flat, her eyes bright with the shine that comes before tears.
She blinked them back angrily, refusing to let them fall. He looked away first.
***
London received them in its usual fashion.
There was noise, smell, and a film of soot that seemed to settle on the skin as soon as one entered the first ring of streets.
By the time the carriage turned into Portman Square, lamps had begun to be lit; a thin mist clung to the air like breath held too long.