Chapter 15
Agnes
There was ink all over Agnes’s hands. All over her sleeves, too. She had tried – really – not to waste parchment. But she had failed.
It was done, at least, as well as she could manage. One thing she was thankful for: it would take several days for the letters to reach her family, and even longer for them to travel south if they accepted her invitation.
She knocked at the door of the solar. From within, she could hear scuffling – a muffled curse. And then at last, a voice.
‘Enter.’
She opened the door. She wasn’t at all surprised to see that Oliver was with Ash, wearing a stiff smile. They both looked red-faced. She tried not to think too much on what she had just interrupted.
‘I finished the letters,’ she said, placing them on the table.
‘One for my parents, and one for Muriel – my sister. The one for Muriel is a little more …’ she tapped her fingers together thoughtfully ‘… enthusiastic. My parents do not need to be told more details than is necessary, but she will be won over by exuberance. I have not sealed them yet, so you may read them.’
Ash hesitated. ‘What?’
‘Do you wish to read them? They are about you, after all. I do not want to say anything to them that you do not agree with.’
Ash looked unsure but took the letters anyway as Agnes sat at the desk, reaching for candle, wax and seal.
He read the one for her parents first – a serious affair, detailing the journey, the attack, Ash’s character, and the merits of Dunlyn Castle – before handing it back and beginning the one for Muriel.
His eyebrows rose as he did, cheeks going red.
There was a laugh from behind him. Agnes realised that Oliver had been reading the second missive over his shoulder.
‘It’s good.’ He grinned. ‘I like it. Although you missed a few things.’
‘Oh?’ Agnes paused, heating a stub of wax over the candle beside her.
‘You should have noted his skilled prowess as a lover.’
Wax dripped with a noisy hiss onto the candle, extinguishing it.
‘Oliver!’ Ash snapped.
‘Ashwy!’ he retorted.
‘You are terrible. That will win me no favours whatsoever.’
‘What? Agnes is a widow. You are a widow, are you not?’
Agnes attempted to seal the letter for the second time. ‘Yes.’
‘Then there we are. It is not as if your sister is expecting you to be a pure and untouched maiden. Perhaps she will be even more keen for you to marry if you have already lain together.’
Agnes removed the seal from the wax with carefully constrained force, then snatched the second letter back and sealed that, too.
‘Ash is right,’ she said, standing with the letters gripped in one hand.
‘Yes?’
‘You are terrible.’ She ignored Oliver’s little noise of complaint and turned to Ash. ‘How did you fare in Skeldale? Did you speak to the priest?’
‘I did,’ Ash said. ‘He was more than happy to see the marriage through quickly for an act of charity from the keep’s funds.’
Agnes rolled her eyes. ‘Of course he was,’ she said. ‘At least that is done, now. With luck we will be wed before these letters even reach my family.’
‘One moment.’ Ash sat in the chair she had vacated, pulling a ream of parchment towards himself and picking up the quill. ‘I ought to write to Lily, too. I will admit that her interest in weddings is low – in fact, she does not give a damn – but I will inform her that we have agreed to a match.’
Olly frowned. ‘Where is Lily?’ he said. ‘You spoke of her so often when we were young, I expected her to be here filling this keep with children. Or did your father marry her off?’
Ash laughed. ‘Lily? Never. He tried, but that ended exceedingly poorly. She lives in Oxfordshire, now. She runs a brewery with Penn’s sister.
’ Olly looked just as baffled as Agnes had when she had been told the tale.
‘I really will explain that to you both,’ Ash said.
‘But perhaps not when someone is trying to have me killed.’
Ash scribbled out his letter, focusing intently, before blotting it and sealing it as Agnes had.
In the stables, one of Agnes’s servants was milling around with the stableboys and offered at once to deliver the notes across the border, apparently keen to be of use in the new keep.
Another rider took the note to Oxfordshire, agreeing to pass on a message for Oliver as well.
When it was done, they retired back to the side chamber where Ash and Agnes had been shuffled after they had first arrived at Dunlyn.
‘Do you think your family will come?’ Ash asked Agnes, as soon as the door was shut.
‘I presume so,’ Agnes said.
‘Then I will need to prepare the keep for guests.’ Ash sighed. He leaned against the wall beside the crackling fire with a groan. ‘I detest entertaining. There is always so much to do, and so many people to consider.’ He grimaced. ‘And now it feels as if my life may depend on it.’
‘Perhaps it does,’ Oliver said, cheekily grinning up at Ash from where he’d slung himself haphazardly in a chair.
Ash didn’t even look at him. ‘Shut your mouth.’
Agnes watched them bicker. There was no malice there, no intent to wound.
They were clearly returning to old patterns, ones that she could never be part of.
It was remarkable that they had done so with such speed.
It betrayed a long past together: a bond that time and distance and loss had not managed to sever.
There was something like grief in her chest. She had thought … she had hoped—
Or she had merely imagined.
She liked Ash – truly. He was a bastard, in his own words, but she was fond of him. His rough edges hid a soft interior, and it was clear he valued loyalty and kindness. In that alone he was all she could have hoped for in a husband: but he was handsome, too, well-built, well-edged.
But it was not to be. She had been happy with a simple arrangement when they had first met, but the longer she knew him, the less simple it all felt. She had not realised she wanted more until it was no longer available to her.
Ash clearly adored Oliver, and Oliver him.
She could be happy for them, at least. She would be far, far happier in Dunlyn Castle with Ash in a marriage in name alone than she could ever have been in Scotland with Francis.
It would be a true happiness, too, not just grabbing at the scraps she could snatch when her husband wasn’t watching.
She would not let her unwanted feelings ruin that. She liked Ash. She did not want to see his happiness destroyed.
Her feelings towards Ash – whatever they were – would fade with time.
It was that he had been kind to her, that he had seen her true self and not rejected her.
That he had encouraged her. In time, she would realise that all she felt was camaraderie – friendship between two people with deep-buried secrets – and the feelings would pass.
Yet as she watched as Ash and Oliver laugh at one another’s jokes, that pain bloomed once again in her chest.