6. CHAPTER 6
T he rector's office smelled of ink and old paper and the beeswax Mrs. Carteret used on every wooden surface she could reach. Vivienne sat in the chair by the desk with her hands folded in her lap, holding herself still while her mind raced.
Paul's ring was on her finger. Thin gold, too large, warm from her skin. It had been there less than two hours, and already it felt like it belonged to someone else's hand.
Paul was pacing. The office was too small, and his agitation made it seem smaller.
His cravat was loose, his hair disordered where he had dragged his fingers through it.
She had never seen him so undone. In seven years of friendship, of medical consultations and shared suppers, Paul Harrison had been unflappably kind.
Not today.
"You can't be seriously considering going with him." Not a question. An accusation.
The rector sat behind his desk, hands steepled, watching them both. He had not yet spoken, but his demeanor was calm. Thank goodness. She needed someone in this room who was thinking clearly, because she was not.
"How can I not?" she said. "If what he says is true — and Paul, he had a wedding photograph with my face in it. He knew about the birthmark. He—"
"The birthmark proves nothing." Paul turned from the window. "I knew about it. Any physician who treated you could have known. He might have bribed a doctor or a maid."
"To what end? He's a duke."
"So he claims."
"He had documents. A photograph. He knew my name — my real name."
"Which he could have obtained from any number of sources if he were running a confidence scheme.
" Paul stopped pacing and faced her, and his expression was not angry but pleading.
"Vivienne. Think. A stranger walks into a church, makes an extraordinary claim, produces a photograph and knowledge of a mark on your body, and within two hours, you are prepared to sail to England with him. Does that not strike you as reckless?"
She opened her mouth to argue. Closed it.
He was not wrong. It was reckless. Everything about this morning defied reason.
And yet reason was not what had made her pulse settle when the duke said her name.
Something deeper had stirred when she looked at his face.
Not recognition. But the absence of the wrongness she had felt standing at the altar with Paul.
She twisted the ring on her finger. Around and around.
"If he is not who he claims," she said, "it would be easy to disprove. We go to England, we make inquiries, and if his story collapses, I come home."
"And if it doesn't collapse? If he is your husband?" Paul's voice dropped. "Then you are in his domain, under his control, in a country where you know no one, with no allies and no recourse."
"She would have us," the rector said.
Paul did not look at him. His eyes were fixed on Vivienne, and there was something in them she had not seen before — or had not allowed herself to see. A fierceness that went beyond friendship. Beyond the concern of a doctor for his patient.
Oh. Oh no.
She looked away. She had accepted his proposal because it seemed sensible and she was tired of being afraid.
Because he was kind, and he had offered her the one thing she craved more than memory: belonging.
He had framed it as a practical arrangement.
Mutual affection. Companionship. Stability.
She had believed him because she needed to believe him.
But the way he was looking at her now suggested his feelings had never been as tidy as his proposal.
"What about your nightmares?" Paul said, and the shift in his voice — lower, more deliberate — made her go cold. "Could he be the man who features in them?"
Dark stone corridors. Running. The echo of her own breathing, magnified by the close walls. Hands seizing her from behind, the smell of damp and iron and something sweet she could never identify. A faceless figure standing too close, saying words she could never quite hear—
She gripped the arm of the chair.
"We don't know those dreams are memories," she said. Her voice came out thinner than she had intended.
"We don't know they aren't."
"Paul." The rector's tone carried a warning.
But Paul pressed on, pacing again, his hands clasped behind his back — the same way he stood when he was working through a difficult diagnosis.
"If those nightmares are based on real events, and if this man was part of those events, then going with him is walking into the very danger your mind has been trying to protect you from for seven years. "
"Or it's walking toward answers I've been too frightened to seek.
" The words came out harder than she expected.
"I've been hiding on this island since I woke up on this shore.
Too afraid to leave, too afraid to search for my past, too afraid that if I found my family, they wouldn't want me.
And now my past has found me, and you want me to hide again? "
Something crossed Paul's face. A flicker that vanished too fast, which she would have missed if she had not been watching him. Something that looked, for a heartbeat, like guilt.
Then he was running his hand through his hair again, and his expression was only weary.
"I want you to be safe," he said. "That is all I have ever wanted. "
The rector's mother appeared in the doorway with a tea tray balanced on her hip. Margaret Carteret was small and white-haired and moved with the brisk economy of a woman who considered sitting still a character flaw.
"You'll all think better with tea," she announced, setting the tray on the corner of the desk. "And someone ought to eat something. There were sandwiches laid out for the wedding breakfast and they'll go to waste."
The wedding breakfast. A celebration that would never happen. Vivienne's stomach turned.
Margaret poured without waiting for answers, pressing a cup into Vivienne's hands with a look that said, drink it, more clearly than words. The warmth of the porcelain steadied her. She wrapped both hands around it and breathed.
Paul refused his cup. He had stopped pacing and stood by the window, arms crossed, staring out at the churchyard. The afternoon light caught the shadows under his eyes.
"There may be a solution," he said, turning back to the room.
His voice had changed. It was calmer, more measured.
The doctor's voice. The one he used when delivering difficult news.
"We could enter a formal petition for separation.
As her physician, I would testify about her amnesia.
Her condition could be grounds to declare her unfit to resume her marital—"
She gasped. He stopped.
"Unfit." The word tasted like ashes and fear.
She watched him hear it. The color drained from his face. His mouth opened, then closed. His hands dropped to his sides.
"That came out wrong," he said. "Vivienne, I didn't mean—"
She set the teacup down. Her hand shook, and she didn't want him to see it. "You would declare me mentally unfit."
"No. Not like that. It would be a narrow medical opinion, limited to the question of whether a woman who cannot remember her spouse can reasonably be expected to…"
"And once that opinion exists?" She stood. The chair scraped against the stone floor. "Once a doctor has testified before a court that my mind is impaired? What happens then, Paul? You know what happens then. You told me yourself."
She had not meant to raise her voice. Margaret paused with the teapot in midair. The rector leaned back in his chair. Paul stood very still, and the stricken look on his face would have moved her if the fear had not already taken hold.
Because she remembered. She remembered everything he had told her, years ago, about what could happen to a woman deemed mentally unfit.
It had started with an overheard conversation.
Two parishioners after Sunday service, talking the way people do when they assume the subject of their gossip is not present.
"Poor thing," they said with feigned sympathy.
"Two years and still no memory. Someone ought to have her looked at properly.
There are facilities for people like that. It would be a kindness, really."
She had gone to Paul, shaking, and asked him what they meant by facilities.
And he had told her about the asylums. After that, she had become obsessed with the institutions.
Had investigated everything she could about them.
That's how she learned that committing a woman was easy: a husband's signature and a doctor's assessment meant the doors closed behind her.
How rarely those doors opened again. How her condition, her lack of identity and memory, would make her particularly vulnerable.
If she ever found her family and they proved unwelcoming, a single petition could see her locked away for the rest of her life.
He had meant to warn her. To protect her. She understood that. But the knowledge had worked its way deeper with every passing year.
And then there was the engraving.
She had come across it in a weeks-old London newspaper that had found its way to the island — a pen-and-ink illustration accompanying an article about wrongful commitments.
A woman behind iron bars, barefoot, her hair matted, her eyes hollow.
Vivienne could no longer remember the article's words. Only the woman's face. Only the bars.
She had not slept for three nights after .
And now, even here in this safe, familiar room, surrounded by people who cared for her, the mere suggestion was enough to make her feel the walls pressing in.
"I would never have you committed." Paul's voice was rough. "You know I would never do that."
"You just proposed declaring me mentally unfit to a rector and his mother, Paul. Forgive me if the distinction feels thin."
He flinched.