Chapter 5
Chapter
Five
Eliza had told herself, quite firmly, that she would not think of him again.
And yet, as she knelt among the damp leaves, her skirts tucked up and her cloak pulled close against the chill, she found her thoughts circling back to him once more.
Gabriel Hawthorne had crossed her mind for what must have been more than a dozen times since their encounter only a half hour before.
Perturbed hardly covered it. He had been insufferable — arrogant and accusatory, with a temper she had not expected from a man so otherwise self-contained. And yet beneath his irritation there had been confusion, genuine confusion. It was that which unsettled her even more than his demands.
He had seen her, he insisted. First walking ahead of him, then disappearing, and finally reappearing further back on the path behind him.
She had dismissed the claim in the moment — with good reason, she thought — as nothing more than the arrogance of a man unused to having his perceptions questioned.
And yet, now, with the quiet of the forest pressing in around her and nothing but her own thoughts for company, the certainty she had felt began to fray like tattered silk.
Gabriel Hawthorne was many things — high-handed, prideful, utterly exasperating. But he was not, she suspected, prone to flights of fancy. Whatever else he was, he did not seem the sort to imagine things that were not there.
“Perhaps,” she murmured to herself as she brushed away a layer of damp earth and exposed the rough, knobby crown of a truffle, “he did see someone.”
The thought slipped into her mind unbidden and refused to leave.
If it had not been her — and she knew with absolute certainty that it had not — then who? Who would wander the woods at such an hour, and for what purpose? And stranger still, who would deliberately seek to mislead the Earl into thinking it was her?
There was no reason for such a thing. No sensible purpose for such a ruse. Unless, as he’d suspected of her, it was some sort of mischief. The thought made her pause. Made her simply stop her digging and consider. And it was in that moment that she registered the silence.
She shifted on her knees and glanced over her shoulder.
The forest was still — too still. The usual morning chorus of birdsong was gone, and even the breeze had died, leaving the air heavy and unmoving.
She told herself it was nothing, just nerves, but the sensation crept over her all the same — a slow, cold prickle at the base of her neck.
Then the silence was broken. Shattered by a single sound.
A sharp crack — the unmistakable snap of a twig underfoot — somewhere behind her.
Eliza froze, her heart lurching into a faster rhythm. She turned slowly, scanning the trees. Mist hung low between the trunks, softening every line and shadow, but nothing moved. No figure stepped forward. No animal darted from the underbrush. The clearing appeared exactly as it had a moment ago.
Exactly… and yet not.
Frowning, she rose from her crouch and walked a few paces toward the edge of the clearing.
Her eyes caught on a patch of undergrowth to her right — a dense tangle of blackberry and bramble that had been intact when she’d arrived.
Now the branches were broken and bent, leaves torn free and scattered across the damp ground.
Something — or someone — had passed through here. Recently.
Her mouth went dry.
The sensible part of her mind whispered that it could have been a deer.
Or a fox. The forest was full of life, after all.
But another part — some long buried instinct for survival— insisted otherwise.
Whatever or whomever had been there had not simple been a creature foraging for berries or a badger rooting through the soil.
Someone had been watching her. The certainty of that realization was as irrefutable for her as if the watcher had stepped forward and confessed.
A pulse of unease rolled through her, deeper than anything she had ever known before. She had walked these woods her entire life, alone and unbothered. They were as much a part of her as her own heartbeat. Never — never — had she felt unsafe within them. Until now.
And what had changed?
Only him.
Only the new Earl of Blackburn and his unsettling presence, his arrogant questions, his accusations. Only Gabriel Hawthorne.
Her fingers tightened around the handle of her basket as a soft breeze sighed through the clearing, rattling nearly bare branches overhead and sending leaves skittering across the forrest floor.
She was no coward, but neither was she a fool.
Whatever had unsettled the forest, whatever unseen eyes might be watching from the mist, she would not linger long enough to find out.
Elixa tucked the truffle into her pouch and gathered the few herbs she had already collected. There were still others she had planned to seek — roots and fungi that would not keep long without harvesting — but the task would wait for another day.
Self-preservation, her grandmother always said, was wisdom and not weakness.
With measured steps, Eliza turned and began her walk back toward the cottage.
The path behind her remained silent, but the sensation of being followed clung to her like the damp morning mist. It trailed her through the trees and lingered at her back long after the cottage roof came into view, an unspoken question dogging each step.
So much so that her steps became more hurried.
So much so that as she cleared the small fence surrounding the cottage, she was all but running.
When she was inside, she closed the door firmly behind her, sliding the bolt into place.
Her grandmother was in the back, hanging clothes to dry.
Taking a moment to herself, Eliza drew in deep, calming breaths as she tried to make sense of it all.
His presence. The unseen watcher. Her instinctive fear.
It was all very strange, very new and out of character for both her and her surroundings.
Had someone truly been there? Or was this, too, part of the chaos Gabriel Hawthorne had brought into her well-ordered life?