Chapter 21
Ruby did not come down to supper.
Archer had watched her enter Pomeroy House just behind him. He’d waited for her to look his way, but she hadn’t. Her head had been bent with Alice’s, and she had not acknowledged the pack of dogs that greeted her, only pressed her palm against her breastbone and hurried up the stairs.
He’d watched her ascend until even her trim little boots were out of sight and told himself to be patient, to wait for her, to stop being such an outrageous fool.
He wanted to hold fast to her ribbons and keep her beside him. He wanted to smile at her and have her smile back, a thousand times, every time.
He did not pretend, even for a heartbeat, that he was not watching her place at the table, waiting for her to come.
But she didn’t. They’d all taken to eating in the kitchen, even the princess, who was as fond of Wall’s cooking as she was disdainful of the sailors’ table manners. Archer’s eyes lingered on the braided straw chair, left empty for Ruby, plain and silent.
He didn’t make it to Wall’s dessert course. He pushed back from the table with an abrupt scrape and strode for the door.
Something was wrong. He knew it was.
She wasn’t anywhere on the ground floor: not the blue parlor or the library or the chamber for the hounds. She wasn’t in the tower—despite the 197 steps he climbed to search for her, and then another 197 back down to keep looking. She wasn’t in her own chamber. Nor Archer’s.
He found her, finally, in a small, disused room at the back of the house—the conservatory, he supposed, though little was kept and tended inside its glass-and-iron walls. Before Ruby had come, it had been dusty and vacant, the windows thick with salt spray.
She sat on a settee with her knees drawn up, her chin in her hand and her eyes fixed upon the glass, looking out at the sea.
“Ruby.”
She looked up. Her face was drawn, the blue in her eyes drowned out by gray. “Malcolm.”
“I’ve been looking for you.” It was absurd, probably, the way he’d chased her down. Transparent. He couldn’t bring himself to care.
“Oh.” She glanced down at the settee, a thick flutter of curly lashes, and then back up to meet his gaze. “Have I missed supper? I . . . was not attending to the time.”
It was growing dark; the sky was a thousand shades of purple in the dusk. She had to have known she’d missed the evening meal.
“What’s the matter?”
She shook her head. Her mouth made a tight line, holding something in. “Nothing. I’ve—” Her voice cracked, and her lips clamped down harder, her eyes going back to the sea.
He was at her side before he could stop himself, and if she did not want this—didn’t want his arms and his mouth and his shameless abandon—then she could bloody well order him to stop.
“Tell me,” he said and put his arms around her, resting his palm on her knee.
She took a quick breath and did not look at him. “I’ve had a letter from my father. An answer to mine.”
Archer’s heart pitched. Dropped.
He hadn’t—thought it would come so soon. That was all. This parting. His arms tightened around her: stupid, foolish, as though he might keep her. As though, if he held on hard enough, he could tear her out of the fabric of her world.
He made himself ask. “He has a plan then? For the princess?”
“He does not believe me.”
He couldn’t parse her words, although they’d come out steady. As though she’d said them again and again in her mind.
“What?” he demanded
Her breath hitched, her chest rising in a tight jerk beneath his hands.
“Of all the things I imagined he might say, I must admit that this did not suggest itself. He says—he says I am to go back to Bridestowe before I make a spectacle of myself, and if I do not go, he will have me sent to our country seat with a chaperone of his choosing. He says that the Princess of Monfalcone is safe at home, that she has no plans to visit England, and that if I spread this wild tale beyond our family, he will be forced to take more drastic measures to ensure the sobriety of my mind.”
Archer felt like he was choking. He did not know what to do with the ire throttling his throat, the clumsy outrage that made his fingers numb. “Ruby,” he said thickly.
She flung up her chin, fast enough to nearly knock his nose with the back of her head. “I’m not going to Bridestowe. I’m not giving up on any of this. On the house, on the princess.”
On you.
He almost heard her say it—or else wished he had.
“I know,” he said. “It’s not in you to give up.”
“It’s only that I—that I—” She flung herself out of the circle of his arms to stand, crossing to the window, her whole body vibrating with tension. “I don’t know. I don’t know how to feel.”
He had some suggestions. Anger. Stupefaction. Scarcely checked and distinctly murderous rage. He could run Hangleton through for the way the man kept on betraying her.
“I was prepared for criticism,” she said.
Her voice shook as she looked out at the ocean.
“Of how I had handled the situation. For some action I had taken or failed to take, for some standard of perfection I did not meet. But this—” She stopped abruptly and turned to look at Archer, blue-gray eyes brilliant, sun on seawater. “He let me down.”
He moved to stand beside her, feeling helpless, afraid to take her hands. “He did.”
“He disappointed me.”
“He was wrong,” Archer murmured. “Over and over. He’s been wrong about you.”
“I know,” she said, and now the tears that had threatened her voice spilled through her lashes and glittered like gemstones on her cheeks.
“I know that he does not value me. That he does not appreciate what I’ve done for our family.
But I thought—” She reached up and swiped at her face, and the naked anguish in her eyes cut Archer off at the knees.
“I always believed that if I truly needed him, he would be there.”
He set his hands to her shoulders, caressing the seam of her dress with his thumbs. “Ruby.”
“Even now—” She broke off and looked back at the window.
The deepening dusk had turned the glass to a mirror; Archer could see the ghost silhouettes of their bodies, standing close enough to form a single whole.
“Even now, I keep thinking it must be some mistake. That perhaps—if only I write to him again. Explain myself better. Perhaps then I can make him—”
“Stop.” He gripped her shoulders harder. Too hard. He would leave bruises there to match the ones he’d put on her throat, on her belly. “Stop it, Ruby.”
She looked back at him, all damp, wounded eyes. “Is it so ridiculous? To think that I could somehow make him change?”
“You don’t have to change his mind,” Archer said. “You don’t need him.”
And even as he said the words, he meant them another way, a dozen different ways.
Let him go; let him roast in the pit of hell; don’t let pleasing him matter to you any longer.
Let me do this for you instead.
Let me.
She lifted her hand to his shirtfront for half a beat, and then she let her palm drop. “I do. This was our plan. Our best hope of securing the princess’s safety.”
He swallowed. It had been swirling in his head for almost a fortnight, this mad, foolish notion. He’d thought of it as he’d pressed his hand to hers in the cove; when he’d held her in the night, his palm fitted to the curve of her lower back.
This didn’t have to end.
“I can do it,” he said. “I have another scheme in mind.”
Her lips parted. Her lashes flickered. “I beg your pardon?”
His throat was tight, his whole body held close with tension. But the words were there, the way they always were, even if it was a struggle to set them free. “I have a ship.”
“You—what?”
“The Delphinium. She’s in the harbor at St. Petroc’s. She’s slow and ancient, and I don’t advertise that she’s mine. But we could do it—Wall and Eugénie and Gerry and Lamentation. And me.”
He had pictured it all, these last weeks. Cast it aside, then considered it again, refining, imagining. Feeling afraid.
“There’s a fellow I can talk to—my old warrant officer from the Swallow. A captain now, with his own ship in the Mediterranean. I’d trust him with my life. If we can smuggle the princess to Genoa, there are people who could help us get her the rest of the way home.”
He felt torn in two as he spoke the words. Even as he wanted to press the vision into her skin—this was how they could protect the princess, this was the path forward, they did not require her father’s intervention—he also wanted to claw the words right out of the air.
He let me down, she had said, and she’d meant the words for her father, but he’d heard them for himself.
He had hurt her already. More than once. He’d kept his secrets and he’d lied to her, just as he was lying to his crew. If he promised her this—this gamble, this venture hazarded—and then failed, he did not know if he could stand it.
“You would do that?” she said. “Risk your ship? Your crew?”
His chest ached as he gazed down at her. She looked delicate, her skin almost translucent in the pale illumination of moonlight and a single candle. But she was not fragile. She was guts and iron; stubborn will and a mortar knife taken to a cracked and forgotten wall.
It was not the risk to his ship he feared. He loved the Delphinium, but it was only wood and canvas, wax and salt water and his knuckles nicked to the bone.
And the risk to his crew—God, the danger to them was no greater than it had always been, ever since they’d chosen to stay by his side.
No. The true risk—what he feared most of all—was here. Was in this room, in Ruby’s eyes: that he would try to be more than what he was, more than a scoundrel and a smuggler and a liar. And he would fail.
“I would do it,” he said, “for you.”
Her breath hitched. “I don’t understand.”
“I’d do this for you. To show you that you do not need your father’s assistance or approval. To show you”—that I can be something, that I can be worthy of you—“that it’s possible to carve a new path.”