Chapter 29
The carriage ride back to Blackmere House took twenty minutes.
Penelope counted the streets. Memorised the route.
Noted the cracks in the pavement, the exact shade of the sky—pewter, smudged with chimney smoke, threatening rain that had not yet decided to fall.
She did all of this with the focused intensity of a woman using the external world as ballast against the internal one, because the internal one had been cracked open at Caroline’s breakfast table and she was not yet certain she could hold it shut again.
She arrived to find Hyacinth Fairleigh in the entrance hall.
Hyacinth was pacing. Not the restless, theatrical pacing she deployed at balls when she wished to be noticed, but the tight, controlled circuits of a woman trying to outrun her own thoughts.
Her pelisse was damp at the shoulders. Her bonnet hung from one hand by its ribbons, swinging with each turn.
She had clearly been here for some time, because the footman stationed by the door had acquired the glassy expression of a man who had been watching someone walk back and forth for the better part of an hour.
“Oh, thank God.” Hyacinth stopped mid-stride.
Her face was flushed, her hair escaping its pins, her composure so thoroughly shattered that the woman beneath it was visible like bone through broken skin.
“I’ve been here since half past ten. Your housekeeper offered me tea four times.
I have refused four times because if I sit down I will lose my nerve entirely, and I cannot lose my nerve, Penelope, because Sir Edmund Fairfax proposed to me last night and I have to give him an answer by tomorrow and I don’t know what to do. ”
The entrance hall rang with the echo of it. The footman’s glassy expression intensified. Mrs. Alcott, who had materialised in the corridor behind Hyacinth looked to Penelope for instruction.
“The drawing room, please, Mrs. Alcott.” Penelope’s voice emerged steadier than it had any right to be. “And tea. This time she will drink it.”
She took Hyacinth’s arm. Led her down the corridor and through the double doors into the drawing room, where the fire was lit and the curtains were drawn and the chair she had stopped sitting in faced the one she occupied alone every evening.
She guided Hyacinth to the settee and sat beside her, close enough that their shoulders touched, and waited.
Hyacinth’s hands were trembling. She clasped them in her lap, then unclasped them, then pressed them flat against her knees in a gesture so reminiscent of Penelope’s own coping mechanisms that it hurt to watch.
“Tell me,” Penelope said.
“The Carrington musicale. Last night.” Hyacinth’s words came fast, tumbling over each other with the breathless urgency of a confession too long contained.
“He chose the interval—when the room was full, when everyone was watching. Got down on one knee. Produced a ring that could sink a frigate. Gave a speech about our compatible temperaments and our shared values and how our union would be a credit to both families.” Her laugh was a blade, thin and bright and sharp enough to draw blood.
“My mother wept. Lady Carrington wept. Half the women in the room wept. And I stood there with three hundred people staring at me and I felt—I felt—”
She stopped. Her jaw worked. Her fingers twisted in the fabric of her skirt.
“What did you feel?” Penelope asked quietly.
“Nothing.” The word fell like a dropped stone.
“Absolutely nothing. He was on his knee, Penelope. This man—this wealthy, titled, perfectly groomed man with his three thousand acres and his excellent teeth—was offering me everything I have spent two Seasons pursuing. Everything I told myself I wanted. And I stood there and I thought about James Crawford’s handwriting. ”
The tea arrived. Penelope poured. Her hands were steady, because pouring tea was something she could do, something concrete and physical and useful, and useful was the last fortress she had left.
“His handwriting is terrible,” Hyacinth continued, accepting the cup without looking at it.
“He writes as though the pen has done him a personal injury. Every letter looks like it was composed during an earthquake. But he—Penelope, he wrote to me after the trouble with the Whitcombes. A letter about the wild flowers in the meadow near the lake. Because I had mentioned, once, weeks earlier, that I thought they were lovely. One sentence. And he remembered.”
She lifted the tea. Set it down without drinking. Lifted it again.
“Sir Edmund does not remember what I say. He does not ask what I think. He tells me what he thinks, and waits for me to agree, and when I do agree he smiles as though I have performed a small trick successfully. He has never once asked me what sort of home I would want. He describes his home, his plans, his improvements, and assumes I will be grateful to inhabit them.” Her grip on the cup tightened until her knuckles blanched.
“James Crawford asked me what books I read. What music I liked. Whether I preferred mornings or evenings. He asked me what I dreamt about, Penelope. Not my prospects. My dreams. And I could not answer him, because no one has ever thought to ask.”
Penelope’s chest ached. The resonance of it—the echo between Hyacinth’s words and her own buried truth—vibrated through her like a bell struck in an empty church.
“You love him,” she said.
“I love him.” Hyacinth set down the cup with a sound like surrender.
“I love a man who manages another man’s estate.
Who earns his living with ledgers and crop reports.
Who has no title, no fortune, and no earthly reason to interest a woman like me except that he is kind and honest and he makes me laugh, Penelope, he makes me laugh until my ribs ache, and I cannot remember the last time Sir Edmund made me feel anything at all. ”
She turned on the settee, facing Penelope fully. Her red-rimmed gaze held the fierce, terrified clarity of a woman standing at the edge of a cliff and asking permission to jump.
“Am I mad? Tell me honestly. Am I throwing away security and comfort and everything a sensible woman should want because a man with bad handwriting asked me about wild flowers?”
Penelope opened her mouth. Closed it.
Because the answer was tangled up in everything she had been refusing to feel—in empty chairs and cold tea and the phantom weight of a baby who still reached for her in dreams. In a midnight corridor where a man’s fingers had trembled against her cheek.
In a study where she had stood with her hands clasped and her heart hammering and waited—waited—for him to cross the room and say don’t go, and he hadn’t, and she had walked out, and the walking out had been the most correct, sensible, proper thing she had ever done, and it was destroying her.
“No,” she said, and her voice cracked on the word like ice beneath a heel. “You are not mad, Hyacinth. You are brave. You are braver than I—”
She stopped. Her throat closed. She pressed her thumbnail into the pad of her finger—hard, harder, the sting of it a lifeline—but it was not enough.
Nothing was enough. Caroline’s words were still lodged beneath her ribs—wanting something for yourself has always been the one thing you cannot bring yourself to do—and Hyacinth was sitting here, shaking with the courage to choose love over safety, and Penelope had packed a trunk and walked away from both.
“Penelope.” Hyacinth’s hand found hers. Gripped it. “What happened? Between you and Alastair. Tell me.”
“There is nothing to—”
“Stop. Please.” Hyacinth’s voice softened into something raw and open and so unlike her usual arch performance that it broke through the last barricade Penelope had left. “I am sitting here asking you whether I should risk everything for love. You owe me the truth.”
The drawing room was very quiet. Rain had begun to fall—not the gentle English drizzle of the morning but a hard, insistent drumming against the windows, as though the sky had run out of patience. The fire hissed in the grate. The tea cooled in its cups.
“I love him,” Penelope said.
Three words. They left her mouth and hung in the air between them, and the sound of them—spoken aloud, in this room, to another person—made them real in a way that thinking them had not. Her entire body shuddered. Her vision blurred.
“I love him, and I left, and he let me go.” She could not look at Hyacinth.
She looked at their joined hands instead—at her own white knuckles, at the crescent marks she kept pressing into her own skin, at the place where her wedding ring sat on a finger that had grown thinner.
“I stood in his study and I gave him every chance to stop me. I walked to the door so slowly it must have taken a century. And he said—he said this was always the arrangement. He said I was reading too much into things. And I left, because staying would have meant begging, and I could not—” Her breath hitched.
She caught it. Held it. Forced it out. “I could not beg a man to love me. Not even him.”
Hyacinth’s grip on her hand tightened until the bones pressed together.
“He’s a fool,” she said fiercely.
“Perhaps.” Penelope’s laugh was a ragged, wet sound, nothing like laughter at all.
“Or perhaps he simply told the truth. Perhaps it was only ever an arrangement, and I invented the rest because I wanted it so desperately. The nursery, the arguments, the midnight corridor—perhaps it was all proximity and crisis and nothing more.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I am trying very hard to believe it. Believing it is the only way I can—” She gestured at the room, at the perfectly maintained house, at the life she was supposed to be inhabiting. “Function.”
Hyacinth was quiet for a long moment. The rain hammered. The fire shifted, sending a scatter of sparks against the grate.
“Then we are a fine pair,” she said at last, and her voice held the trembling ghost of her old wryness. “You, in love with a man you’re too afraid to fight for. Me, in love with a man I’m too afraid to choose. Between us we have the combined romantic courage of a napkin.”
The sound that escaped Penelope’s lips was closer to a sob than a laugh, but it carried a fragment of something she had not felt since the carriage had carried her away from the estate—something warm, something human, something that reminded her she was not entirely hollowed out.
“Refuse Sir Edmund,” she said. She wiped her face with the heel of her hand and gripped Hyacinth’s fingers with renewed force.
“Whatever I do or fail to do with my own disaster—refuse him. Write to James Crawford. Tell him yes. Tell him you choose him—the bad handwriting and the crop reports and the wild flowers and all of it. Do not spend the rest of your life sitting across from a man who never asks what you dream about.”
Hyacinth’s chin trembled. “My mother will disown me.”
“Your mother will come round. She is dramatic, not heartless.”
“Sir Edmund will be humiliated.”
“Sir Edmund will find another woman with a respectable name and agreeable temperament before the Season ends. He is not in love with you, Hyacinth. He is in love with the idea of you, and there is a universe of difference.”
Hyacinth stared at her. Then she leaned forward and pressed her forehead against Penelope’s shoulder and breathed—one long, shaking breath that carried the sound of a woman letting go of the life she had planned in order to reach for the one she wanted.
“And you?” Hyacinth whispered against her shoulder. “What will you do?”
“I have no idea,” Penelope admitted at last. And she was certain that she could feel her heart break.