Chapter 5
Edward could not sleep.
He tried, but the bed was too soft. Too clean. He stared at the ceiling.
She had looked at him, not through him. Not past him. Not at the floor. She looked at him like he was a person.
For twelve years, he had been alone. Nobody held his gaze. Not the men he worked with. Not the women in foreign cities. Not even George, his oldest partner, who still flinched when Edward moved too quickly.
She flinched too. But she did not look away.
Edward gave up on sleep around four. He sat up. The room was cold. He did not mind cold. Cold meant he was alive and alert, and nobody was trying to kill him, which by his standards made it a good morning.
He dressed in the dark. Muscle memory. He could dress, load a pistol, and climb out a window in under two minutes.
Nathaniel called this disturbing. Edward called it practical.
The two of them had never agreed on what constituted normal behavior, which was why Nathaniel was a respected member of Parliament and Edward was the man Parliament sent when they needed someone to disappear.
He stood at the window. The sky was grey and low. The gardens stretched out below, the hedges still wet from the night, paths of pale gravel curving between beds that someone had cared for meticulously.
He thought about Valeria. He had been thinking about her since the moment she stuck out her hand and looked at him.
He was buttoning his cuffs when the knock came. It was light and quick. A shuffle of feet retreating.
He opened the door, but there was nobody. Only a covered dish on the floor. He carried it to the table and lifted the lid. There was no food. However, there was a note.
Your bride is stuck in the labyrinth that is her garden alone. Find her and bring her back before something terrible happens, and before anyone else sees her in such a state!
He read it twice. Folded it. Smiled.
The games had begun, then.
Valeria was not stuck. She was exactly where she wanted to be, deep in the hedge maze. Back pressed against an old oak, face tilted up to the sky.
Mr. Fife, the gardener, had spent three months shaping the hedges into a proper labyrinth at her request. Her gift to herself.
She had been there since dawn. The note was sent out to every man with their morning tea. Even the cleverest would take hours. That gave her a whole morning alone.
The game would test the men’s protectiveness, the first trait on her list. The rules were simple: find her, bring her back, do not panic, do not give up, do not send a servant to do it for you.
She had been very specific about that last point. Three of the gentlemen had already asked their valets to go in their place, and Mary had intercepted every one of them.
“Sir Marcus sent his valet with a compass,” Mary had reported, trying not to smile.
“Send him back,” Valeria had ordered.
“Already done, Your Grace. Lord Barton asked if there was a map.”
“There is no map. That is the point.”
“Mr. Ashworth said he would write a poem about the labyrinth and dedicate it to you instead of entering.”
“That is entirely in character for Mr. Ashworth.”
It also meant that she did not have to smile at men she did not trust over poached eggs. She could sit in her garden and be alone and not perform for anyone.
She pulled her shawl tight. The sky was flat and pale. It could go either way. She should go back.
But she did not go back. Instead, she let herself think.
Of her father’s laugh when John told a joke, loud and helpless, the kind that shook his whole body.
Of Evan shaking his head from across the table, mouth tight, pretending he was above it.
He never was. Of Bridget’s baby, whom she had met only once.
The baby had grabbed her finger and held on to it.
She had wanted to cry, but she had not, since Gordon had been standing in the doorway.
She thought of the letters she was not allowed to send. She had written dozens in her head.
Dear Bridget, the house is cold, but my husband is worse.
Dear Caroline, please do not worry. I am eating plenty. Which was a lie, but a kind one.
Dear Father, I forgive you. Because she did, mostly, on the good days.
She never wrote any of them down because Gordon regularly checked her inkpot and counted the sheets of paper in her drawer.
She thought about dancing. She missed it so much that sometimes her feet moved on their own, tapping out the steps of a waltz under the breakfast table while she ate.
Gordon let her attend only one ball in three years.
She had worn a blue dress. She had picked it herself, and she loved it and felt beautiful in it for the first time in a year.
Gordon watched her from across the room the entire night.
Arms folded. Jaw set. She did not dance.
She sat in her chair, held a glass of wine she did not drink, and watched other women laugh and spin, all while holding back tears because she had trained herself not to cry.
Afterward, in the carriage, he told her the dress made her look common.
She said nothing. She folded her hands in her lap, looked out the window, and did not say a single word for the rest of the night.
The following morning, she put the blue dress in the back of her wardrobe and did not take it out again.
Until the day after his funeral. She put on the brightest blue shawl she owned and walked in the garden twice. Nobody stopped her. Nobody said a word.
She thought about the man who had kissed her hand. His green eyes. The Scottish lilt in his voice. The bread he had put on her plate without asking.
Stop it. He is dangerous and full of himself.
But he had put bread on her plate. She kept coming back to that. Such a small thing. A piece of bread.
Gordon would have taken bread off her plate. He would have told her she was eating too much, that she was growing soft, that ladies did not reach for the bread basket without being offered. The Hound just put it there without looking at her and did not say a word about it.
She wondered if her father knew about the auction. She had not written to him about it. She was not sure why. Maybe because explaining it would mean explaining everything, and explaining everything would mean admitting what Gordon had done, and she was not ready for that.
She was not ready to see her father’s face when he discovered the truth.
She was not ready for the guilt he would carry.
He had tried to stop the marriage. He had gone to the magistrate.
He had gone to the bishop. But nobody had listened.
Gordon had both the title and the influence, and influence in this country bought silence the way it bought everything else.
Then her father had chosen to believe that this was a good match, despite the way it came about.
She would tell him, eventually. When the party was over, and the decision was made, and she had a man beside her who could stand between her and the world while she fell apart for five minutes.
She was owed five minutes. Maybe ten.
She was lost so far inside her head that she missed the sky going dark.
The first drop landed on her cheek. She wiped it away. By the time she looked up, the grey had thickened to charcoal, and the wind was bending the hedges.
“Oh no,” she gasped, looking up.
The storm broke all at once. The paths turned into mud in minutes. Her shawl was soaked. Her dress stuck to her body. Water landed on her face. In her eyes.
She could not find the way out. Everything looked the same in the downpour. Left. Dead end. Hedge wall taller than her head.
She doubled back and took a right. Another dead end. The rain was so heavy that she could barely see ten feet in front of her.
“Help!”
The wind drowned it.
She tried again, louder, hands cupped around her mouth.
Nothing. Not even an echo. The hedges swallowed everything.
She was alone in a maze she had designed herself, and the irony was not lost on her. Three years locked in a house, and now she was locked in a garden of her own making.
Her shoes were ruined. The hem of her dress was heavy with mud and water. She was shivering so hard that her jaw ached. Her hair was loose and clung to her neck.
The useless lot of them had gone inside at the first drop, then.
Suddenly, she heard footsteps. Heavy. Steady. Not hurried.
He rounded the corner of the hedge, his coat soaked through, his hair flat against his skull. Water ran down his face. He did not look cold. He did not look bothered. He looked like a man who had walked through worse than a rainstorm on a Tuesday morning and barely noticed the difference.
His green eyes found her immediately. She was crouched against the hedge, with her arms wrapped around her knees and her hair in her face and her dress ruined, and she had never looked less like a duchess in her life.
“Are ye hurt?” First thing he said. Not a greeting. Not I found you.
“No,” she replied, pushing wet hair from her face. “I am wet and furious.”
“That was a pretty stupid game,” he remarked.
“Of course, the Hound would be the one to find me.”
“Ye should be thankful Hounds are loyal. Everyone else went back long ago.”
He stepped forward and picked her up. One arm under her knees, one behind her back. He did not struggle.
“What are you doing?” she sputtered.
“Saving you.”
“I don’t need saving! The manor is that way.” She pointed behind them.
“The path is a swamp. I am not risking my bride’s neck in the mud before we are even married.”
“Put me down!”
She shoved at his chest, but it did not budge. Her face was hot, which was absurd given how cold and wet the rest of her was. She was pressed against his chest, and she could feel his heartbeat, slow and steady, and the warmth of him through his wet shirt.
“That was a pretty stupid game, if I may say so,” he said, walking through the rain as though it were not there.
“You already said that.”
“It deserves repeating. Watching how we speak with the people who work for you might have told you more about our characters than sending us into a hedge maze.”
She opened her mouth to argue and then closed it. He was not wrong. She hated that he was not wrong.
“If I must be honest with you,” she muttered, “I hoped some of the men I do not trust would have left by now. It would have saved me the trouble of apologizing when I dismiss them.”
“How many do you not trust?”
“Most of them.”
“Wise woman.” He adjusted his grip. The rain was easing slightly. “You don’t need to worry about the others. I can protect you from all of them.”
“I do not need a protector.”
“Everyone needs a protector, Duchess. The trick is finding one who doesn’t want something in return.”
“And you don’t want anything?”
“I want to re-enter Society; that’s the truth of it.
Nathaniel says that a wife and a title and a respectable household will open doors that twelve years of service to the Crown cannot.
” He paused. “And there are people I want to help. Orphans. The poor. The ones that nobody lifts a finger for. A duchess at my side opens doors that a spy never could.”
She had not expected that. She had expected him to talk about heirs, about lineage, about the things men always talked about.
“But you want heirs?” she asked.
“Not particularly,” he answered, and did not explain further.
She stared at him. She had never heard a man say that before.
She waited for the caveat, the condition, the part where he told her what he really wanted. It did not come. He just kept walking steadily, unhurried.
“How would you treat your wife?” she prodded. “And the people who work for you?”
“With the respect they deserve for trusting me to protect them.”
She looked at his face. He was not performing. He was not trying to impress her. He was answering her questions the way a man answered when he had nothing to hide and no energy left for pretending.
She stopped fighting. Not because he told her to, but because something had shifted in her chest and she needed a moment to figure out what it was.
He carried her to a gazebo at the edge of the gardens and set her down on the bench. His arms did not shake when he let go. She noticed that.
“Stay here,” he said, then went back into the rain.
She watched him disappear around the hedge. For a terrible second, she thought he was leaving. Then he was back, coat streaming, with a lit lantern in his hand. She had no idea where he found it.
“How did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Light a lantern in a storm.”
“Trade secret.”
He hung it on the hook in the center beam with steady hands. Everything about him was steady.
In the warm light, she looked down at herself. Dress clinging to her body. Hair in wet ropes. She looked terrible. She looked like a woman who had been sitting in a hedge maze, feeling sorry for herself while the weather turned.
“You need to get out of those wet clothes,” he urged, practical and blunt. “Or ye will catch yer death before we are married.”
He turned his back before she could answer.