Chapter 14
Mary helped Valeria take a bath.
She heated the water the way Valeria liked it, added lavender oil, and laid out clean towels on the chair by the fire.
The room was warm and steamy, and for twenty minutes, Valeria lay in the tub and stared up at the ceiling, not thinking about anything. She was very good at not thinking about things. She had practiced extensively.
Mary did not rush her; she merely tidied the room. She had been doing this for three years. She knew when Valeria needed silence and when she needed conversation, and she always seemed to know the exact moment one turned into the other.
“The blue dress suited you today,” Mary said eventually. “You should wear color more often.”
“I intend to.”
Valeria sank lower in the water. The warmth wrapped around her shoulders. She thought of Edward’s hands, the patience of them, the way they stopped the instant she pushed him back.
She sat up so abruptly that water sloshed over the rim.
“Your Grace?” Mary looked at her.
“It’s nothing. The water is hot.”
“It is the temperature you requested.”
“Yes, well, it feels hotter than usual.”
Mary said nothing. She only straightened the bottles on the washstand with the precision of a woman who had opinions about why the water felt hotter than usual and was choosing, for the sake of propriety and her security, not to voice them.
“The children were lovely. Thomas asked Mrs. Grady if he could live in the kitchens.”
“What did Mrs. Grady say?”
“She said no. Then she packed him a basket of food that would feed a family of six. I believe she also included a handkerchief with her initials on it.” Mary paused. “She is going to deny this if asked.”
Valeria almost smiled. “Ruth borrowed three books from the library.”
“I know. She asked me if she was permitted. I showed her the shelves, and she selected them with the focus of a general choosing weapons.” Mary adjusted another bottle. “She reminds me of a certain someone.”
“Who?”
“You, Your Grace. On your good days. And, I presume, before your marriage.”
Valeria looked at the ceiling. The steam curled around her. “Everyone keeps saying that. Before.”
“Because there was a before, and there will be an after. You are in the middle now. The middle part is the hardest.”
“You sound like a novel.”
“I have been reading your novels, Your Grace. The ones Gordon would not let you have. They are quite good. The one about the sea captain is my favorite.”
Valeria laughed. A genuine laugh. Small but genuine. “That book is terrible.”
“It is. But the sea captain reminds me of someone.”
“If you say the Duke of Welford, I will drown you in this bathtub.”
“I was going to say Mr. Ashworth, actually.”
Valeria stared at her. Mary’s face was perfectly straight. But then the corner of her mouth twitched, just barely. She threw a wet cloth at her, and Mary dodged it with the practiced ease of a woman who had been dodging thrown objects for three years, though the previous ones had been less playful.
“Now,” she said, “the masquerade ball is at the end of the week. We should discuss what you will wear.”
“I do not care what I will wear.”
“You say that now.”
“I always say it.”
“And I always ignore it. It is the foundation of our relationship,” Mary said.“You should be happy, Your Grace. You are going to be with the Hound. You will be extremely safe.”
“Safe,” Valeria repeated.
She turned the word over in her mouth. She had spent three years wanting nothing more than safety.
Safety was the absence of Gordon. Safety was a locked door she controlled. Safety was eating what she wanted, walking where she pleased, and sleeping without listening for footsteps.
She had safety now, the auction had given her that. But safety was not the same as happiness.
Safety was the foundation. Happiness was the house one built on top of it. And she did not know how to build that house because the last time she tried, the man she had married tore it down.
Valeria felt the tension of the day ease. The children. The running. The laughter. The look on Edward’s face when Ruth shook her hand. The way he let William win.
“I am just…” She searched for the right words. “I have forgotten who I was. And I do not know how I am going to remember when I become someone’s wife once again.”
Mary looked at Valeria with the steady patience of a woman who had been caring for her through the worst three years of her life and who was not about to let the best ones be ruined by doubt.
Valeria thought about the children running across the lawn. About Ruth’s handshake. About Horace’s caterpillars. About the way Edward crouched down so Thomas could tackle him and fell over backward like a man who had been felled by a giant.
His words echoed in her mind.
“Mothers always come back.”
The certainty in his voice, as though it were a fact and not a hope. She wondered if his mother had come back. She did not think so.
“He played with the children today,” she said.
“I saw, Your Grace.”
“He let a boy named William beat him in a race. And he told Ruth that mothers always come back.”
“That is a kind thing to say to a child.”
“It is a kind thing to say to anyone.” She paused.
“He did not have to play. He was standing on the terrace, watching. He could have stayed there. But Ruth asked him to reach a branch, and he came down. After that, he just… joined. As though it were natural. As though he had always known how to be gentle and simply needed someone to remind him.”
“That sounds like a man worth marrying, Your Grace,” Mary said.
“I know. That is what worries me.”
“You are worried about marrying a kind man?”
“"I am worried about trusting a kind man. Gordon never pretended to be kind, and I still could not stop him.” Valeria looked at the water.
The steam had thinned. Her fingers were pruning.
“Edward is kind, and that terrifies me more.
Because if he changes after we marry, I will not have seen it coming.
At least with Gordon, I knew what he was from the start. "
“If you truly believed that about the Duke of Welford, you would not have agreed to marry him,” Mary pointed out.
Valeria looked at her hands in the water. The dry skin, the cracks from three winters without hand cream, had been healed. She used hand cream every night now. Not because she needed it anymore, but because she could.
“No,” she acknowledged. “I suppose you are right. But I still plan to keep my distance.”
“Sure,” Mary uttered, in the tone of a woman who had watched Valeria blush every time the Hound walked into a room and who had absolutely no intention of arguing about the concept of distance.
The water was getting cold. Valeria rose and wrapped the towel around herself.
“The ivory silk dress with the gold thread, for the wedding,” Mary said. “It was your mother’s. I had it pressed this morning.”
Valeria looked at her. “You already decided.”
“I always decide, Your Grace. You simply agree afterward.”
That was true. It had been true for three years.
Mary chose the dresses, the shawls, the ribbons, the soap, and the lavender oil.
She chose them because Gordon had taken choice away from both of them, and this was how they had fought back: small decisions made in the margins of a life that was not their own.
“Thank you, Mary,” Valeria murmured.
“For what, Your Grace?”
“For everything. For three years of everything.”
Mary’s expression did not change, but the look in her eyes did. Just for a moment. “That is what I am here for, Your Grace.” Then she went to lay out the nightclothes.
Valeria watched her go. Three years of warm milk and hidden rags and choices made in the margins. She thought about the woman who had washed her evidence, kept her secrets, and brought her laudanum, which she never drank.
“Mary,” she called.
Mary stopped at the door. “Your Grace?”
“When we are married, you will come with me. To his house in the north. I will not go without you.”
Mary turned. Her expression was steady, but her eyes were not. Not at all. “I would not let you, Your Grace,” she said, before closing the door.
Valeria stared at the closed door for a long time.
Images of Gordon’s house flashed through her mind unbidden.
The cold corridors, the marble floors, the portrait above the fireplace, the room where she had been locked, the meals that had been measured, the letters that had been read, and the laughter that had been punished.
Three years of silence, small rooms, and the careful woman she had become in order to survive them.
Then Edward’s house. The one in the north, near the Scottish border, which he had mentioned in the garden. A roof that leaked in three places. Land and tenants. Rooms that needed filling. A house that was waiting for someone to make it a home.
She could do that. She had spent three years making a prison livable.
She could make a house a home. She could open the windows, fill the rooms, plant a garden, borrow books for Ruth, cut biscuits for Thomas, and let William run races across the lawn.
She could eat breakfast without counting bites, walk wherever she pleased, and laugh as loud as she wanted, and nobody would punish her for any of it.
She could be Valeria again. The real Valeria.
She got into bed. The sheets were cool. The pillow smelled of lavender. She did not sleep for a long time, but she did not mind. Because for the first time in three years, her inability to sleep was not from fear. It was from anticipation. And that, she thought, was worth every sleepless hour.
Tomorrow, Caroline would make her try on dresses. Tomorrow, Edward would follow her instructions and prove that he was humorous. Tomorrow, something would change.
She could feel it coming, the way one felt the weather turn. A shift in the air. A drop in pressure. The hush before a storm broke and the world rearranged itself into something new.
She closed her eyes. Storms did not frighten her anymore. She had danced in one. She had been carried through one. She had been kissed in the ruins of one.
Let it come.