Chapter 23
The horse did not care that he had not slept.
Edward liked that about horses. They did not ask questions. They did not look at you with blue eyes full of trust you had not earned. They wanted feed and a firm hand and a rider who knew when to let them run.
Simple terms. He could meet them.
He rode north along the ridge as the sky turned from black to gray. The air was cold and smelled of wet grass and the last of the night rain. Beneath him, the mare moved easily, sure-footed on the soft ground. He gave her the length of the reins and let her set the pace.
He had left Valeria’s room before dawn. Watched her sleep for three hours, maybe four.
Watched the way her breathing shifted when she turned, the way her hand curled under her chin, the way the firelight caught the auburn in her hair and turned it copper.
He watched without touching her, and the not-touching was the hardest thing he had done in twelve years of hard things.
He had promised to be there in the morning. And he would be. He just needed to think first.
He just could not think in that room. Not with the smell of her skin permeating the air, and the memory of her mouth on his, and the quiet, devastating sound of her voice saying thank you for coming back as though it were the bravest thing she had ever said.
The ridge flattened out past the tree line.
Open country. He could see the village below, smoke rising from chimneys, the church spire catching the first gray light.
Further out was the road to London. He had ridden that road six days ago with purpose and certainty.
He was riding this ridge now with neither.
George’s voice. That was the problem. Not the threat at the masquerade. Not Peter and his theatrics. But George’s voice, low and amused, curling through his skull like smoke.
“You are a weapon. Weapons do not sit on shelves. They rust..”
The worst part was that George had not been trying to hurt him. He had been telling the truth as he understood it. And he understood Edward better than anyone alive.
The mare slowed at the crest of the hill. Edward let her stop and then dismounted. He stood at the edge and looked down at Thornhill, the dark mass of it against the lightening sky.
Somewhere in that house, Valeria was sleeping in a bed he had just left. In two days, she would stand at the altar and marry him. She would take his name. She would trust him with her safety, her future, her body if she chose to offer it.
She would give those things to a man who had spent twelve years breaking people for the Crown and liked it some nights more than he should have.
He sat on the wet grass. Did not care about the damp.
He thought about Valeria’s face when she had watched him with the children. The softness in it. The way her hand went to her stomach without her knowing, a gesture so quick and unconscious that she would have denied it if he pointed it out.
She wanted children. She had not said it yet, but she did not need to. He had spent twelve years reading people. Some things did not require words.
He could not give her that. Not because he was unable, but because he was afraid.
Afraid that the thing inside him—the cold, efficient thing that the Crown had built and George had sharpened—would pass to a child the way his father’s jaw had passed to Nathaniel and his mother’s eyes had passed to him.
He did not want a son with his hands. He did not want a daughter who flinched at loud sounds because her father had trained her to hear threats in everything.
Nathaniel would call this foolish. He would say that a man was not his work. That what Edward did for twelve years did not have to be what he was for the rest of his life.
Nathaniel believed in fresh starts with the optimism of a man who had never held a knife to another man’s throat in a dark room in Vienna and felt nothing afterward except relief that it was done.
The sky was turning pink at the edges. Dawn was coming on fast. Edward should move.
He did not move.
There was a sound below. Hooves on packed earth.
Edward’s hand went to his hip before he remembered he was not carrying a weapon.
Old habits died hard.
He looked down the slope and saw a man on a gray gelding, riding the fence line of the lower field. It was the tenant farmer he had seen the day before, checking on a ewe that had been limping.
The man spotted him and reined up. Raised a hand. Edward raised his in return. The man took that as an invitation, which it was not, and rode up the slope to meet him.
“Morning, Your Grace.” He touched his cap. He was older than Edward by a decade, with a weathered face and hands like leather. “Early for a ride.”
“Early for fence work,” Edward corrected.
“Aye, well. The ewe won’t wait for a civilized hour to get herself tangled in wire.” The farmer glanced at the manor below. “Heard there’s a wedding.”
“In two days.”
“Her Grace is a good woman. The servants speak well of her. The old Duke, God rest his soul, was not so well-liked, but she kept this place running when he wouldn’t.” He paused and shifted in the saddle. “The lads in the village are glad of it. A steady hand at Thornhill means steady work.”
Edward looked at him. A man who cared about his sheep and his fences and whether the manor above him had a master who would keep the roof patched and the wages paid.
Simple things. The things that mattered to people who did not live in shadows.
“Did ye know her husband?” Edward asked.
The farmer’s face changed, but not much. A tightening around the mouth, a flicker in the eyes. The expression of a man who had opinions he had learned to keep behind his teeth.
“I knew of him,” he replied carefully. “Kept to himself. Didn’t ride the land.
Didn’t know the tenants by name.” A pause.
“She did, though. Even when he didn’t let her out much, she used to find ways.
Sent the maid with bread when my wife took ill.
Wrote a letter to the physician in the village when my boy broke his arm and asked him to waive the fee.
” He looked at Edward squarely. “That’s the kind of woman you’re marrying, Your Grace. Just so you know.”
“I know,” Edward said.
“Good.” The farmer touched his cap again. “Then I wish you well, and I’ll be getting back to my ewe.” He rode down the slope.
Edward watched him go. The gray gelding picked its way along the fence line, and the dog that had been waiting at the bottom of the hill fell in behind them. A man and his horse and his dog, going about the quiet business of keeping things alive.
“That’s the kind of woman you’re marrying.”
He knew. That was the whole problem. He knew exactly what she was. He had known since the gazebo, since she shivered in his coat and challenged him with a cocked eyebrow and told him he was welcome to play as long as he did not cheat.
He had known since she laughed at the ruined portrait with paint on her fingers and joy on her face, and he had felt something crack open in his chest that twelve years of discipline had not prepared him for.
He knew what she was. He was not sure what he was. That was the difference.
She deserves a man, not a weapon.
He turned the thought over in his mind. It had George’s fingerprints on it. George, who had spent years telling him what he was, shaping the story until Edward believed it. A weapon. A Hound. A thing built for a purpose, useful until it was not.
But Valeria had not looked at him like a weapon. Not once. She looked at him like a man who had painted flowers on her dead husband’s portrait and held her hand while she told him the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She looked at him and saw someone he did not recognize.
Maybe she sees what is actually there. Maybe George is the liar.
The thought sat in his chest like a coal, warm and dangerous. The kind of thing that could either light a fire or burn the house down, depending on what he did with it.
He mounted the mare and turned her south toward the house.
He should write to Nathaniel. Tell him about the wedding. Tell him to come if he could, though the notice was short and Nathaniel would grumble about the roads and arrive anyway with a bottle of wine and an opinion about everything.
Nathaniel would like Valeria. He would see past her composure and her steady voice to the steel underneath. He would look at Edward across the dinner table and know, without being told, that his brother was in more trouble than any mission had ever put him in.
Dear Nathaniel, Edward composed in his head as the mare picked her way down the slope.
I am getting married in two days to a woman who is braver than I am and funnier than I deserve, and I am sitting on a hill at dawn because if I stay in her room for one more hour, I will tell her that I love her, and I am not sure either of us is ready for that.
Nathaniel would read that letter and ride through the night. Or he would write back something short and maddening, the way he always did. Something like, Then tell her, you stubborn fool. He had a gift for reducing complicated things to simple instructions. Edward had a gift for ignoring them.
The stable boy took the mare when Edward rode in. A lad of fifteen, quiet and efficient. He brushed the mare down without being asked and did not flinch when Edward dismounted. Most people flinched. The boy just nodded and got on with his work.
“What is yer name?” Edward asked.
The boy started at that. People did not ask stable boys their names. Especially not dukes.
“Henry, Your Grace.”
“Ye handle her well, Henry. She is particular about who touches her.”
“So am I, Your Grace.” The boy turned red the moment he said it. “I mean—that is… I only meant—”
“I know what ye meant.” Edward almost smiled. Almost. “See that she gets an extra measure of oats. She earned it.”
He went inside. Took a bath. The water was hot, and he sat in it until it was not. He thought about nothing.
No, that was a lie.
He thought about Valeria, because that was all he thought about now, and the nothing he was aiming for was just the space between one thought of her and the next.