Chapter 20
By the time they reached the coaching inn, the sky had turned into a deep indigo, and the air had a bite that promised frost by morning.
Victor stepped out of the carriage, stretching briefly before he turned back to her.
Gwen stepped out with the aid of the inn’s ostler, her cloak wrapped tight around her, chin lifted in that particular way that told him she was afraid and refused to show it.
He offered his arm. “Come, you are tired.”
“I am perfectly well,” she insisted.
“You are exhausted and chilled,” he countered. “Do not argue. At least not until there is a roof above your head.”
Her lips pressed together, but she took his arm.
Inside, the inn was warm and crowded, the air thick with smoke, the scent of stew, and the hum of voices. A few heads turned as they entered.
Victor felt Gwen tense beside him. Before the innkeeper could ask a single question, he said, “A private chamber for the night. For myself and my wife. And a separate room for my man.”
He felt her scandalized gaze like a physical thing, but he did not look at her. The word wife rolled easily enough off his tongue. Too easily.
The innkeeper brightened at once. “Yes, Your Grace. At once. The Rose Room is available. A very decent chamber. Comfortable for a newly married couple.”
“Suitable,” Victor said.
The innkeeper beamed, bobbed his head, then led them up a narrow staircase. He paused at a door near the end of the passage and opened it with a flourish.
The room was clean, modest, and plainly furnished. A hearth with a lively fire. A small table. A single bed.
Just one.
Victor thanked the innkeeper and dismissed him with a coin. The door closed. Silence fell.
Gwen looked at the bed, then at him. “There is only one bed.”
“Indeed.” He nodded. “How fortunate that we are a devoted husband and wife for tonight.”
“I do not recall becoming your wife,” she scoffed.
He allowed himself a faint smile. “You would have objected loudly.”
“Violently,” she muttered.
He moved to the hearth, warming his hands. “We will share it. It is not the first time we have lain beside each other.”
Color crept into her cheeks. “That was different.”
“Very,” he agreed, his mind unhelpfully conjuring an image of her in his arms, breathless and undone. “All the same, the bed is more comfortable than the floor. We are both human. We both sleep. The arrangement is simple.”
“Our arrangement is over,” she said quickly. “You agreed. I reminded you. You are honor-bound.”
“To what?” he asked. “To throw myself on the floorboards in order to preserve the last scrap of a modesty you believe already ruined?”
She lifted her chin. “I will sleep on the floor.”
“You will not,” he said, amused despite himself.
“I will,” she insisted. “You may have the bed. You are taller. You will complain more loudly in the morning if you do not sleep. Your Grace.”
The sound of his title, crisp as a slap, did it.
Victor barked a laugh, the sound surprising even him.
“As you wish,” he relented. “Sleep on the floor if the idea of sharing a bed with me offends you so deeply. I will occupy the bed and try not to be crushed beneath the weight of my own selfishness.”
She glared at him. “You are insufferable.”
“So I am often told,” he quipped.
She set about making herself a nest with the stubborn efficiency he was coming to recognize. She dragged a small blanket near the fire, spread it over the rug, and folded her cloak into a thin pillow.
Victor watched her from the bed, boots off, coat draped neatly over a chair, cravat loosened for the first time that day.
“You need not attempt to be noble, you know,” he drawled.
“This is not nobility,” she replied. “It is practicality.”
“Thin, uncomfortable practicality.”
She turned her back to him pointedly and lay down.
He snuffed one candle, leaving only the one on the mantelpiece and the low fire. Shadows danced across the low ceiling.
The bed was not luxurious, but it was wider than his boyhood cot, and he had slept on worse. He lay back, hands tucked behind his head, and listened.
The inn settled gradually. The voices below hushed. The tankards thudded less often. The occasional burst of laughter rose and faded. Hoofbeats sounded in the yard, then stilled.
On the rug, Gwen did not move, though she too was awake.
He heard her restless shifting, the catch of her breath when some hard bit of floor dug into her flesh.
He closed his eyes. Counted slowly. One to fifty. To one hundred. At one hundred and thirty-seven, he opened them again.
“Gwendoline,” he said into the dimness.
No answer.
He waited. She shifted again, trying to find a spot that did not exist.
Patience, drilled into him by tutors and necessity, deserted him.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed, crossed the short distance, and looked down.
She lay curled near the hearth, her face turned toward the flames, lashes shadowing her cheeks. Her hands were tucked beneath her chin. A child might have looked so if they carried the lines of strain around her eyes.
“Stubborn creature,” he muttered.
She heard that.
Her eyes flew open, locking onto his. “What are you doing?”
“Fixing a mistake,” he said.
Before she could scramble away, he bent, slid one arm beneath her knees and the other beneath her shoulders, and lifted her.
She let out a soft, outraged gasp, her hands catching at his shirt. “Put me down,” she hissed. “Victor.”
He ignored the way his name on her lips tugged at something treacherous inside him. She weighed very little.
He carried her to the bed and set her gently on it, drawing the thin coverlet over her.
“There,” he said. “Now you need not pretend the floor is comfortable.”
She pushed herself up on her elbows. “You cannot simply pick me up like some parcel and place me where you think I ought to be.”
“I can,” he said. “I just did.”
She glared at him. “You are impossible.”
He almost smiled. “And you are warm. Stay there.”
“What about you?” she demanded. “You cannot mean to lie on the floor.”
“Watch me,” he challenged.
Before she could muster a protest, he took his pillow, tossed it on the rug near the hearth, and lay down on it with exaggerated contentment.
He felt her eyes on his back, as if he had lost his senses. Perhaps he had.
“Victor,” she huffed. “You cannot be comfortable.”
He folded one arm beneath his head and regarded the ceiling. “On the contrary. I have slept on wet ground in winter and on hard benches in drafty inns. This is luxury itself.”
“You lie,” she muttered.
“Frequently,” he replied. “But in this case, the floor truly is tolerable.”
She shifted, rustling the coverlet. “I cannot take the bed while you lie there.”
“You insisted on taking the floor while I had the bed,” he reminded her. “We have simply switched preferences. Consider it a neat balancing of accounts.”
She made a frustrated sound. “This is absurd.”
“It is efficient,” he countered. “You sleep. I sleep. The innkeeper remains convinced we are a married couple who will emerge in the morning looking sufficiently rumpled to satisfy his sensibilities. Everyone wins.”
She was quiet for a long moment. Then, softly, she said, “I will not sleep while you are there.”
“That is your own stubbornness, not the floor’s fault.”
She sighed. “Very well. Come up here.”
“Pardon?”
“You heard me,” she sniffed. “You may have half the bed. You are too big for the rug anyway. I would rather share the mattress than spend the night thinking of your bones freezing by the hearth.”
“They would not freeze,” he said. “Only ache.”
“Victor,” she said, her tone brooking no argument. “Come, please.”
He hesitated. He could, after all, remain on the floor. His back would complain in the morning, but he would survive. His self-control would remain intact.
The thought of lying beside her on that narrow bed, of waking up to her, felt like an invitation to folly.
“Are you afraid?” she asked quietly.
He almost laughed. “Of floorboards? No.”
“Of me,” she murmured.
That silenced him.
He rose in one smooth motion, crossed to the bed, and lay down near the edge, one arm behind his head, the other resting flat on the coverlet.
“There,” he said. “Satisfied?”
She turned onto her side, facing him, leaving a respectable gap between them. In the low light, with the shadows touching her cheekbones, her features were softer.
She looked younger. More vulnerable.
“Not entirely,” she replied. “But it will do.”
He huffed a breath that might have been a laugh. “Try to sleep, Gwendoline.”
“I cannot,” she admitted. “My mind will not quiet.”
“Tell it to,” he suggested.
“It won’t obey.”
“Then give it work. Tell me what it is gnawing on, and we will dissect it together.”
She was quiet for a little while, her eyes fixed on some point near his shoulder.
“I am worried about my mother,” she murmured.
He had expected that. “Because you left her with him?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Without me there, he will take out his anger on her. I am not under any illusion that my presence spared her entirely, but at least I was a diversion. A different target to strike. Now, there is only her.”
He considered. “You said she chose him.”
“She did,” Gwen affirmed. “That does not mean she deserves what comes with that choice.”
“No,” he agreed. “It does not.”
She drew the coverlet higher, as if warding off more than the cold.
“My father died when I was twelve. From a fever. It took him in less than a fortnight. One day, he was laughing with me over some dreadful poem I had written; the next, he could not rise from his bed. He was clever and kind and terribly impractical. Mama adored him.”
“I remember hearing of his death,” Victor said. “My father said that it was a waste of a reasonably competent man and a perfectly good estate.”
Gwen’s mouth twitched. “That sounds like something he would say.”
“I was not permitted to speak,” Victor sighed. “My opinions then were limited to the quality of my Latin.”
Gwen gave him a quick look. “After Papa died, Mama… broke. Or so it felt like. She cried for weeks. Months. The house felt empty and loud at once. People came and went with condolences and lists and questions. I wandered about like a ghost, trying not to disturb anyone.”
“No one disturbed you either,” he guessed.
“Not after the first few days,” she said. “Then there were merely kind pats on the head and suggestions that I should be brave. As if bravery were a shawl one could put on against grief.”
He said nothing, so she continued.
“Then Howard appeared. Handsome. Smooth. So confident. He brought flowers. He sat with Mama and spoke of my father as if he had been his dearest friend, though I had never seen him in our house before Papa’s illness.
He took charge of small things at first, then larger ones.
He arranged accounts, advised Mama on tenants.
He made everything seem easy. Mama looked at him as if someone had turned on a lamp in a dark room. ”
“And you,” Victor asked, “what did you see?”
“A man who smiled too much when people were watching and not at all when their backs were turned,” Gwen muttered.
“A man who always knew precisely where I was and what I did, yet never seemed pleased by the knowledge. I told Mama once that he frightened me. She said I was being paranoid. That I was jealous.”
He could hear the old hurt beneath the words.
“I was not jealous of him,” she went on. “I was jealous of the way she ceased to see everything else when he was in the room. My opinions never counted before, but after he came, they seemed to count even less.”
“And now,” Victor said softly, “she is bound to him by vows and habit.”
“And love,” Gwen added bleakly. “However misplaced. She believes it is love; she cannot imagine a life without him now. He hurts her, with his words, with his hands, with his choices, and she forgives him because she cannot bear the thought of him elsewhere.” She paused briefly. “I will not be that woman.”
Victor believed her.
Silence stretched, filled with the small sounds of the inn: a door closing somewhere down the hall, a muffled laugh, the creak of timber. The fire in the hearth popped softly.
“You think yourself nothing like her,” he murmured.
“I hope not.”
“You are loyal. You love fiercely. You cling harder than you admit. Those are her traits, too.”
“Then I am doomed,” she muttered.
“No,” he said. “Because you can see where her loyalty blinded her. You have already stepped away. That is difference enough.”
Her eyes searched his face. “You speak as if you know what it is like to be loyal to someone who does not deserve it.”
He looked up at the ceiling. “I know it very well.”
“Tell me,” she breathed.