Chapter 15
We reach the post office, breathless, just as the sign in the window is flipped from open to closed.
I step up to knock, but the girl opens the door.
She beckons me in and looks my husband over with a thoroughness that tells me she recalls every word of my telephone conversation concerning him.
“You’re her, aren’t you?” Her face is eager and bright, her voice far warmer than before. “The maid who came by an inheritance?”
“I’ve not…” I sigh. “Yes. Yes, that’s me.” Companion, though. Not maid. And there’s no fortune yet.
“I’ve read it in the paper. Every little bit.” Her bright eyes ask the questions she doesn’t dare voice—What will you do? How will you beat them? “How can I be of help, now?” As if we’re suddenly friends.
“Dunn House,” I say, gripping the counter. “Do you know it? Surely you must deliver the post there.”
Her look is either intrigued or pitying. “Dunn House, like an estate, miss?”
“You’ve never heard of it?”
She shakes her head.
“Well, thank you kindly.” I back toward the door. “Good day, then.”
“Oh! Here,” she says, shoving a small paper my way. “Came for ’ee after you gone—’round noontime, it were. That’s why I waved ’ee in just now.”
A telegram.
Merryn de Montfort does not exist STOP Isabella alive STOP please advise STOP
“It’s from Mr. Gould,” I say to AJ.
“Gould? What is it?” He grabs the counter, peering over my shoulder. “Has he news? Everything’s all right, isn’t it? We’ve not lost?”
His intensity is oddly calming. To have a person on your side who is this intensely upset about the state of your affairs is…reassuring.
I glance at him but movement outside the window catches my eye.
“No. I don’t believe so. But AJ…” I lean close and whisper, “We must go. Now.” He’s found us.
The agent. In his finely cut suitcoat and perfectly turned-out hat, he stands out in this quiet coastal hideaway.
He paces slowly down the cobbled street before the post office, his gaze roving the quiet shops.
For me, of course.
I approach the desk. “I’d like to send a return tele—” I glance down. “But I can’t, can I?”
“’Course you can,” says the girl with a cheeky grin. “For sixpence.”
I finger the calling card, but I haven’t any idea what to tell him if I ring. Not yet, anyway. “And now, have you a back entrance?” I smile at the clerk.
Answers are around the corner—the air here is thick with them, if only I can grab one.
We’re close.
Dusk finds us buried beneath itchy straw, bouncing down the road out of Newquay. “You’ve a keen sense of adventure, Mr. Winthrop,” I quip. My head is beginning to throb behind my eyes, which means this headache will spread. “What have you gotten us into?”
“A cart,” he says cheerily. “One that will carry us discreetly farther up the coast—at no charge.”
I blow the straw out of my mouth. “You truly mean to travel all the way around the Cornish coast?”
“Depends on how quickly you remember things.”
We bounce along for several silent moments, then I bare my soul, releasing my deepest fear into the bald, frigid air. “And if I find something utterly terrible?”
“Murder terrible, or just…you know, burn the toast bad?”
I adore his sense of humor. Truly, I do. It’s charming. Likely helpful.
Usually.
“Would you…” I cannot bring myself to ask if he will vanish. Everyone has his limits. AJ’s seem impossibly wide, but I sense I’m close to bumping up against one.
“Would I what, luv?”
“What if I don’t remember? What then? What if I never find any answers?”
“Then you go on living in the present.”
“In an asylum!”
“I’ll visit you.”
“Ansel! You’re making fun.”
“What? I don’t see why you’ve tied yourself in a knot over this. It hasn’t happened yet.”
“Because everything is at stake.” He is apathetic about everything, it would seem, including me.
Including our marriage. Perhaps that’s why he has jumped into it so easily.
The notion that my love eclipses his so greatly breaks my heart in ways I cannot put into words.
I touch my hand to my chest, and find an alarming emptiness there.
I stiffen. Something is missing—the brooch.
No. No!
She’ll sell it the moment she’s away from here, Sabine whispered to her mother when I opened it. You’re wasting family heirlooms on her. I feel about in the wagon, frantically searching. I cannot bring myself to admit the loss to AJ.
“Steak? I might have steak.”
“Must everything be laughable? Will you please be serious for once?”
“I hardly see the point.”
I curl into my frustration in the bouncing wagon, and when I close my eyes another man’s face appears. Brown-eyed, windswept, and utterly solemn. I shove it aside but it returns, haunting the fringes of my mind. A vague longing circles, so I shove harder.
The wind dies as the cart creaks around a corner. Something feels wrong.
I poke my head above the straw. The road is veering inland, away from the coastline. “AJ. Where is this farmer going? The shore is that way. Perhaps we should jump out.”
“I’ll not hear talk of jumping. Especially at night. What if you hit your head again?”
A good blow and you’ll lose what little ground you’ve gained. I can hear Dr. Bartlett’s words even now. Your head…it’s much more delicate now. Bear that in mind and take care.
“We’ll stop where we stop,” says AJ. “Then I shall escort my lady back to the coast.”
“What’ll we do, ride directly into his barn? We’ll be arrested.” I spread my bare palms over the wagon floor, desperate for any sign of the brooch.
“Being in prison would keep you out of the asylum, at least.”
“You’d like to see me locked up, wouldn’t you?” The headache intensifies. I grab my head, which has never felt more fragile.
A gruff sigh. “It’d be handy for keeping you in one place. Now—you’re not jumping.”
I glare at him in the dark. Then I spring from the cart, striking prickly grass and rolling down a hill. When I stop, my skirt is twisted and pain shoots from shoulder to hip, but the night is quiet.
Until a thud sounds behind me, and an oof that sounds terribly like AJ. He groans. “Whose rotten idea was this, anyway?”
“No one forced you to jump.” I’ve landed on my hand, and two of my fingers throb. I twist the new wedding band off, hanging it off the tip of my smallest finger and rubbing the swollen one.
A hiss of grass and AJ is sitting up, looking down at me in the scant moonlight. “Do you honestly think I’d leave you, Merryn?”
Me, or my inheritance? That must be why he married me.
I examine the new rip in my linen shirtwaist in the cover of darkness. Rotten brooch. Rotten pride. Had I handed it over to AJ in the tearoom, it would be in his pocket now. I turn away from him. He’s insufferable when he’s right.
I hold the gold band up to the moonlight to see what is sharp and jagged inside. It’s plain and thin, with no gem marring its shape. But…words. An inscription. I strain to see the message AJ inscribed to me.
We rise, and a flash of moonlight pierces the dark. For a brief second, I see a name.
Tamsin, my beloved.
I curl my fingers around the ring. “Who is Tamsin?”
He pauses. “My mother.”
“Oh.” The ground feels solid beneath my feet for a moment.
I stare up into AJ’s face in the darkness.
In my unsettled heart, the picture becomes clear.
It isn’t peace I’m searching for around every corner, for what I want most isn’t merely a cessation of chaos—but love.
I wish to have love cradling me through the storms, catching me when I fall.
Holding me up toward the sunlight. I wish for someone to care whether or not I’m in an asylum and to doggedly pursue me if I’m lost.
I finger the solidness of this ring that ties me to him, to something of his history. “You truly mean to keep me, don’t you?”
He blinks down at me as if I’ve lost my mind, then glances about. “Look.” He points past the gently sloping hill and there beyond the rise is a slate roof and a simple stone steeple, haloed in light. “A church.”
“Sanctuary.” I’m weary and sore now. Pliable. He tucks my hand in his arm and escorts me down the grassy hillside, through the rough-hewn double doors that are, mercifully, unbolted. In most parts of rural England, churches are a known place of refuge, which we sorely need.
We step into a sacred space—something holy that should not be tarnished with anger.
It’s a humble chapel, but it houses a magnificence, somewhere in the mix of a holy silence, the rugged stone walls, and the moon’s glow through arched stained-glass windows.
I close my eyes, slipping his mother’s ring back on my finger as a song tumbles from somewhere deep.
O gladsome Light, O grace
Of God the Father’s face,
The eternal splendour wearing,
The Son of God, the Saviour!
Tallow candles burn in each window, making it a small lighthouse to beckon visitors. I turn to AJ, who is bathed in red and yellow light, his face glowing with concern. For me.
“You seem better now,” he says, brushing a hand down my cheek, sweeping away loose hair. And I know he does not mean physically, because I look considerably worse than I did before the jump. His fingers find my spine, causing it to jolt at the touch, then relax. “Your back. It’s not stiff anymore.”
I’m not skilled at hiding my emotions. He sensed my turmoil in the cart and tried to fix it, in his very AJ way. Laughter, always his medicine, bursting the bubble of my tension. “I’m not ready to jest about…about—”
“The place which shall not be named.” A quick smile on his well-defined lips. “Very well, no more talk of it.”
My muscles loosen under his touch and I move closer instinctively, my hands on his chest. I’m fully aware of the fact that we’re legally married, and that we have every right to belong to one another.
And that I have asked him to abandon everything while making him believe he is, at best, a convenient adhesive securing all my broken pieces together.
But the image of that other man haunts the fringes of my mind.
Which marriage would be valid? The first or the second?
Well, the first one.
And the second one would cease to exist, as if it had never been. Sometimes it seems inevitable that my new self will be absorbed into the past one, the only valid version of me.
I can offer AJ nothing. Not if I love him.
No…there is one thing. “When we met that first day,” I say, laying my cheek against his chest. “I didn’t drop the book.”
“Funny. I do recall it falling from the tree where you were sitting.”
“Because I threw it.”
“You what?” He holds me at arm’s length, so I’m looking into his face.
“There was this striking gentleman on the path, about to pass me by, and…well, how else was I to gain his attention?”
His eyes sparkle. I want to kiss him.
“Just so you know,” I say. “It was convenient to marry you. But it was also wholly impractical and fun.”
His boyish delight causes warmth to bubble up in me. He watches me for a moment, his gaze darting over my face, and then he sweeps me close and kisses my forehead as if he cannot help himself.
It feels natural to stand on my toes and reach toward him. It must be the same for him as he nuzzles my face, and he kisses me. At last. I’m lifted as my arms go around his neck, and I embrace him just as eagerly. It’s contagious, this longing, pulling at me, a delicious undertow.
When I’m placed on my feet, I’m reluctant to let go, but he releases me, keeping his hands about my waist. I’m left swimming in the headiness of it.
There is no past that matters as much as the present.
“When we met, you had to trust me a great deal to marry me so quickly. And sometimes I forget what I’ve asked of you. ”
His embrace tightens. “Everything changed for me the day I met you. Surely you see that, Merryn. There aren’t words to describe what you’ve done to me.”
I bury my face into him. What was it, exactly, that made him feel so ardently? We’d talked of birds and poetry, of everyday life. I’d mentioned Lady St. Laurent, but probably not the inheritance. Probably not.
Sometimes it is possible for a person to simply love another without cause.
My chill fades in that lovely sanctuary, in that embrace, though the wind howls outside now.
Soon we lay fully clothed upon the floor between the pews, me curling into him, and he drapes my cloak over us.
I close my eyes and my pounding head spins me into dreams of kissing AJ again, then spirals into visions of a man upon the shore.
I look away from the sheer intensity of this other man’s affection.
Yet in its glow, I am at home.