Chapter Twenty Five
Kate swayed in her seat, as lightheaded and dizzy as if all the air had been sucked out of the room. Her hands clutched the handkerchief threaded through them so tightly that she was surprised the delicate linen had not torn clean through. “What?” she whispered.
Andrew skewered her with that vivid, blue-eyed stare. “Have I been somehow unclear?”
“But that’s—that’s just—” Preposterous. Wasn’t it?
The last dregs of the breath that had grown stale in her lungs shuddered out, and odd little starbursts danced around the edges of her vision.
“You’re wrong,” she said on a sharp inhale, struggling to draw breath back into her starved lungs.
“You’re just…just wrong.” He had to be wrong.
Another jab of his knife in her direction, as if his patience had worn thin. “If you had had to endure the sheer volume of lovelorn sighs and disconsolate moping as I have, you would know better than that,” he said.
“I do know!” Kate said, jolting up from her chair once more to slam her palms down upon the table, locking elbows which wanted to buckle beneath her.
“I do know! You—you haven’t been to Longthorpe Manor in years!
How could you possibly know as much, when I—” When she hadn’t. When she hadn’t even suspected.
“Because the boy had been desperately in love with you for half his life, possibly longer. He’s spent years and years mooning over you.
” He tore into the last pastry upon his plate.
“Don’t you think that if he were interested in marrying Miss Applegate, he would be dancing attendance upon her at every available opportunity?
And yet”—the final bit of pastry demolished, Andrew kicked back his chair and rose to his feet—“this very morning I was obliged to step over his prone body on my way into the house, because for some godforsaken reason he’d chosen to sleep on the steps.
He has got lodgings of his own, Kate, only a few streets away.
But he slept here the night through, on cold stone.
Why do you think that is?” Andrew straightened the lapels of his coat, reached for his tea and downed the last of it.
“Rhetorical question,” he said as Kate fumbled for an answer.
“I know the answer already even if you do not care to see it.”
The faintly censorious tone he’d employed scraped raw Kate’s last nerves. “Did you come only to condemn me?”
“No,” he said, blinking in surprise at the accusation.
“I came for breakfast. Hadn’t even the faintest idea you were in town.
But I am about to be late for an appointment, so I must ask you to excuse me.
You can keep the handkerchief if you like.
” A brief bow, and he turned on his heel and stalked right out of the dining room as abruptly as he’d entered it, with no apparent care or thought to the havoc he had wreaked upon Kate’s already turbulent state of mind.
From the foyer, she heard the front door open once more. Andrew muttered an annoyed, “Get up, you cork-brained ninny. People will talk if you’re sprawled out here much longer, and you know how Devon despises gossip.”
A dull thump and a pained groan followed, as of someone being roused from slumber by the advent of a booted foot to the midsection. “Drew?” Elliot said groggily, in a confused mumble heavily laden with the grit of sleep. “What are you doing here?”
“Came for breakfast. And told Kate the truth while I was at it, as you ought to have done years ago.”
A queer scrabbling sound, and Elliot’s voice came again, significantly sharper and more lucid than it had been only moments again. “You didn’t,” he said, in tones of encroaching horror. “Say you didn’t.”
Kate closed her eyes against the sting of fresh tears. Sank once more into her seat, folded her arms upon the table, and rested her head upon them.
“Someone had to,” Andrew said. “And I’ve endured rather too much of your melodramatic nonsense to willingly stomach any more. For God’s sake, Elliot, you’ve dragged that poor girl all the way to London, and she thinks you intend to marry someone else!”
Not anymore she didn’t. It ought to have made her happy to know he wouldn’t be marrying Miss Applegate after all, but instead she only felt…
confused. Betrayed. And so very, very stupid.
Possibly there was anger buried beneath it all, too, but in this moment, in this dreadful, horrible moment, there was only room within her for mortification and grief and shame.
Distantly, she heard the front door close, muffling the voices without, and the distinct click of footsteps as Mrs. Norris came once more into the room to begin the process of clearing the breakfast table.
“That’s quite enough of that,” she said with a disapproving cluck as she swept away Andrew’s dish.
“You oughtn’t have to hear it. My word, one would think they were still children, with how those boys do bicker amongst themselves.
” Her voice shifted into a sympathetic coo as she placed her free hand lightly upon Kate’s shoulder from across the table. “More tea, dear?”
Oh, Lord. Mrs. Norris knew, too. Did everyone know? Everyone but her? Exactly how blind had she been all these years?
“Thank you, but no,” Kate croaked into the pillow of her arms beneath her head. “If you don’t mind, Mrs. Norris, I think I will go back up to bed. I’m not feeling at all the thing at the moment.”
“No, I don’t imagine you are,” Mrs. Norris said, her voice warm and soft as her hand squeezed Kate’s shoulder gently. “I shall make your excuses for you. No one could blame you for taking a bit of time to yourself. As long as you need, mind. Hodges and I will guard your peace for you.”
Kate dabbed at her eyes with the cuff of her sleeve, discarding the balled-up handkerchief upon the table as she lifted her head once more.
“That’s very kind of you,” she said, “considering…well, you know.” Whose house she occupied.
At whose table she sat, whose food she ate, and whose hospitality she enjoyed.
“It’s worth remembering,” Mrs. Norris said as she turned to sweep off toward the kitchens, “that Hodges and I are employed by the duke, and the duke alone. Lord Elliot, too, could use that reminder, I feel—and Hodges and I will be more than pleased to give it to him.”
∞∞∞
The persistent grey of the sky had put the day into a timeless turn of hours that felt as though they stretched out endlessly.
Somewhere in Kate’s room there was a clock, marking the time that had passed with a distant, relentless ticking away of seconds.
But she had not glanced at it once since she had virtually crawled upstairs after breakfast and heaved herself into bed, feeling as though she’d aged a hundred years since she had first come down.
She had only lain in bed, sinking into the soft mattress beneath her and staring up at the damask bed curtains hanging above her.
But the peace she had sought remained stubbornly elusive.
The room was thick with a heavy, stultifying silence—but her thoughts were so loud, so cacophonous, that they pulsed in her ears like shouts.
Eventually she had buried her head beneath her pillow in a vain effort to muffle them.
It hadn’t muted the race of her thoughts, but it had muffled the knock that had come upon her door.
She hadn’t heard it at all, and thus she found herself startled clear out of her wits when Mrs. Norris gently shook her shoulder.
“Beg pardon, dear,” the older woman said softly. “But you have got a caller.”
Kate’s heart stuttered through several frantic beats as she pushed the pillow aside and shoved her elbows beneath her to push herself upright. “Elliot?”
“No, dear. It’s Lady Crewe who has come to call.”
Rebecca. Kate blew out a breath and collapsed once more upon the tangled nest of covers her restless thrashing had produced. “I’m not coming down,” she said.
A soft voice from the doorway. “That’s quite all right. Might I come in, instead?”
Kate closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “If you’ve come on Elliot’s behalf—”
“I haven’t. We had an appointment today, don’t you recall? We were meant to visit my favorite bookseller and then go for ices.”
Lord. She had forgotten it entirely. “But that wasn’t supposed to be until two,” she said.
“It’s half two now,” Rebecca said, and she gave a polite nod to Mrs. Norris as the woman backed out of the room, sensing that Rebecca wasn’t going to be summarily ejected. “I became concerned when you did not arrive, so I came to fetch you myself.”
So late already? How many hours had she been rotting in bed? How many more would she likely have continued? There was a part of her—a small and petty part—that wanted to be something less than pleasant. This woman was Elliot’s friend, after all, and at the moment that made her suspect.
But Rebecca had never been anything other than kind and welcoming to her, and so Kate bit back a sigh, sank down once more, dropped her pillow back over her head and said, “Honestly, Rebecca, I don’t feel like doing much of anything today, if you must know.”
The muffled sound of footsteps approaching. Rebecca lifted the corner of the pillow carefully to peer beneath it. “If you might be amenable to a very small piece of advice,” she said, with a wrinkle of her nose, “you look a mess.”
“That’s not very nice of you. And it’s not advice, besides.”
“No; that was an observation. The advice is that order begets order. Presently, you are so far beyond disorder that I’m not certain there’s even a word for it.
So let’s put you back in order, and perhaps you will begin to feel ordered once more.
And once you feel ordered…well, I would still like to visit the book shop, though the ices might not suit the weather.
It does look like we’re in for a downpour sooner or later. ”
“I can’t leave the house,” Kate said, snatching for the pillow as Rebecca lifted it away from her face. “Elliot—”