Chapter 31
Thirty-One
He was dressed in yellow buckskins and brown boots with tan fold downs. His coat was pale grey and his waistcoat was copper. Was this how he dressed for the countryside? He looked as perfect for the part as he did in his London blacks and whites.
Now he walked at her side down a sheep track. Neither of them said anything. She felt extremely stupid.
Or reckless. Or restless. Or embarrassed. Her mood might as well have been sheep’s wool, caught in the furze, stuck and tangled and blown this way and that, defenceless against the wind.
Once they were off the shore and behind the scant shelter of the shingle ridge, she turned and led them parallel to the coast, towards the harbour, almost two miles distant.
She could not take him home. Not after her reaction when he’d arrived so unexpectedly at her door.
Daniel, Joseph, her mother…they’d all cornered her with eyes full of worry and with questions—and with loyal fury for him, that fine-dressed London lord.
It was obvious enough what had happened.
Excruciating enough, her secrets revealed.
The sister, the daughter, the widow…she was only a foolish woman after all, a creature of base flesh to be seduced by height and breadth and strength.
An untrue heart to be turned by words and gestures and the burning look in the darkest of dark eyes.
He walked beside her, his hands clasped at his back, the curved rim of his hat drawn low on his brow, set firmly against the wind.
Several significant parts of her appeared to have become unmoored, were escaping on a current. His appearance had caused large, echoing gaps inside her chest where before there had been certainty.
She’d sat on the shingle bank, watching the storm approach.
The sky was wide enough to see it build, a bruise spreading.
Above her, the blue had turned to white, to silver, to grey.
The warm summer breeze had been blown away by a sharper, colder wind.
She’d known there was perhaps an hour until the rain began, perhaps less. But she hadn’t moved.
She wanted to get caught in it. To be soaked and battered, lightning overhead, the roar of thunder trying to crack the sky.
She’d wanted to feel anything that might break the numbness inside her.
“To hurt, to feel, and breathe, and live…” It was uncanny, the way his words had taken the secret feelings from inside her and offered them back to her.
Here, like a pamphleteer thrusting an uncomfortable truth under someone’s nose, shaking it in their face. Here. This is you. She didn’t want her truth to be in his hands. He was too brutal with it. Too honest. Too demanding.
He glanced up at the first few drops of rain, seeming to notice the changing weather for the first time. The droplets made dark dots on his grey coat.
She found herself saying, “Are you still on the committee?” He would say no and then everything would be easier. She wouldn’t have to admit she was glad he had come.
She was glad. She was terrified. She was angry. She was glad.
“Yes. Though I’ve been in Kent since May. I go up to town when they need me to. Things are going well. I suppose your aunt keeps you informed?”
She nodded, wrapping her fingers tighter into the shawl she held around her shoulders. “She told me she was in Kent. Near your father.”
There was a pause at the end of the sentence. One which he filled. “But she did not mention me.”
No. Not one word. Her dear aunt, trying to save her pain.
“I moved to Kent when my father did. I’ve spent the summer with them. And Tom.”
“My aunt says he has a tutor.”
“Yes. Some young man of mechanical genius.”
She couldn’t help her smile. Or the wave or something that felt almost like homesickness. “My aunt says they talk of contraptions and machines all day long and no one understands them at all.”
“The pair of them make me fear for the future.”
“And…and your father? Is he well?” She risked a glance. He was looking ahead, his face in profile, but she saw the tightening of his jaw, the crease of worry at the corner of his eye.
“He’s as well as can be expected. This divorce case…
having to give evidence…” He shook his head.
He would’ve had to make a statement too.
Allow solicitors to question him, to pry through his family’s private business, question the servants, talk openly of all the sordid details of his stepmother’s infidelities.
“It has not been easy. But my father is…strong.”
The word he settled on seemed to surprise him. She watched him frown in thought.
“I never thought so.” His voice was quiet, as though talking to himself. “I thought it was weakness. But I realise now…there are some pains too great to bear.”
He looked at her, and she could not tell if he was sorry for her, or his father, or for everything, including himself.
Had he been hurting? She’d made herself believe he couldn’t be.
It was easier that way. But he was thinner than she remembered, quieter, stiller.
It was the way working men went about their day after injury, in great pain, moving carefully but unable to lie abed with a houseful depending on them.
They wouldn’t rest anyway, even if they could.
They were too proud. They were too scared to stop.
Alfred had been like that, smiling through twisted ankles and sliced thumbs and wracking coughs, claiming it was nothing, no, he was never sick.
She was like that.
Lord Cotereigh was too. He’d glower through it. He’d wither a head cold with a snub. On the inside, she smiled at the thought.
“And your uncle?” she asked. “My aunt said he had left London.”
“Yes.”
“She said you cut him. At Lady Weeton’s ball.
And Sir Handley, Mr Beckford, Lord Pembroke, Lord Leighton…
you all turned your backs, and then it went around the room.
The whole room turned its back.” Her aunt had written two full sides to describe it.
Madelaine had reread the pages until they smudged.
He stood alone in the centre of that vast room, the whole ton giving him a cut of such breathtaking severity I could scarce believe it.
He was red as beets, jaw opening and closing, floundering like a fish.
Forgive me if I seem to be describing the scene with too much glee, I wouldn’t normally take satisfaction in anyone’s distress, but Maddie, if you’d been there…
“Yes. I cut him. My friends were good enough to follow suit.”
“I wish I’d seen it.”
His smile was grim. Whatever he felt, it was too complicated to be pleasure. “A surgery long overdue. If he has any sense, he’ll go to the Continent and take his sister with him. Perhaps the Americas.”
“Well done.” The insistent pattering of the rain was as loud as her words. Drops clung to the brim of his hat. “I am glad.”
His step paused, his eyes on her. She was frightened he would take hold of her hand.
She increased her pace, bending her head as the wind decided to drive the rain horizontal. “Come on. We’re still a mile away.”
Even the hardy shepherds had retreated. There were normally a handful, dotted around the marsh on their ponies.
Now they’d taken refuge in their huts and cottages.
She could have taken shelter at one of those—she’d done it before—but she had a different destination in mind, and it wasn’t the tavern at the harbour or the cottage of anyone she knew.
She did not want company. She did not want to stand dripping before some poor housewife’s fire, making polite apologies, sipping tea, all her neighbours assessing the man at her side.
Out here she was free—yes, exactly as he’d said. Free and wild. A woman alone—she could walk these lands alone. No one questioned it. She’d done it since she was a girl. She did it as a widow. Everyone was used to it.
Now the storm drove prying eyes away, let her walk unquestioned with a man.
The wind masked their words. The rain buried them.
They alone were alive out here; they alone, without society, clothes dark and dripping, hair flattened, rain and salt mingling, the taste of the sky on her tongue, breathing the sea with every breath… a wild baptism.
The rain fell even harder, a grey-brown curtain, blurring the way. Lord Cotereigh darted glances at her, worried for her. He began to unbutton his coat. “Madelaine…Mrs Ardingly…” She touched his hand, stopping him, giving a shake of her head.
She was fine. She burnt on the inside. Every breath seemed ten times its normal size. She was light. She could fly away. She was steady and strong as rock.
“Are you really sorry?” She had to shout to be heard over the wind and the rain, not slowing her pace but increasing it, Lord Cotereigh hurrying after her.
“Am I sorry?” He dragged a hand across his dripping face, water in rivulets down his jaw. “Yes!” He shouted too, the word angry but clean with it, pure and certain.
“Good. Do you have sealegs?”
“What?”
The harbour was ahead, yellow light flickering in fisherman’s shacks, wind making masts and ropes scream.
It was good the tide was low. All the sails had been furled, but the heavy rain-slicked bundles shuddered, canvas trying to break free.
The harbour was deserted. Every sane person was inside.
Madelaine strode to the jetty, onto the creaking wood.
“Stop! For God’s sake, where are you going?”
“I have a boat.”
She didn’t look behind her but let the wind carry her words. She heard his heavy tread on the boards.
“A boat?” His tone said, Are you crazy?
“My brother’s boat. It has a cabin.”
He might not be able to hear her, but he followed, his own protests drowned by the weather.
She reached the gangplank. Only a little water pooled low around the boat’s hull, the keel sunk in mud.
It was upright, more or less, moored tightly along its length but shuddering, groaning, as the weather sought to set it free.
Lord Cotereigh swore as she stepped onto the deck, but he followed, his expression stormier than the weather. If he ordered it to stop, it would probably listen. She laughed, which only made his scowl darker.
“Can you swim?” she asked.
“Yes, but—”
She crossed the deck, confirming the tide was heading in, swirls of dirty, foamy water exploring the glistening rain pocked mud. “Look there,” she said, pointing at nothing.
Already convinced she was a madwoman, he only gave her another frown before doing as she said.
She leant far over the low rail, and so did he, straining to see whatever it was she saw.
“No, a bit further…do you see that mud?”
“Yes. Why—”
She pushed him in.