Chapter 35 #2
Down the side stairs, past the stillroom with its clean glass and mint, through the green-baize door into the kitchen’s glow.
Mrs. Fogarty made a startled sound as Christine sped past, skirts caught up like a girl’s.
Out through the scullery, across the flagged yard smelling faintly of yeast and woodsmoke, into the night.
The grounds had shrugged off their darkness with relief, as if tiresome guests were a weather that would pass.
Lanterns along the terrace dissolved into a breath of gold and then nothing.
Beyond them, shapes reassembled themselves into hedges and statues and the suggestion of trees.
The moon had not yet risen high; the lake lay like a sheet of slate.
Her lungs burned, but her heart ran harder. She did not weep until the gravel curved toward the yew walk, and she knew exactly where her feet were carrying her.
He stepped out from the shadow of the hedge as if the night itself had breathed him into being.
“Christine,” Charles said.
She stopped so abruptly that the pebbles slid and muttered under her shoes. The tears she had been outrunning caught her at once, hot and angry.
“You promised.”
He lifted his hands, palms visible, a penitent’s posture with a liar’s eyes.
“I know. I know. I would not have come if it were not desperate. I hid in the little folly by the lower lawn till I saw the carriages arriving, till I knew he would be busy,” his smile, thin and frantic, flashed and failed, “then I saw you run out, and I thought, God has hands.”
“You are starving,” she said, because her mind, treacherously, had been trained from childhood to inventory need. His cheeks were hollow. His coat had been turned and turned again, his linen had once been fine and was now a ghost.
“You look as if you have eaten nothing but pride and bad luck for a week.”
“Three days,” he said, almost with pride, “but there is a way out. I have made a plan. The money you gave me, bless you for it, was almost enough. If I can reach Scotland, I can climb into a new life and never look south again. But I cannot do it on my feet. I need a horse. That is all.”
He reached for her sleeve and caught himself, let the hand fall.
“Give me a mount and I will be gone before dawn. You can tell your wolf I was never here.”
She wanted to laugh at the word, as if Tristan were a pet she had collected and not the only person who had stood between her and the room that meant to swallow her whole. The laugh turned into a sob. She pressed her fist to her mouth and swallowed it like medicine.
“If I give you a horse,” she said hoarsely, “you will sell it in the first town and drink the price.”
His eyes flashed with affront and charm.
“I will not. I swear to you, Christine, listen, this time is different. I have a friend across the border who owes me more than a little. He has a mill. Wool, honest work. He will not ask questions if I arrive with windburn and a sword behind me. I can be of use to him. I can be other than what I have been.”
He took a breath, and for a moment his expression softened into something that looked like the boy who had taught her to climb the old apple tree behind their father’s house.
“Let me try.”
She closed her eyes and, in the dark, saw Tristan’s face in the doorway, the terrible astonishment that had looked like injury.
She tasted the sweetness of a morning in Portman Square and the sharp, humiliating tang of a scandal-sheet, and a shopgirl’s voice saying Scullery Duchess with a laugh she had pretended not to hear.
She felt the way the room had turned when she said no marriage, as if she had tipped a tray of crystal and could not catch a single glass. When she opened her eyes, the night had not changed. Charles stood as he had always stood, with one foot already pointed toward escape.
“Not a horse,” she said.
His face hardened into the old blank she knew too well. “Then I am lost.”
“Not a horse,” she repeated. “A rider,” She drew a breath that felt like stepping under cold water, “two.”
He stared, and for once, even he did not have a phrase ready. “You?”
“We leave now,” she said. “If I saddle you, you will take the first turning back to London for cards. If I go beside you, you will at least behave yourself until the border.”
“Christine, be sensible,” he said, and there it was the habit that had always been in him, the urge to press her back into whatever box made his life easier, “you have a duke eating out of your hand and a house full of chandeliers. You will never get this again.”
“I know,” she said simply, and the simplicity nearly undid her.
“I may never have him again. But I will not be the woman who stood in a room and begged a man to stop being who he is and then punished him when he could not. I will not perform love as if it were a trick. If I cannot have him entire, I will not have him in halves.”
She lifted her chin and found that, absurdly, her hands had stopped shaking, “and you will not die because I chose to be brave in the wrong direction.”
“You will be ruined,” he said—truth, not cruelty.
“I have been ruined twice already,” she returned, “I know the road. It does not frighten me as much as it used to.”
He raked a hand through his hair. “What about the servants? The ball? Your—your name?”
“Names are only useful if a person inside them can breathe.”
“Tristan will follow,” he warned, “he is a hound when he chooses to be.”
A sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob escaped her. “Yes. That is the part I love. We go to the old tack room by the east gate,” she said, brisk now because if she made a plan, she could not stop to think.
“There is a stable-boy who thinks the moon speaks to him. He will not ask questions as long as I ask nicely. Two saddle horses, quiet mouths, good legs, and cloaks. We take the bridle path along the river until the road turns north. If anyone stops us, we are going to comfort a sick aunt.”
“You have grown clever,” he said, half-mocking, half-awed.
“I have grown tired of being stupid,” she said.
He looked at her as if seeing, at last, that she was not the sister he had left behind to carry his debts like shopping.
“Very well,” he said softly, “let’s fly.”
She nodded, and then, because she could not leave the place that had been the first home she remembered without touching it, she reached for the rough bark of the yew and let her fingers rest there a second, like a benediction no priest would recognize.
In that brief contact, she smuggled a prayer into the night, that the man she loved would forgive her, or at least would not bleed from this in a way he could never mend.
They moved, quick and quiet, along the hedge and down to the service path.
She did not look back at the house, though the windows called like a constellation.
In the scullery yard, the stable-boy was indeed conferring with the heavens while a cat derided him.
Christine said his name, and he came to earth at once.
“Two horses,” she said, “now please. Not the greys, the chestnuts with more sense than vanity. Bridles and plain saddles. No ribbons.” She met his widened eyes, “You did not see me.”
He did not blink. “No, my lady.”
Charles watched her with a kind of reverence that made her almost laugh; it was so late and so poor.
He took the first bridle the boy handed him and fell into the old, easy motion of buckles, straps, the practical grace of a man who had always been more comfortable with a horse than a ledger.
She swung into the other saddle without waiting to be helped and discovered that her body remembered as if it had been practicing without her.
The boy opened the small gate by the east wall. Beyond it, the path narrowed to darkness. The wind had found its way across the fields and brought the smell of water and the faintest rumor of rain.
Christine gathered the reins. For an instant, one open, mortal instant, she allowed herself to picture Tristan in the ballroom. She pictured his face when he realized she had chosen this. The thought was a blade she drew across her own heart to keep herself honest.
“Go,” she said, and put her heels to the horse.
They slipped into the dark like two lines of ink vanishing into a page already overcrowded with other people’s stories.