Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The second carriage lurched at the same moment the clouds opened again. Winston set his boots wider and caught the strap above his head. Across from him, Adeline steadied the basket of provisions with one hand and braced the other flat against the squab.
“We won’t make the turn if he drives at that rut,” she said, eyes on the wavering line of hedgerow outside.
“He won’t,” Winston answered, though the driver did, and the wheels slithered before finding purchase. “Hartley has a better head than that.”
The pace eased. Rain hammered the roof and ran down the glass in sheets.
A moment of quiet followed inside the carriage, the kind that belonged to people who had spoken freely for an hour and must now breathe.
A ham pie sat between them, rather the worse for miles.
Louisa and Cordelia’s carriage had long since gone on ahead.
Adeline and Winston’s carriage had been forced to stop when the offside horse had thrown a shoe near Hounslow, only regaining the road at a walk.
Winston told himself the choice to ride with Adeline, rather than with his mother and daughter, had been practical.
He’d said it at the door of the townhouse.
Hartley would need a steady hand on the lead team and someone to judge the road, and Cordelia would rest more if left to Louisa’s chatter.
All of that was true enough. None of it explained the way he watched Adeline now, noting the set of her mouth when the wheels struck a stone, the way she never missed a change in the horses’ breathing.
He cleared his throat. “You’ve not asked to trade places,” he said.
“I’m well here.” She folded the cloth back over the pie. “Your mother and Louisa are happier together. Louisa thinks she’s guarding her.”
“She is,” he said, before he could make it gentle. He tried again. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For the way you looked at them last night,” he said. “As if they were the whole of the world.”
Her fingers smoothed the cloth one more time, then she lifted her eyes to his. “They were,” she said simply.
They rolled on. The rain softened for a few minutes, then returned with a force that made the hedges blur.
A footman, soaked to the skin, clung to the perch behind like a stubborn limpet.
Winston rapped the ceiling to have Hartley stop long enough to take the man inside the boot. They set off again.
He meant to keep his questions for Greystone. Oswald would meet them there. Debrett’s lay in his memory like a judgment he was not sure he wanted to enforce. Yet the carriage, the rain, the unchosen quiet, these were a kind of room. He would not have another soon.
“You said before,” he began, not sure how to put it without turning it into an accusation, “that your father could be…difficult.”
She looked out at the hedge as if she could unspool the right words from the thin winter hawthorn. “He is not a man to cross,” she said at last. “He takes being alive as a kind of high office. We held to our places or we suffered for it.”
“And your mother?”
“She held to us,” Adeline said. “That was her place as she saw it. She made it so.” She glanced at him once and back to the window.
“There were nights when I went out and hid in the grounds. I’d take my book and sit under the tree at the boundary wall, just there.
” Her hand moved, marking space in the air.
“I told myself I could see across the county if I kept very still. I learned to come back only when the lamps were extinguished.”
He felt something in his chest go tight and new. The picture was clear. A girl in a thin cloak under a tree, waiting for the temperature of a house to change. “And when you came back?”
“Sometimes there was only quiet.” She folded her hands, thumb across thumb. “Sometimes…” She shook her head and left the sentence where it was.
“You were alone,” he said.
“Not as alone as my mother,” she said without heat. “She did not show it. That was the trick she taught me. We make everyone comfortable, and then perhaps the thing with teeth will lie down.”
He wanted to reach for her hand but couldn’t spare his own from holding his position against the jostling of the road.
His shoulder and hip came into contact with hers as they shifted.
She slid on the seat; her body pressed against him, and then was torn away.
Each contact brought a tightening of his breath.
A race to his pulse. He settled for adjusting the leather strap at his shoulder. “He didn’t strike you?”
“No,” she said, with a flinty dryness that told him enough. “But the words were worse.”
There wasn’t much to say to that that didn’t sound like a speech men make when they are too late. Or when they are separated by the safe distance of time and space, able to speak platitudes that mean nothing. He let the wheels talk. When he spoke again, he kept the question easy on its feet.
“Did you ever come near marriage?” he asked.
“No,” she said at once, and then seemed to hear the shape of the word in the air. A small line showed at the edge of her mouth. “Not truly near,” she amended. “I… knew what it might be. I can’t say I stood with the thing in hand.”
He didn’t point out the contradiction. He only nodded. His mind filled the space with a memory of the drawing room at St. James’s, a hand-delivered letter, a face gone pale, and the way fear could make truth look like a trick of light.
“You always wanted children,” he said, recalling her voice in the carriage the night before, the way it had softened when she cradled Louisa’s foot on her knee.
“Yes.”
“Why do you speak as if…?” He trailed off, unwilling to put a date on a life that was alive in front of him.
“As if it’s too late?” she supplied, without being unkind. “Because I cannot see it happening.”
“You’re not an old woman.”
“I’m not a young one,” she said. “And I’ve made choices that close doors.”
He looked at her for a long breath. “Doors open,” he said.
A corner of her mouth warmed, then smoothed. “Sometimes they do.”
The road dipped and rose again. Fields opened to either side, water standing in flat mirrors where ditches had given up.
Hartley had to take the next descent in a crooked path to avoid the worst of the wash.
The carriage creaked. Something ahead shouted.
Hartley hauled on the reins and the team came back under his hand in a rush of wheezing breath and flying foam.
Winston had one hand to the strap and one braced against the seat before the final jolt came. The carriage pitched once, twice, and settled then stopped so fast the footman in the boot shouted an oath.
“What is it?” Adeline asked, already leaning to the window.
Winston pulled the blind cord. Through the rain, the road ahead had ceased to be a road.
Where it ought to have curved between two old oaks, a great slump of earth had slid off the bank.
Water still ran through it, brown, muscled and impatient.
The far verge, intact, carried the deep, wet ruts of the coach that had passed on before them.
“Louisa and Cordelia’s carriage made it,” Winston said.
“And ours will not,” Adeline answered. “Can we go round?”
“Not without wings.”
Hartley’s face appeared at the side window, rain carving paths down his cheeks. “Your Grace, the lane’s gone for ten yards at least. I’ll not risk the team. There’s a vicarage a half-mile back. We passed the lane to it. Smoke in the chimney. I suggest we go beg their hearth and wait on the storm.”
“Do it,” Winston said.
They backed the team, turned them in the tightest space he’d seen Hartley take, and made for the narrow lane.
It climbed a little and then ran level along a low wall.
A square house stood at the end of it, neat and plain as a good suit.
A vicarage with a kitchen garden was tucked behind.
The gate was tied with rope. The vicar was a stooped man with quick eyes and a wife who had already put a kettle on by the time Hartley knocked.
“You’re welcome to our roof,” the vicar’s wife said at once, seeing the soaked coats. “We’ve a fire in the parlor and a second in the little room. There’s a pork joint. Say no more.”
Winston bowed his thanks. They went inside, finding immediate warmth and shelter in the little parlor with its gloriously crackling fire. They were served tea and dried themselves before the fire as best they could, the smells of cooking emanating from the kitchen tantalized them both.
Winston looked at Adeline more than once and caught her looking at him.
They shared smiles and blushes, feeling protected and safe in this snug haven they had stumbled upon.
The vicar chattered while his wife bustled in the kitchen with the help of the house’s single servant.
Both sat on a settle with the vicar in an armchair opposite.
The settee was large enough to accommodate two people, if they knew each other well.
Winston’s thigh pressed against Adeline’s.
His fingers brushed hers where she held them on her knee.
Each contact sent a frisson through Winston, set his heart to racing as though he had not touched her before.
When she spoke, he used it as an excuse to look at her.
But his eyes took in her swan-like neck.
Her delicate ears and apple cheeks. He found himself watching the movement of her lips.
The wind changed before the door opened. It struck the vicarage windows with such force that the fire guttered and flared blue. A heartbeat later came the thunder, rolling so near that the air itself seemed to shake. Adeline rose instinctively.
The parlor was close and warm, the storm beating at its edges. Winston had been speaking to the vicar in low tones when the latch lifted and the world outside rushed in on a wave of rain and cold air.
“Good heavens,” said the vicar’s wife, bustling forward. “You’ll be drowned, sir! Come in, come in at once!”