Chapter 4
He read the letter again two days later.
My Dear Adrian,
I have been informed that you buried yourself so deep in Cornwall that your own solicitor forgets where you are.
Unfortunately, you can no longer hide, old friend.
I shall come and see for myself what has become of you.
Expect me within the fortnight. Do not write back to dissuade me. I have survived worse than your temper.
Your Friend,
T.M.
PS I am writing you as a whole man, more or less. They patched the leg well enough. I only limp when it rains, but we do live in England. So, you may draw your own conclusions about my general state.
He could hear Tristan saying the words, the same unbothered cadence, as though he hadn’t spent the last four years fighting in a war. He held the letter and found, with some surprise, that his hand was not quite steady.
Tristan belongs to another era, my former life. Back in London when I was reckless and rudderless. Consuming too much brandy with too little sense, a path that ended on a stretch of icy road with a curricle on its side and a woman screaming bloody murder...
And I walked away with nothing worse than a scar along my ribs, and the world I knew vanished into thin air. Tristan went to war. I went to Cornwall, my own sort of barricade. We have been busy, corresponding just enough to remain friends…and now he means to visit me.
Adrian realized, standing there with the letter still clasped in his hand, that he wanted to see him.
It was not an obligatory visit from some solicitor, or business matter to be handled.
It would be a respite from all the ledgers, the tenants, the marriage now three hours from being made.
He was still holding the letter when Mr. Coombe knocked and let himself in without waiting for an answer, as was his habit.
“Everything is at the ready, my lord.”
“Ready?” Adrian folded the letter and set it inside his coat, against his chest, as though it might slip away from him if he didn’t keep it close. “You make it sound like a dinner party.”
“The clergyman has arrived,” he said, paying no mind to Adrian’s dry humor. “Mrs. Scott has seen to the chapel. As you know, the special license spares us the reading of banns and the gathering of half the county to witness it, which I confess I consider its virtue.”
“Indeed.”
“Shall we, my lord? The coach is ready to take us now.”
“Lead the way.”
***
The chapel at Ashcroft was small. It had never held more than family and the servants who’d worked there long enough to be included in services. Today, it held even fewer than that. There was Mr. Coombe, the clergyman, and Mrs. Scott.
She stood at the back of the chapel with her hands folded neatly behind her back, her face staring blankly ahead. Mr. Coombe, standing a little apart, watched the proceedings the way he watched a ledger balance, satisfied, and likely thinking of the next column.
And then, there was Lady Vane.
She had dressed plainly for the occasion in a simple ivory frock. Her dark hair was pinned up elegantly, if plainly. There was no reason for anything else. No family members or friends to remark on finery, a wedding no one outside these walls would ever hear described.
She stood very straight before the clergyman with her hands folded in front of her, that same calm he had noticed two days before when they met.
It was not the result of nerves pushed down, but the composure of a strong woman who would never give anyone the satisfaction of watching her hands shake. Adrian appreciated that.
The service would not take long. He supposed they generally did not when there was no audience to perform it for.
When the book was set before her to sign, Adrian watched her hand hover a moment above the page.
It was a strange thing, but not long. Mr. Coombe nor the clergyman seemed to notice it at all, but it was long enough that Adrian did.
It is that same small hesitation I noticed in the driveway. When I said her name, she paused as if it were a stranger’s. I suppose this is just a tired woman, signing away a name that isn’t fully hers yet. There is nothing in that worth remarking on.
He put the thoughts away and focused on getting through the present moment. Instead, he looked down at the ring as he slid it on her finger. It was his mother’s.
Mr. Coombe produced it that morning, and Adrian realized he had no part in its selection. He did not even know if it was customary to use an heirloom, or if he ought to have bought new. But looking down at the fine gold band, he did not regret the omission.
He took her hand to slide it on, and felt, with a jolt that went through him more sharply than he would have liked. Her hand was not the soft, uncalloused hand of a lady. There was strength in it, years of work.
How strange, he thought again, until he looked up, and her eyes met his.
She was quite attractive, in that plain sort of way that first struck him.
As he held her hand in his, he could not remember the last time he had touched another person with anything like gentleness.
Four years of handshakes with tenants and solicitors, of lifting his sister’s basins, of signing his name where Mr. Coombe’s finger pointed and he said “here”.
Nothing that had asked tenderness of him, or received it.
It unsettled him more than it ought to have, for a thing that lasted perhaps three seconds.
I will need to inform her that this will be a marriage in name only, and to also remind myself.
***
The formal dining room consisted of a long table and only two chairs. Each movement was impossibly loud in the cavernous space, the scrape of silver against fine porcelain, the quiet tick of the tall clock in the hallway, and the heavy, stifling silence that stretched between husband and wife.
Adrian felt strange that they sat at a table meant for twenty, yet knew a wedding was entitled to a formal dining space.
We are separated by enough dark, polished mahogany to host an entire delegation, he thought to himself.
Footmen moved like shadows along the perimeter, serving soup that had far too much salt.
Adrian barely touched his plate, favoring the wine.
When it came time for the second course, he moved the pheasant around aimlessly until it was cleared.
Dessert was brought, a light cake with fruit and cream, and Adrian knew the time had come.
On the carriage ride back from the chapel that morning, he had composed his speech. It was an unpleasant task, but a necessary one.
With a slight flick of his wrist, Adrian signaled. “That will be all. Leave the wine on the table, and you may close the doors.”
The staff bowed and withdrew without a sound, the heavy oak doors clicking shut behind them.
For a moment, the silence rushed back into the hollow room, thicker now without the distraction of servants moving about.
Adrian leaned back, folding his hands over his linen napkin, his posture rigid as a soldier’s.
"I imagine today has been...taxing for you," Adrian began, his voice flat, measured, and entirely empty of any warmth.
She looked up, meeting his gaze over the flames of the tapers.
“I will be brief," he continued, striking the tone he had practiced all morning. “Our signatures are on the register, the legalities are settled, and the world has seen what it needed to see. But behind these doors, we must be clear about what this union is.”
“Oh,” she said softly, setting down her wine glass and looking at him with those deep blue eyes.
“You should understand what this marriage is, and is not, Lady Ashcroft,” he said as he watched her face tighten for a fraction of a second. “You need not worry. It is a matter of name. Nothing more. You have your own apartments, as any wife of mine would.”
“The room is more beautiful than I could have imagined.”
“Very well, then. I will at least have the adjoining rooms opened to you. I’ll not have it said I keep my countess in a single borrowed room like a poor relation.”
“I understand.”
“And, I will make no physical claim on you. Not tonight. Not after.”
She only looked at him for a moment, steady, unhurried, the candlelight catching the dark of her navy eyes as she held the taper in her hand. Then, she turned her gaze to her room.
“Goodnight, Adrian,” she said over her shoulder, and sauntered from the room.
Not my lord. Not Lord Ashcroft.
That would have been the way a newly made countess ought to address her husband, of all but three hours.
Just his name, plain, as though they were two ordinary people arriving at the end of an ordinary day and had nothing more remarkable to settle between them than the hour.
As if he were some dock worker, or a friend.
No one had said it to him so simply in four years.
His own name, without weight hung on it, without the careful distance people had learned to keep since the accident.
It rang in his ears as though he were not a man half the county whispered about, not a house in mourning for a marriage that had never quite been permitted to end its grieving.
It went past every guard he kept, the ones he’d built so carefully, and so long ago he’d half-forgotten he was still holding them up, and landed somewhere he had believed closed for good.
He wanted, absurdly, to keep her there a moment longer.
To say something that would make her say his name again. He said nothing of the kind.
“Goodnight, my lady,” he said instead from the threshold, and turned before the wanting could get any further hold of him.
He had nearly reached the turn of the gallery when a sound stopped him. It was low at first, something he might have mistaken for the house settling. Then it rose from the East Wing, shrill and cold. It was his sister’s voice, thin and frightened.
“The horses. Someone stop the horses.”
The same words, every time.
Someone. Stop. The. Horses.
Four years, and always the same four words.
Words she had screamed on a night she swore to him that she could not remember at all, not in waking hours.
Only in her nightmares did it come back to her, whole and merciless and mean.
It was a cruel thing, for such a sweet, small girl to be assaulted while she slept, and she could not defend herself against it.
“The horses. Someone stop the horses!” she cried out, her voice rising.
He crossed to her door and stood there with his hands flat against the cold wood, the way he had a hundred times before.
He did not go in. He never did. On nights like this, he had learned that waking her only trapped the horror inside her a while longer, a sort of sleep paralysis.
It was kinder to let it run its course and be gone by morning.
It was always gone by morning, leaving her only with the exhaustion of a restless night and none of the memory.
He stood there silently until her voice quieted, until the small broken breaths gave way to the even cadence of real sleep, and then a while longer than that, because some part of him needed to be certain she was through it before he could make himself walk away.
When at last he turned from the door, he found he was not alone in the gallery.
His wife stood still at her own door, a candle in her hand. The light cast gold across her face, leaving the rest of the corridor in shadow. She had not left her doorway, nor gone in. She had not called out, had not asked what the sound meant or whether he required assistance.
She had merely stood in silent vigil and watched him. Without a word or acknowledgment, he turned on his heel and walked down the hall to his quarters. He shut the door and stood against it for a moment, the cool of the wood comfortable on his back.
He crossed to the window rather than the bed, not yet ready for the dark to close over him entirely.
The curtains were still open from the evening, and beyond the pane Cornwall lay black and enormous.
The moor rolling off toward a sea he couldn’t see but could hear, faint and constant, the way he’d heard it every night of his life without once troubling to listen properly.
A thin moon hung low over the water, laying a pale seam across it, and somewhere out past the park a fox called once and went quiet. The wind moved in the old elms below with a sound like a held breath being let out slowly.
He thought of her candle in the dark corridor, and the stillness of her, and found he could not decide whether he was grateful for it or unsettled by it, and suspected, standing there with the glass cool under his palm, that it would be a long while yet before he managed to tell the two apart.
He undressed in the dark rather than ring for anyone, folded his coat over the chair by rote, and lay a long while on top of the counterpane before he thought to get beneath it, listening to the sea he could not see and turning her stillness over in his mind until, sometime near dawn, it finally let him sleep.