Chapter 15
Betsan dressed her a few evenings later, with the same easy chatter as always, and asked, as Nell had known she would, about what happened at the goldsmith’s. She had prepared herself for this. She was ready.
“I saw you come out looking so pale, my lady. I’ve been fretting over it a full week. I hope it wasn’t ill news.”
“Only a clasp that wanted mending,” Nell said, already turned to the glass, the lie coming smooth and practiced now, worn into a groove by repetition the way her father had always warned her lies would be if she let them sit too long unused. “Nothing to trouble over.”
“Ah, that makes sense.” Betsan took it and moved on, satisfied, chattering already of ribbon and slippers.
And it was only the warmth of her, the easy, unquestioning gladness with which she accepted whatever her mistress told her, that caught Nell off guard, as it always did.
It made her feel guilty for the lie, her stomach tight and sour.
She looked hard into the glass so the girl would not see what it cost her to be loved so simply by someone she was.
“I nearly forgot, my lady! I was looking in the book below, the one Mrs. Scott keeps for the family’s days, and I saw tomorrow is a special day.”
“It is?”
“Of course! Why, your birthday falls tomorrow! I’ve half a mind to beg some flowers off the hothouse for you myself.”
“I don’t wish to bother anyone with it this year,” Nell said sharply, not remembering her fake birthday, and softened it after with something about the lateness of the season for flowers, her ears ringing as she spoke.
The day in the book belonged to Honoria Vane, not to her. It was just one more borrowed thing among so many, and she found she had no appetite left for celebrating a birth that was not her own.
I must find a way to escape this masquerade, and yet it is the last thing I want.
It was the study she could not leave behind, dressing that night, however hard she tried to fix her mind on the evening ahead.
All he had told her. How close she had let him come to kissing her.
The step back she had made herself take at the very last inch, when everything in her had wanted the opposite of stepping back. It pained her to do so.
I could not let him kiss me, thinking of me as someone that I am not. He does not deserve that.
***
By the time they set out for Truro, she was already raw from emotion, and the assembly did nothing to mend it. It was a far larger affair than the Trevanions’ dinner had been. By her estimation, half the county packed into one bright, candle-blazing room.
There were more eyes than she could account for, any one of which might belong to someone who had once passed through Plymouth and marked her face the way Mr. Greaves had marked it years before she’d thought to notice.
She kept to the edges of the room as much as courtesy allowed, and waited, all evening, to be caught out. Instead, she watched.
She watched Cassandra dance a slow set with Tristan close at her elbow the entire time, his hand ready to steady her though she scarcely seemed to need it.
Nell was so proud of all she had achieved in such a short time, and it was plain to anyone that the two of them had grown thoroughly attached to each other.
When the music changed, her husband was suddenly at her side. He led Nell out of the shadows, without asking, his hand simply there and hers in it before she’d thought to weigh the wisdom of accepting, husband or not.
For the length of that dance, she forgot the room entirely. She let herself fall into his strong, broad arms, and be guided through the dance like a fairy princess. She breathed in his scent, savoring notes of pine and peat and moss.
He was breathtaking, and he was her husband.
She somehow forgot Mr. Greaves, forgot the goldsmith, forgot every reason she had for keeping her guard raised.
She was aware of nothing but the touch of his hand at her waist, the way he watched her rather than the other dancers, and how very little their marriage resembled the arrangement it had begun as.
The dance ended, and the spell was broken. An elderly gentleman, kindly and visibly deep in his cups, caught Adrian’s arm as they came off the floor and Cassandra and Tristan met them. He pressed it with the warmth of a man delivering condolences he believed himself overdue in giving.
“Never had the chance to say it to your face, my lord, you being so long from town,” he said with a clap on his shoulder. “Such a loss, both your parents at once, and in such a manner. Terrible thing. Terrible. Your father was a great earl.”
He meant no harm by it. Nell understood that even as she watched the color go entirely out of Adrian’s face.
“You’ll forgive us,” Adrian said with a nod, in a voice gone flat and hard as struck iron, already turning for the door, already calling for the carriage before the old man had fully released his arm.
Within minutes they were in it, and gone.
He did not speak the whole drive home.
Cassandra held his hand in the dark of the carriage, saying nothing either, her own face gone quiet.
There was nothing to say, no comfort to give in such a moment.
Nell watched him stare at a point somewhere past the window that held nothing at all.
She understood then that what he carried was not grief exactly.
Grief healed, in time, however slowly. This was a wound that had never once been let to close.
Back at the house she could not settle. She undressed, she let Betsan brush out her hair, she lay down and rose again within the quarter hour, restless in a way sleep would do nothing to answer. She tried a novel to no avail.
I cannot think straight. I need to speak to him!
At last she crossed to her door, meaning to go and find him wherever he’d shut himself away, and opened it.
And he was standing on the other side of it, his hand already raised to knock.