Chapter 16
Adrian had not meant to come. He had sat alone in his study with his father’s letters spread before him as if he would somehow materialize from the script.
Such a loss, both your parents at once.
The words were turning over and over in his skull like a wheel down a hill that would not stop, until the walls of the room felt too near, and he had found himself in the corridor outside her door before he had decided to walk there at all.
She did not seem surprised to find him standing on the other side of it, his hand raised to knock. She only stepped back, and let him in without a word.
He sat on her bed, turning his hands over in his lap.
“I told you once I don’t often speak of the years before,” he said at last. “I find tonight I cannot go on not speaking of it. I want to share more, tell you the whole of it.”
She sat next to him and waited.
“Before the accident, I was not the man you’d take me for now.
Reckless. Idle. I loved a good party, and trouble.
Gambling, the usual things young men do.
My father had very nearly given up hope of me.
I drank too much, wagered too freely, kept company that did neither of us credit.
” He gave a short, humorless breath. “You’ve heard the story of the horse at White’s. Do you remember?”
“I do.”
“There were a dozen worse than that one, and my father heard of most of them. Probably more.”
“And the night itself? A duel you had said?”
“It started as a simple quarrel. Drunk, foolish, over nothing that would bear repeating now. It ended in a challenge. There was a duel, to be fought at dawn, and I was too far gone in drink and pride to think of refusing it.”
He made himself go on, because stopping now felt worse than finishing.
“Someone…a friend, frightened for me…sent word to my parents. They set out through the night to reach me before it could happen. Bad weather. A bad road. Cassandra was with them, because there was no time to leave her behind when the message came.” He stopped, his eyes threatening to spill unshed tears. “Their carriage never arrived.”
“Oh Adrian,” she said, taking his hands in hers.
“I stood on that ground at dawn entirely unharmed. The duel came to nothing…Some sense returned to both of us before a shot was fired. I only learned afterward, hours afterward, that they had died on the road coming to stop me from a fight that never even bloody happened.”
He heard his own voice go rough on the last of it.
“And Cassandra woke with the dizziness, and no memory of the night at all.”
“Are you sure?”
“None. I have let her keep that. I have never told her the whole of it, not the duel, not that they died coming for me and not for any other reason. She believes it a plain accident, bad luck on a bad road, and I have let her believe it because I could not think what good the truth would do her, only what harm.”
He waited, then, for her to draw back from him. He braced for it the way he had braced against anyone who might come close enough to learn the truth about him, certain that once said aloud it would sit between them exactly as heavy and as damning as it sat in his own chest.
She did not draw back.
“A bad road and worse weather killed your parents,” she said, quiet, calm, and entirely certain.
She was like cool water on a hot summer’s day.
“Not a reckless boy who was, in the end, unharmed by his own foolishness. Grief and guilt feel a great deal alike, Adrian. Near enough that most men never trouble to tell them apart. But they are not the same thing, whatever guilt would let you believe.”
“You say that very plainly, for a thing most men can’t manage to believe of themselves.”
“I say it as one who has had cause to learn it,” she said, and something crossed her face before he could note it.
“Your late husband’s passing?”
“No,” she said, her voice tight and strained. “Something else.”
He did not press her because he did not want her to shut him out. This was progress; whatever that could lead to, he did not know. He wanted to savor whatever closeness had come between them.
“Goodnight, Honoria,” he said, and he saw the same look cross her face as he walked to the door.
“Goodnight, Adrian,” she said.
“There is another matter,” he said quickly, unable to leave. He turned to face her. “There is something I find I no longer wish to carry alone. I would like to share it with my wife.”
She rose to her feet and met him in front of the large fireplace.
He told her of the ledgers, the entries he could not place, Mr. Coombe’s answers thinning the longer he pressed them, the invisible repairs in the nearby village, the fear that had settled in him this past fortnight that the man who had kept Ashcroft’s books since his father’s day might have been quietly bleeding it for longer than he cared to guess.
“I want your counsel on it, if you’ll give it. I have gone years managing everything alone because it was easier than trusting anyone with it. I find I have lost the habit of wanting to. I think you are someone I can trust. Will you think on it?”
“This is a lot for me to triage,” she said as she ran a hand through her long brown locks and began to pace. “I will need to mull this over, but you can trust me. I will help you in this.”
“I am glad,” he said, still knowing there was some truth she was still holding back, though he wanted to press. Instead, he left.
He was still turning that over, some hours later in his room, when a soft knock came at his chamber door.
It was Betsan, twisting her hands in her apron, her face apologetic in the way of a servant who knows she should not be disturbing her master so late.
“Begging your pardon, my lord, truly I am sorry to trouble you at this hour. Only there’s a thing I thought you ought to know, before tomorrow comes.” She took a breath, as though bracing herself for the saying of it. “Tomorrow is an important day.”
“Is it? What would that be?”
“It is the countess’s birthday, my lord. Tomorrow. And she’s told me plain she doesn’t wish to keep it.”