Chapter 19
“Who was he?” Adrian asked on the ride home, whispering in her ear.
“A tradesman,” Nell said, the lie smooth as silk. “He mistook me for someone else.”
“I see.”
“A customer of his, gone unpaid, from before I was married. It was nothing.”
He let it go, the way he let most of what she gave him go now, and she hated, as she watched his face settle back into unworried ease, how easily he trusted her.
She had not told him the truth. She could not.
The man had come from her late—no, from Honoria’s late husband’s creditors. They had been sent north to find the widow Vane wherever she’d gotten herself to. And somehow, they had found her at a fair in a Cornish market town three days’ hard ride from anywhere she’d have expected to be traced.
How they had come by her direction at all she could not say. It hardly mattered how. Just another loose end from Honoria that was looped around her neck.
That night, long after the thrill of the day and the sugar had worn off, she sat alone with the one thing she had carried through every place she’d ever hidden in.
She hugged her father’s small case, worn soft at the corners, the instruments inside it kept clean and honed though she had not had proper cause to use them since Plymouth.
He had taught her to close a wound. He had taught her, too, that fear was a thing a person worked through rather than around them.
She took a deep breath. She knew that a surgeon who let her hands shake before a cut had already lost the patient, and that the only cure for shaking hands was to make them work anyway, once, and then again, until the shaking learned it wasn’t in charge.
She turned the case over in her lap and let herself remember being brave, deliberately, the way she’d once made herself remember it before a difficult surgery, because she understood she was going to need every scrap of it before this was done.
She could no longer look away from the shape of things.
Adrian believed the danger had passed them. It was all so clean, wasn’t it? Mr. Coombe fled, the thief exposed and gone, the worst of it behind him and a trusted man of business left to set the accounts right.
And that man was Mr. Greaves. He had no notion that the man he’d handed his ledgers to with such relief was the mastermind behind everything he’d lost. Mr. Greaves would go on quietly stripping Ashcroft bare, all with a smile on his face for as long as no one thought to look past Mr. Coombe’s flight to the mind that had driven it.
I and I am the only soul under this roof who knows the whole of it.
She could not warn him without telling him everything; she had gone over it time and again.
She would divulge her true name, her trade, the forged register, the whole rotten foundation the marriage was crumbling on.
She sat a long while with that, turning it the way she’d turned the case in her lap, and by the time the candle had burned low she had decided.
I will tell him. Whatever the cost, I need to be honest with him.
***
In the morning, she went to find him, resolve gathered as tightly as she could hold it, and found him already at his desk.
With Mr. Greaves beside him.
The two of them bent close over the ledgers, Mr. Greaves at his ease in her husband’s house, one hand resting on the desk as though he had long since stopped thinking of himself as a guest in it. She turned before either man could see her, and went back the way she had come.
But Mr. Greaves had seen.
She heard him a moment later, murmuring some excuse to Adrian, a word about the light, about needing air, nothing that would raise a question, and then his step behind her in the hall.
“My lady.”
She stopped, because there was nowhere to go that would not have looked like flight. He came close enough that she had to hold very still not to step back from him, and dropped, for the first time since she left her home, every last pretense of idle civility.
“I have wanted you since your father’s sickroom, Miss Frayne, and I find I am done circling the fact of it.” His voice was low, almost gentle, which was somehow worse than if he had shouted it.
“You barely know me!”
“But I know you. I have been following the pretty little girl with interest her whole life.”
“You are disgusting!”
“You know by now it was I who set the creditors on you. I who hold every thread in this. The register, the name, the whole of it. There is one way out of the noose I’ve knit for you, and only one.”
“Say it plainly, then. I am tired of your games.”
“You will leave Ashcroft. You will come to me…
as my wife. A false name in a parish book is no marriage at all, whatever a clergyman said over it.
There is nothing there to undo, nothing the law need trouble itself with.
You need only vanish quietly and marry me elsewhere, under your own true name this time.
As insurance, I will keep the proof of the other for the rest of both our lives.
” His hand found her wrist, closing hard enough to convey his intentions.
“Exposure is only for a woman foolish enough to refuse me, Nell. I would so much rather not be foolish with you. There are so many other things for us to focus on.”
She held very still under his hand, her mind already working.
There is no version of this where I do not lose everything, only versions where I lose it slower or faster.
His eyes suddenly went past her shoulder, down the length of the corridor.
Betsan stood at the far end of it, still and watching.
Mr. Greaves’s hand opened at once, releasing her wrist as smoothly as if it had never closed on it at all, his whole manner sliding back into the easy, unbothered civility he wore like a second coat. He lit up his pipe and puffed.
“Think on what I’ve said, my lady,” he said, pleasantly, for anyone who might be listening. “I shan’t trouble you for an answer today.”
And he bowed, and walked past Betsan without so much as a glance, and left Nell standing alone in the corridor with her wrist still stinging where his hand had been.