Chapter 21
She was a mile from Ashcroft, the grand house and all its splendor already swallowed by dark clouds behind her, before she let herself think of the letter. Lightning cracked, and thunder boomed behind her.
She had written it all down before she left, sitting at the small writing desk with her hand steadier than she had any right to expect, setting out her true name at the top of the page.
Nell Frayne. Her father, and what he’d taught her, and why.
The bargain she had been presented with, all too conveniently wrapped in a bow, with Honoria Vane for a case of jewels that had turned out to be worth nothing at all.
The forged name entered in a parish register, black and legal and unforgivable.
And then…because this was the whole reason that she had picked up the pen in the first place, the reason that mattered more than any confession of her own guilt, she shared everything she had overheard outside a half-shut door past midnight between two criminals.
She told him that Mr. Greaves was the mind behind the slow bleeding of Ashcroft’s coffers. That Mr. Coombe had only ever been his hand, frightened into obedience by some threat she did not know.
That the very man Adrian had taken into his trust to set his accounts right was the one who had broken them and meant to go on breaking them for as long as no one thought to look past the steward he’d already sacrificed.
She had written it to protect him. If she could not be with him, she would save him.
She had known, setting down each word, that the same page which saved him would be the one that damned her.
Once he read it, once he understood what she’d done to his name and his trust and his home, there could be no coming back from it. Not for her.
That is the price of the one clean thing I have left to give him, she thought. By now Betsan would have carried it up to him.
By now he knew everything. Who she truly was. What she had done, and why, and how far the lie had run. And what still moved against him, patient and smiling, under his own roof. The thoughts swirled in her head and made it ache.
And yet, her heart felt lighter. It was the one clean thing she had done in months. She would not be there to see what it cost her, and told herself that was mercy rather than cowardice. Though she was no longer entirely sure of the difference.
She thought of the necklace, left lying on the dressing table where he could not possibly miss it.
His mother’s. The finest thing she had ever in her life held against her own skin, and the one object in that whole house that might have carried her somewhere safe.
Something sold quietly in some city large enough not to ask questions, enough to buy a passage, a room, a little time.
She could not take it. Not because she hadn’t thought of it; she had.
Standing over it with her bag already packed, turning the thought over the way she turned over every hard choice, testing its edges, but because it had never once been hers.
Not truly, any more than the name she’d signed in the register had been hers.
How have I gotten myself into such a mess?
Leaving it was the only way left to her of saying the one true thing she could not say to his face. Whatever else she had stolen from this house, she had never meant to steal that.
Not the necklace, and not, however it must look to him now, the whole of what had grown up quietly between them these past weeks either. She did not wish to steal his heart, just as she felt it had opened.
The plan, such as it was, had never been more than thin. Reach the coaching inn on the Bodmin road before first light. Take whatever mail coach ran inland first, wherever it went.
Lose herself eventually in Bristol, a port large enough to swallow a woman with a few coins in her pocket, her father’s bag over her shoulder, and no name worth keeping track of.
Beyond that, she had nothing at all, and had not let herself look beyond it, because looking too far ahead on a night like this one was its own kind of danger.
The next clap of thunder came without any warning at all, so loud and so close. Then came the rain, hard and cold and all at once; the sky opened as though it had been waiting for exactly this moment to do it, soaking her through to the skin within minutes.
She kept walking.
There was nothing else to do. No money worth the name, no name worth the money, no road behind her that led anywhere but back to a house she could never return to.
She walked soaked and shaking, colder than she could remember being in years, and more entirely alone than she had been in a life that had taught her early and thoroughly what alone meant.
That was when she heard the horses.
Two riders, coming up behind her out of the dark and the rain, loud with drink at first. They were laughing at something, voices carrying.
Her head began spinning, and then, as they drew close enough to make her out on the empty road, it went quiet all at once.
The silence was worse than the noise had been.
She was so scared. A man gone suddenly, deliberately silent had begun to think.
They reined in on either side of her and walked their horses in close, hemming her gently but unmistakably toward the hedge, until there was nowhere left for her to stand but pressed against thorn and bramble with the rain running down the back of her neck.
“Bit late for a girl like you to be walking alone, ain’t it,” one of them said, leaning down from the saddle, his breath sour with whiskey even through the petrichor. The other said nothing at all. Only watched, which frightened her more than his companion’s talking did.
She did not run. Bolting would only have brought them after her at a gallop, and there was nowhere to run to besides.
There was only a mile of empty, sodden road in every direction, no door, no light, nothing between her and whatever they had in mind.
She had faced worse odds than this over a bleeding man on a gurney and made herself stand still, and made herself think.
Then hooves came up hard out of the darkness behind them, and the rattle of wheels behind the hooves, and a carriage slowed on the road at speed, its lamps cutting twin gold lines through the rain.
The two riders did not wait to learn whose carriage it was. They wheeled their horses as one and were gone into the dark the same way they’d come, as quickly and as silently as they’d arrived. The carriage drew level with her and stopped. The door began to open.