Chapter 22
Let her go, it is the sensible thing to do. If she wants to leave, that is her choice. Just let her go, Adrian told himself as he paced the foyer. Do nothing.
His mother’s necklace was going cold in his closed fist. Doing nothing while the woman he loved walked further from him in the pouring rain seemed like a worse idea with every passing minute. He could not go on doing nothing. His mind was already made up, despite the lies he fed himself.
“Have my carriage brought around at once,” he called out to a passing footman as he pulled his jacket down from the hook. “Go to the stable now!”
“Aye, my lord,” the footman said as he sprinted off. “I will see it brought ‘round to the front for you.”
“Thank you,” he muttered under his breath as he pulled on his gloves and hat.
To the stable hand’s credit, the carriage stood ready in under five minutes. Adrian was already inside it before he’d decided what he meant to say to her, before he’d decided anything at all.
The carriage lurched through the gates, wheels throwing up thick mud. The rain came in sideways through a window that wasn’t quite closed, cold against his face and soaking his sleeve. He didn’t reach to shut it. In fact, he barely felt it.
All he could feel was the unbearable narrowness of his study the moment Betsan had said the word gone. Whatever this ride cost him, whatever he found at the end of it, he would not sit still. Not anymore.
He found her a mile out, walking fast along the edge with her a leather satchel banging against her hip and her head bent against the rain as she struggled to keep her footing.
For one dizzying second, as the carriage lamps swept over her, he understood he was looking at everything he had only just begun, however unwillingly, to want.
His wife looked so small walking away from him in the dark, with no more baggage than a woman fleeing a burning building.
Then, he saw the riders.
There were two of them in front of her, their intentions clearly not good.
“Faster!” He called to the driver, rapping his hand on the roof.
The riders started wheeling their horses hard away from her the moment his lamps swung round the bend and hit them. In the single heartbeat before they vanished into the black hedgerow, he understood exactly what he had ridden into.
A woman alone on an empty road at midnight, and men who had been closing in on her before my carriage frightened them off. My God, what if I hadn’t come…
The thought made his whole body tense, and all he wanted to do was pound those two fools into nothing. But by the time he had the door open and was down onto the road, they were gone entirely. The sound of their horses’ hooves was already swallowed by the rain and muck, and there was only her.
She was soaked through to the bone. Shaking, though whether from cold or from what had very nearly happened he could not yet tell. Likely both. He pressed back against the thorn hedge, as though she meant to disappear into it, to block her.
“Do not run, it is me,” he said softly, his hands closing around her shoulders and rubbing them.
She looked at him, as wide-eyed as a doe. She did not speak.
“Did they…did they dare touch you?” he growled, his voice torn ragged. “Are you hurt?”
“No.”
The single word came out steady and sure, though he could feel the tremor running through her under his hands, could see it in the white set of her mouth. And the moment she said it, the fear that had driven him into the storm folded in on itself and quieted.
She is all right, and that is that.
With that realization, he decided that whatever had been growing between them these past weeks had ended the instant Betsan came white-faced to his study door.
He remembered the anger now, a familiar emotion, even standing in the rain with his hands still closed around her arms and wanting badly, shamefully, to pull her the rest of the way against him.
I am supposed to care.
He made himself remember that, and made himself let go of her arms, and stepped back half a pace into the downpour. He would not beg. He did not beg for anything, not for his sister’s health, not for his own peace, not for a single hour that did not carry the weight of everything he’d lost.
The habit held even now, even soaked to the skin, even with his heart still hammering from the sight of two riders closing in on the woman he could not, whatever she was, seem to stop wanting to protect.
“You cannot simply leave,” he said finally, the words hard and level and simple, because the fright he could not acknowledge still festered in his chest, the fright of what he had very nearly ridden up on too late. He shook it off.
“The Countess of Ashcroft does not walk off into the night, like a maid quitting her post over unpaid wages. Whatever you thought you were doing, walking out of my house in the dark without so much as a word to anyone…”
Why did you leave me?
He would not ask her that. He would not give her the satisfaction of seeing how much her leaving had struck him. Instead, he leveled an accusation against her character, because an accusation was a thing he could still stand up straight and deliver.
She looked at him for a long moment in the rain, and time seemed to stop. Her hair had come loose from her bonnet and was plastered in dark curls against her face.
“The letter,” she whispered, and her voice shook now. “I left it with Betsan, to carry up to you before I went. I told her it was urgent and that it must reach you tonight. You must have read it by now…you must understand why I had to—”
“I have received no such letter.”
He watched her face go very still at that, watched some architecture of a plan gone wrong collapse behind her eyes as she closed them.
“Truly, you did not get my letter?” She asked, her eyes wet, from rain or tears he could not be sure.
“No one has brought me anything, Honoria.”
“Do not call me that name,” she said, and then she began to cry outright. “And while we are at it…there is no countess either for you to shame, my Lord.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that I am no widow,” she said, her voice strong.
“I never was. I am but a naval surgeon’s daughter, born on the wrong side of a marriage that was never quite made.
But a few weeks ago, I was paid in jewels I believed real and later learned were worthless paste, to take the real Lady Vane’s place when she fled the country…
rather than come north and marry you herself,” she explained as she pulled her cloak tight around her.
“I forged the name in your parish register with my own hand. I have worn it on a lie every single day since. At your table, in your sister’s sickroom, in a bed that I never once let you share…because I could not bear to let the lie reach quite that far.”
The rain went on falling around them, indifferent to the truth shattering before Adrian’s eyes.
Every little thing he had noticed and set carefully aside these past weeks rose up now, all at once, and fit itself, piece by piece, into a shape he could no longer refuse to see. It was standing right in front of him.
The hesitation, always, over her own name.
That half-beat pause I told myself was nothing.
The calluses Betsan mentioned seeing on her hands that I let myself dismiss as some widow’s hard-earned habit of usefulness, as if that were plausible.
The sureness of her fingers over a laborer’s injury at the works, a sureness no sickbed vigil, however devoted, could ever have taught a woman. I always knew…
For a long, suspended moment it is not hurt I feel at all, standing here soaked through in the middle of a dark road, but a plain, cold fury.
What sends fire through my bloody veins is that every honest thing that has ever passed between us these last weeks, every unguarded laugh, every hour among the shelves, every moment my guard came down enough to let her close…
all of it was built on a lie I never once was clever enough to suspect… or did not want to.
“Was a single word you ever gave me true,” he asked then, and he kept his voice quiet, quiet in a way that was somehow far worse than anger.
“Or was all of it the same coin as the name? Every kindness. Every hour you spent…every hour you spent with my sister. Was any of it real, or only well performed?”
“The name was a lie, yes.” She held his eyes, unflinching even now, though her voice had at last begun to fray, the words coming rougher, less certain. “The rest was not. I swear it to you on my father’s very soul, whatever that oath can be worth to you now.”
“I see,” was all he could muster.
“I am truly so very sorry, my lord. More than you will ever know. And, I am sorriest of all that I took your trust while I was wearing a stranger’s name to do it. I ask no pardon for any of it. I don’t expect one, and I won’t insult you by asking.”
Then, before he could find any breath to respond at all, she spoke again.
“Greaves is the author of everything that has bled this estate these four years,” she started, and he took a step closer to her.
“Not Coombe, whatever the ledgers make it look like. Coombe is only his hand, frightened into obedience by something Greaves holds over him. I think it is some threat to his child that he could not risk testing. I overheard the two of them together, past midnight, some nights ago, through a door left open just enough,” she explained, before she took a deep breath.
“The man you have handed your own books to, the very man you trust now to set them right, is the man who has been robbing you all along. He no doubt means to go on doing it, at least for as long as you let him.”
He knew that she was not pleading with him. She was not bargaining for her own freedom with the very confession that ought, by every reasonable calculation, to have bought her silence and her flight instead of this reckless honesty standing soaked in the middle of a public road.
“You may hand me to the magistrate the moment we return, if that is what justice requires of you,” she said, breaking the silence.
“I would rather answer honestly for the name I stole than run from it now and leave you standing unwarned in that man’s mercy.
Whatever else I am, my lord, I did not want to leave you there. ”
“I must think,” he said. “And we must get out of this bloody squall before we both catch cold. Let us return to Ashcroft…unless you wish to continue your flight?”
“Now that there is no secret between us, no matter what punishment may come to me, I would very much be grateful to return,” she replied.
They rode back to Ashcroft in the carriage without speaking, the rain drumming steady and relentless on the roof.
Her wet hair dripped onto the seat across from him, her hands folded tight in her lap as though she meant to hold herself together that way.
He did not know how long they rode in that silence.
Long enough for the storm to begin, very slightly, to ease.
A woman who can forge a name with so steady a hand could surely imitate tenderness with the same proficiency. Yes…I let a swindler reach the one part of me that four years of grief had left untouched.
And yet, as I grip the necklace in my pocket, this puzzle will not fit the shape I’m trying to force it into.
My mother’s necklace was left plainly on the dressing table where she could not have missed it.
Its worth was the one thing in that house that might have carried her free and clear, sold quietly in some city large enough to swallow her whole.
A swindler empties the drawers before she runs.
She did not. It must have been a miscalculation in her haste…
He did not believe himself, not for one single step of that silent, rain-soaked road home, not even as the carriage finally turned down the long driveway.
By the time the lights of Ashcroft finally rose up ahead of them in the dark, he understood, with a dread that had nothing at all to do with anger, that he had no idea what he meant to do with either truth.
The carriage drew up at last before the great door, and Mrs. Scott was there before either of them had properly climbed down, likely alerted by some servant sent ahead at a run.
She had a stack of towels already gathered in her arms and a look on her face that asked no questions. Adrian handed her down from the carriage himself, his hand steady under her elbow though hers trembled still.
“Straight up with you both. You must get out of those wet things before you catch your deaths,” she said as she handed them towels. “I have warm baths drawn in both your rooms this quarter hour past, and milk is heating. Go along, now.”
He did not let go of her until Mrs. Scott had bustled her off toward the stairs.
***
He bathed in water gone lukewarm by the time he finally sat still enough to notice it. His mind had been turning over everything she had told him on that road, with little capacity for anything else.
He dressed in dry clothes that felt, after the soaking cold of the storm, almost indecently warm against his skin. He found a cup of warm milk waiting at his bedside, sweet with honey and dark with spice, and drank it without tasting much of it at all.
Down the corridor, in her own room, he knew that his wife likely sat wrapped in a heavy dressing gown before a fire built up high and bright, a cup of tea gone cool in her hands.
He knew that neither of them would sleep easily that night, each lying awake in their beds, listening to the storm’s lingering winds spend themselves out against the windows. Then he realized there was one thing left that he had to know.
He got out of his bed and walked quietly to the adjoining door between their chambers. He knocked once and poked his head in.
“There is one thing I must know.”
“I will tell you anything,” she said as she lifted herself up in bed and pushed down the cover. Her hair was long and curling down her back, her brown eyes twinkling in the candlelight that flickered by her bedside.
“What is your name? Your real name.”
“Eleanor. Eleanor Frane.”
“Eleanor,” he repeated, letting the syllables settle on his lips.
“You can call me Nell.”
“Goodnight, Nell,” he said as he shut the door between them and climbed back into bed.
It suits her.