Chapter 23
I have returned to Ashcroft as a prisoner of it.
She awoke with a stir, thinking about how she had chosen to walk out into the darkness, unknown and alone, to keep him safe. Now she was back under his roof, closer again to Greaves and further from Adrian than a stranger would have been.
Betsan came to her early the next morning, white-faced and shaking, twisting her apron in both hands.
“What is wrong?”
“My lady, I must tell you something, and I don’t know how to say it…I don’t know how to make it sound any better than it is.”
“Say it plainly, then. Plain is easier to hear than dressed up.”
“I never gave the earl your letter.” The words came out in a rush, as though she’d been holding them in since the moment she’d woken.
“I know that. It’s all right, Betsan.”
“I meant to, my lady, I swear it on my life I meant to! I had it in my apron pocket not an hour after you left, and I was going straight up to his study with it…only Mr. Greaves stopped me in the passage.”
“What did he say to you?” Nell asked, rising to her feet and approaching Betsan.
“He asked what I carried, very pleasant at first, the way he always is it seems. And, when I wouldn’t tell him, being that you’d said it was for the earl’s eyes only, his face changed into something awful. He told me plain what happens to servants who go carrying tales about a great house.”
“I am so sorry,” Nell said, knowing well how a man like Greaves operated.
“He said that a girl with no family to speak for her could find herself turned off without a character reference before the week was out, and no one would ever trouble to ask why.” Betsan’s voice cracked at that.
“I was that frightened, my lady, I could hardly stand upright. And before I understood what was happening, he had it out of my hand and was gone down the passage with it, quick as last night’s lightning. ”
“And you’ve told no one else this?”
“Not a soul. I didn’t know what to do, my lady. I’ve been sick over it, wondering whether to confess it to Mrs. Scott or wait for some sign from above as to what to do…”
“You did right to wait for me this morning,” Nell said, her own heart beating hard against her ribs at the implications. “You’ve failed no one, Betsan. Do you understand me? None of this is your doing.”
“But if I’d only held tighter…”
“He would have had it from you regardless. A grown man against a girl of nineteen in an empty passage is no fair fight, whatever either of us wishes it had been. It is truly all right.”
“Thank you,” Betsan nodded, tears still standing in her eyes. “I’ve set your breakfast tray down over there, and your clothes are laid out for today. Shall I dress you?”
“I will manage myself today. But thank you…truly…You are a strong girl.”
“Thank you,” she said once more, and left the room.
Nell walked over to her breakfast tray and looked at it with no appetite. She sat down in the chair next to the fire and watched the flames swirl in the wind that came down the chimney.
It hardly matters now that Adrian never read the letter. What matters, what sits like a hand closed slowly around my very throat, is who holds it in his place.
She could see the whole shape of it every time she closed her eyes. Her own hand moving across the page at that desk. Every name. Every date. Every place. The chapel. The register.
The moment she had signed away a stranger’s identity and made it her own crime instead of someone else’s inheritance.
She had written it all so that Adrian would understand why she did what she did, so he would be safe, so the truth would finally outrun the lie. Now, it sat folded in Greaves’s pocket.
She looked at the tray Betsan had brought, cold and untouched. The toast had gone stiff at the edges, the tea gone cold in the cup.
She had been sitting there for over an hour, she realized. She stood and walked to the window. She rested her hands against the cold glass, looking out at nothing. Not the gardens. Not the drive. All she could focus on was grey light.
***
As morning became afternoon, she found that she had dressed and walked to Cassandra’s quarters. She stood there a moment before she knocked and understood why her body had chosen this door above every other in that vast, watching house.
It is the one room left for me where nothing waits to be confessed. I have and always will be Cassandra’s friend.
She knocked softly.
“Come in!”
Cassandra was sitting up already, bright and talking before Nell had crossed the threshold, entirely unaware that anything had happened in the world beyond her own four walls over the last several hours.
“There you are. I began to think you’d forgotten me entirely. Where were you this morning?”
“I…I…”
“It does not matter! Come and tell me, what do you wager I may be able to try by week’s end?”
“Let’s see how today goes first before we speak of wagers. You have made excellent progress, but we needn’t rush.”
Nell drew the chair close and lost herself in the ordinary shape of the exercises, the small familiar choreography of finger and gaze and slow turning that asked nothing of her but competence.
Cassandra clearly had no notion that her brother had ridden out through a storm the night before, chasing after a wife who had tried to leave him. No notion that he now knew, exactly and completely, what that wife truly was. A fraud.
“You’re very quiet today,” Cassandra said, midway through, tilting her head to study Nell in that shrewd way she had grown into these past weeks. “Is something troubling you, my friend?”
“Only a poor night’s sleep. I am fine. Follow my finger again, if you please, and don’t let your neck do the work your eyes ought to be doing.”
Cassandra let it go, though Nell caught her glancing back once or twice with something not quite satisfied in her countenance. Then Adrian came in.
Here it is…
Nell felt it before she turned to look, some change in the pressure of the room.
When she finally looked, he was already crossing to his sister’s bedside without so much as a glance in her direction.
The warmth in the room went out by degrees after that.
Not because he raised his voice, not because he said one unkind word to Nell, but because he would not look at her. Not at all.
“How are you faring today with your exercises?” he asked Cassandra, as though Nell was not standing three paces away from him, her hand still resting on Cassandra’s shoulder.
“Better every day, and growing bored of being asked how I do, if I’m honest.” Cassandra reached for his hand and grasped it. “Adrian, I’ve been thinking. I am well enough now, surely, for another small outing. Would you allow for Honoria to take me somewhere, once the weather turns fine again?”
Honoria.
The name came so easily from her mouth, unthinking, warm and familiar. It was the only name she had ever been given for the woman standing beside her, and she had no reason on earth to hesitate over it.
Nell watched his jaw tighten. Only once, gone almost as quickly as it had shown itself. But she saw it. She knew that he could no longer hear that name spoken aloud, warm and easy and entirely undeserved, without hearing the whole lie sitting coiled beneath it like a serpent. Cassandra saw nothing.
She only waited, hopeful, for her answer. A week ago, he would have bent to her without a second thought, glad of any excuse to give his sister something she wanted.
“Not this week,” he said flatly, not offering any more explanation than that.
“Adrian, I only asked for—”
“I said not this week, Cassandra.” His voice had gone hard in a way Nell had never once heard him use with his sister.
Nell knew that it was aimed entirely at her, now standing quiet at the foot of the bed. It was the only way left to him to punish her that did not require him to speak to her directly, to acknowledge her presence in the room at all. Nell took it without a word. There was nothing she could say.
Cassandra looked between the two of them, her brother and his wife standing in the same small room and, with equal determination, remaining eerily silent.
Something crossed her face for the first time.
A small frown, not of hurt, but of a girl who realized there was a whole conversation happening around her.
One that no one had troubled to let her hear.
“Oh my…Has…Has something happened?” she asked slowly, looking from one to the other, pointing at them.
“What do you mean?” Adrian asked through gritted teeth.
“Between the two of you? You’ve hardly looked at each other since you came in, Adrian, and I confess I don’t understand it.”
“It is…it is nothing that concerns you.”
It came out so flat, so final. Nell realized this was the first time she had ever heard him speak sharply to his own sister in all the weeks she had known him, and she was the true cause.
Cassandra’s mouth opened, ready to press further, but Nell moved quickly to head it off.
She could not stomach the thought of her exerting herself, another catastrophe before the afternoon could grow any worse than it already had.
“I think that’s enough exercise for today,” she said, her voice smooth as silk. “You’ve done very well, better than yesterday even. I’ll leave you to rest.”
She was already gathering her things, glad of any excuse at all to be out of that room, when a footman appeared in the doorway.
“Begging your pardon, my lord.” He addressed himself to Adrian, eyes carefully fixed somewhere just past his master’s shoulder. “There is a man come below on a matter of law…”
“A matter of law?”
“Yes, concerning the countess,” he said as he handed over a card. “A Mr. Hale, of Plymouth. He says he comes on behalf of the creditors of the late Viscount Vane.”
The room went very still. Nell felt every drop of blood leave her face at once, the floor seeming to tilt very slightly beneath her feet. Cassandra looked between her brother and her sister-in-law with open confusion now, the frown deepening as a hand rose to her forehead.
“The creditors of who? Adrian, what does that mean?”
Adrian did not answer his sister. His eyes had come to rest on Nell at last, the first time he had properly looked at her since he’d walked into the room, and whatever was in that look, cold, or wary, or something else entirely that she could not yet put a name to, it held her fixed to the spot as surely as a hand closed around her wrist.
“Show him to my study,” Adrian said at last, still watching her. “I’ll come directly.”