Chapter 27
Walking up toward the east wing that afternoon, Nell made up her mind.
I am done being a woman whose first instinct is self-preservation.
Having resolved to dedicate her life to helping others, she was finished running from the people she had lied to. It was time to face the future head-on. She was done letting fear dictate her path for her. Behaving that way only led to outcomes like that dark road leading out of Ashcroft.
She would choose light, and there was one person among them all who provided that. She owed Cassandra the truth, and all of it, before anyone else could reach her first and hand it over, twisted into whatever shape suited their own purposes best.
She found Cassandra propped up against her pillows with a book open on her lap, her eyes fixed on some point past the window instead. Nell sat down in the chair beside the bed without waiting to be asked, the way she had stopped asking permission for weeks now.
The small familiarity of it had become its own kind of comfort, and she realized then that Cassandra was truly the best friend she had ever had.
“I have something to tell you,” Nell said, “and I would very much rather you heard it from me than from anyone else in this house.”
Cassandra set her book aside at once, all pretense of reading abandoned. “That sounds very grave indeed.”
“It is.”
“Should I be frightened? I’ve heard a terrible amount of running around and hushed voices.”
“I don’t know. Perhaps you should be. I only know I cannot let another day pass without telling you myself.” Nell folded her hands in her lap, pressing them together to keep still. “My name is not Honoria Vane. It never was, and it never will be.”
Cassandra just looked at her. Her face did not change, not yet. She only waited.
“I am the daughter of a naval surgeon,” Nell went on, before her courage could fail her.
“I was raised on the Plymouth docks, in rooms that smelled of tar and blood more often than anything sweeter.
I have set more broken bones with my own two hands than any physician your brother ever paid good money to look at you.
I can promise you that. And…the real Lady Vane came to me with a bargain, some months back.
She needed a woman to marry your brother in her place, so that she might flee to France rather than come north to a husband she’d never chosen for herself.
She paid me for it, or believed she had.
I later learned the jewels she gave me were nothing but paste, worthless glass dressed up to look like a fortune. ”
“Nell…”
“Let me finish, please, before I lose my nerve entirely.” She made herself go on, though every word cost her more than the last.
“I signed a false name in your family’s parish register, before a clergyman and witnesses, in a church I had never set foot in before that morning.
I have been living under that name ever since.
In your house. At your table. Holding your head steady, every single morning, while you learned, slowly, to trust me. Oh, when I think of it…”
She made herself finish it properly, all of it, the whole tangled shape of the lie laid out plain between them at last.
“My plan was to go to Edinburgh, for a place at old Mr. Cargill’s table that I had never once believed I would truly reach. He was an old colleague of my father’s, and I know he would allow me to practice medicine, as much as any discreet woman can.”
“That is quite a dream. What happened to it then?”
“A man named Greaves happened to it. He had known me from the very first moment he’d walked into my father’s sickroom in Plymouth…and somehow, he schemed to bleed this estate dry while wearing the mask of an honest man of business.”
“I do not understand…”
“I am still figuring it out myself, but he somehow got his hands on a letter I had written in a desperate hour to warn Adrian of everything. It was lost to Greaves before it ever reached him. But luckily, your brother was able to get it back.”
“This sounds like a novel gone awry.”
“It certainly does,” Nell said as she braced herself, waiting for Cassandra to draw back.
She had sat at enough deathbeds in her time to know precisely what betrayal looked like crossing a face, a wound sealing shut too quickly and too badly to heal clean. But Cassandra did not draw back. She reached out to her instead, and took Nell’s hand in both of her own, holding it fast.
“Something as small as a false name does not undo a true kindness,” she said. “You gave me back my own feet, Nell, whatever I ought to call you now. I don’t much care what you were christened when you did it.”
“Cassandra, you don’t understand the whole of what I’ve done. I forged—”
“I understand it perfectly well. You’ve just told me it all.
” Cassandra’s grip tightened. “But, I mean what I said. Whoever you were before you ever came to this house, the woman who sat with me every single morning and refused, absolutely refused, to let me go on believing I was ruined for life, that woman is not a stranger to me. She never was, and a name in a book won’t make her one now.
I won’t pretend otherwise, not for anyone’s sake, not even my brother’s. ”
Nell felt something in her chest, something she had held braced and rigid for weeks now, finally let go all at once, and had to look down at their joined hands rather than trust her own face to hold steady.
“Thank you,” she managed, when she trusted her voice again.
Cassandra was quiet a moment after that.
“Do you love him, Nell?”
“Who?” Nell looked up sharply. “What?”
“My brother,” Cassandra said plainly, no teasing in it at all. “Do you love him? You needn’t answer if you’d rather not... I only think someone in this house ought to ask you plainly, since it’s quite clear to me you’ve never once let yourself answer it. Even inside your own head. Am I right?”
Nell opened her mouth to deflect it, the way she had deflected every question that ever came too near that truth, some easy answer already forming on her tongue.
She found, reaching for it, that she had no deflection left in her at all.
Not for this. And especially not for Cassandra, who had just handed her forgiveness so freely it had nearly undone her.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I do.”
It was the first time she had said it to another living soul, including herself. It was the first time she had let the word take its full shape outside the locked confines of her own subconscious.
“I love him,” she said again, because once was not nearly enough to empty the whole of it out of her.
Now that the floodgates had opened, she needed to.
“I have loved him, I think, since before I understood what I was feeling at all. I have never loved a man before, and I daresay it has done me no good whatsoever.”
“Not all love starts this way,” Cassandra said with a much-needed laugh.
“Perhaps not,” Nell said with a sigh. “But I came into this house on a lie, and he has every right in the world never to forgive me for it.”
“Tell me,” Cassandra said, and did not let go of her hand. “What would you say to Adrian, if he were here?”
“I was so happy and relieved to see you on that road, the very man I love. The first since my father, if I am being honest. And you came to save me from whatever fate would have at the hands of those men…but then, to be brought back to your house not as a wife welcomed home, but as a prisoner returned to her cell…it was unbearable.”
“Was it?” Cassandra said, pushing her to go on.
“Your coldness in these past days cuts me worse than any wound I’ve ever stitched closed.
It’s a pain I know I have no right to feel, as this is all my making, and yet, I feel it fully.
I know I’ve earned every ounce of your anger, but God help me, I still, foolishly, cannot stop hoping past it. I crave you, and your love...”
“What else, Nell?” Cassandra prompted.
“I would bear your hatred easily. Gladly, even. I’d welcome it as fair payment if it were only my own true failings you hated me for!
What I cannot bear is that half of what now stands so coldly between us is Greaves’s doing entirely.
It’s a lie stacked cruelly on top of my own lie, and I am left with no way in the world to prove to you… ”
“Prove what?”
“Which parts of me were ever true. Which parts of us…”
“He knows now,” Cassandra said gently when Nell fell silent.
“Perhaps not every single word you’ve shared just now, but the truth is out in the world.
You told me that he took the letter from Greaves’s own hand.
He means to protect you, Nell. He cares for you far more than you realize. I have never seen him like this.”
“He knows what I did, Cassandra! I don’t know that the knowing has changed what he feels about it. A man can know the whole truth of a thing and be glad for it, yet still choose to hate the woman who handed it to him.”
“It will change,” Cassandra said. “Give him time, Nell. He is careful, my brother. Careful past all good sense sometimes, but he is not cruel. He is smart, and he will see it. He will see you, for all that you truly are.”
Sitting there, her hand still tight in Cassandra’s, Nell hadn’t the heart to tell her the truth.
You have no idea how little time either of us have left before the fragile world we have built shatters completely.
***
That evening she took the air in the garden with Betsan before the house settled for the night, glad of the girl’s ordinary chatter after so heavy and so honest an afternoon. The golden sunlight shone along the lawns, casting a pleasant glow up the side of Ashcroft Hall.
Betsan talked of nothing; it could have been about ribbon and weather and some small kitchen dispute over the ordering of Sunday’s joint of beef, and Nell just listened to the sound of her voice.
The wind was hitting the trees, and the leaves danced, when suddenly it seemed to stop.
It was the stillness that caught her eye first.
Then she realized that it wasn’t the wind that had stopped. It was her heart. And there, at the very edge of the shrubbery, was a shape, half swallowed already by the coming dusk. It appeared to be a man, standing exactly where no groom or gardener had any business at this hour of the evening.
Nothing living, she told herself, ought to be quite so motionless as that.
She brushed it off and resolved that it was nothing at all.
A trick of the failing light playing tricks with the shadows, along with her jumpy nerves after all that had happened.
Or perhaps a gardener forgotten past his proper hours, or only the long shadow thrown by the last low light of the sun catching some ordinary shrub at an unfamiliar angle.
It was neither.
The shape moved toward them, unhurried, entirely without haste, the way a man moves when he has never once in his whole life needed to hurry after anything he truly wanted.
He moved like a man who had always, always been content instead to wait and pounce when ready. Nell knew him by the walk alone.
It’s him.
Beside her, Betsan had gone quiet at last. She felt some instinct catching at her, too, some animal awareness that the shape drawing toward them across the darkening lawn was no groom at all.
“My lady,” she whispered, “who is that? Is that…is that one of the grooms? My eyesight is not good at such a distance…” she said as she took Nell’s arm in hers.
Nell didn’t answer right away. She found she could barely breathe.
She froze in her tracks, and they both fell silent as Betsan stopped.
They watched the silhouette approach out of the gathering dusk and take shape.
The last thread of twilight caught on a face she had prayed never to see again, a man who had no honest business at Ashcroft tonight.