Chapter 28
Cassandra came to him steadier on her feet than she had been in years. She crossed the whole width of the study without once putting out a hand to catch herself against the doorframe or a piece of furniture.
She looked at him with a raised eyebrow, a thin smile on her face. Adrian knew that look and understood, before she had even settled into the chair, that she had not come merely to sit with him and pass a quiet hour.
“You know,” she said, arranging her skirts with a flourish that told him she had rehearsed this conversation, “I would not be walking so steadily at all, if not for the woman you have spent the better part of a fortnight now refusing even to look at.”
“Cassandra, this is not the time. I have a terrible headache, and I—”
“No, Adrian. Let me finish, please, before you talk yourself out of hearing it.” She folded her hands in her lap the way their mother used to when she meant to say something difficult and would not be argued out of finishing it.
It made Adrian’s heart soften a bit more. “I have thought of very little else these past days, and I find I cannot go on watching you as you are without saying my piece to you, whether you wish to hear it or not.”
“There is nothing to say on the matter that I haven’t already turned over a hundred times myself.”
“There is a very great deal to say, and you have said none of it honestly. Not to me, and I suspect not even to yourself, whatever private arguments you have been having with your own conscience these past nights.” She held his eyes, so like her own, steady, unwilling to let him look away from her the way he had learned to look away from everything else.
“Fine. What is it then?”
“Think, Adrian. Truly think, rather than simply feeling wronged.
A schemer does not spend two months of her mornings teaching a girl to hold her own head steady when that girl has nothing whatsoever left to offer her in return.
I could not pay her for it. I could not advance her position, or introduce her to society, or do a single thing a clever, scheming woman ought to want from her efforts.
I was, by every practical measure such a woman might reasonably care about, entirely useless to her cause.
And still she came. Every single morning, patience that far surpasses anything London’s finest physicians ever managed to be with me in four long years, because she wanted, simply and only, to see me well again.
She asked for nothing in exchange for it, not one thing, and you know that as well as I do. ”
He said nothing to that. He had turned the very same thought over himself, alone, late at night, more times than he cared to admit to his own sister, let alone to himself in the clear light of day.
“And when Greaves offered her a way out,” Cassandra pressed on, her voice gaining heat now, “a clean escape from every part of this, her own true name restored to her, safety bought at the price of a single word of yes, she refused him outright. To her own certain ruin, Adrian.
A woman playing some careful game for money does not choose punishment over an easy exit, and one offered freely to her.
She chose the rope only because there was never any game at all to begin with.
Only a woman who could not bring herself to stand by and let that man go on robbing you blind, whatever it cost her personally to stop him. ”
“I know it,” he said quietly.
“Then why,” Cassandra demanded, leaning forward now, “will you not say so to her face? Why do you go on treating her as though she were still some stranger who has wandered in to do you harm, when you know you have just told me yourself that you know, precisely, what she truly is?”
He had no answer for her.
There was nothing left in him to give. No clever evasion, no careful reframing of the facts that might spare him from what came next.
Under the suffocating shame of having no answer at all came, at last, the truth he had kept from himself longest. He worked his hardest to bury his feelings beneath duty, coldness, and the management of his household. He loved her. He had loved her through the whole of the lie.
A quiet, traitorous part of him had always known something was off, but he had been too enamored, too blind to dig until it all erupted around them. Now the fear consumed him entirely.
Not fear of who she really was, but the fear of admitting how close he had come to throwing her away.
For the first time in longer than he cared to count, he examined himself honestly and confronted the starkest truth of all.
She was the one person in four long years he could not properly do without and had no idea where to begin to make it right.
“I have been a fool,” he said, quiet, the words costing him more than he expected.
“Yes,” Cassandra said, without a single trace of mercy in it, and then, gentler, watching his face carefully, “but not one past mending, I think. You have never yet been past mending, Adrian, whatever unkind things you have told yourself these four years to the contrary.”
Because she had laid him so entirely open, sitting there across from him at his own desk with nothing but honesty between them, he found, for the first time, that he could give her something in return. The one last thing he had never let her have. He knew it was time.
“There is a part of that night I have never told you,” he said, and heard his own voice change as he said the words, going lower, rougher. “The night our parents died.”
She went very still at that and said nothing. She just looked up at him, her eyes wide and her lips in a thin line.
“Would you like me to share that with you?”
She nodded, and he told her. All of it. The foolish quarrel.
The challenge, thrown and accepted in a single reckless breath of drink and pride.
His own stupidity, standing him up on a dueling ground at first light, while their parents raced through the black, stormy darkness to reach him in time, to stop a fight that in the end, absurdly, needlessly, came to nothing at all.
That they had died on that same road, coming for him, coming to save him from himself, and that he had walked away from that field entirely unharmed, and learned only hours later, standing in this very house, what his own foolishness had truly cost.
“I have called it my fault every day since,” he said.
“Every single day, Cassandra, for four years. I built the whole shape of my life these past years around never once saying it aloud to anyone, because I believed, foolishly, that if I never said it, I might go on managing the weight of it alone forever, and no one else would ever have to carry any part of it with me. I did not want you to carry this too, because you have enough with your maladies. My god, can you ever forgive me, Sister?”
Cassandra did not recoil from him, the way he had feared, every single day of those same four years, that she would, if she ever came to learn the whole truth of it.
She only reached across the desk instead, and took his hand in both of hers.
She grieved with him, openly, tears standing plain and unashamed in her eyes.
“You have punished yourself long enough for this,” she said, her voice thick with it.
“A road, and a storm, killed them, Adrian. Not a foolish boy’s pride, however reckless that pride truly was.
You have carried a stone all this time that was never yours alone to carry, and I wish, more than I know how to properly say to you, that you had let me help you carry even a small part of its weight four years ago, instead of shutting me out along with every other living soul in this house. We all deserve a life worth living.”
Something in him that had been held rigid and unmoving since before she could properly remember at all, some old, load-bearing wall he had built up brick by careful brick in the very worst year of both their lives, began at last, quietly, without ceremony, to give way.
He saw, too, once the very worst of it had finally been spoken aloud between them, exactly how badly he had wronged Tristan. He had driven off the one friend in this whole world who had never once failed him, not through any fair judgment of the man’s true character.
He pushed him away because he could not handle it, and Tristan had come back to him anyway. Had come back owing him nothing at all, carrying the whole hard truth of Coombe’s confession in his own two hands.
He would find Tristan, ask his pardon, and give him at last the blessing he ought to have given freely from the very first moment Tristan had come to ask for it.
He was already on his feet, turning toward the study door with every intention of going to find him that very hour, when Betsan reached the door first. She stood in front of him, wild-eyed and barely able to force the words out past her own frantic breathing.
“My-my-my lo-lord.”
“Betsan, whatever is the matter? Catch your breath first! You will keel over at this rate.”
“The countess…she is…she is…”
“She is what?!” he asked, his voice uncharacteristically loud.
“She is gone.”
“Gone how? What does that mean? She hasn’t run again, surely, not after everything…”
“Not fled, my lord, I swear it to you on my life! It is not like before, nothing at all like before.”
“Come into my office, sit down,” he said as he pulled up a chair next to Cassandra.
The girl’s whole body was shaking now, her hands twisting hard at her apron.
“We were only in the garden together, my lord, taking the air before the house settled for the night, same as we always do. And out of nowhere, a man came out of the dark, before either one of us saw him coming. He had hold of her, my lord!”
She cried then. “He had his hand round her arm before she could so much as cry out, only she had breath enough left in her to tell me to run for the house! And so I ran, my lord, I ran as fast as ever I have run in my whole life, and I looked back only the once.”
“And what did you see? Who is it? Where did she go?”
His mind was spinning, trying to figure out where to go, what to do, and how, but he needed all the facts. He had to remain calm, so that he could get Betsan to speak. He went to the small bar cart next to the fire, poured her a small glass of sherry, and handed it to her.
“I saw her handed up into a carriage, my lord. A big heave ho, not gentle about it at all. It was that Mr. Greaves I think. He was never truly gone from this house, my lord, whatever he told you this morning about setting the books to rights and taking his leave. He has her, my lord. He has the countess, and I don’t know where he means to take her, only that the carriage went off fast, faster than any carriage ought to go on that road in the dark. ”
Cassandra had gone white, beginning to rise from her chair. “Adrian.”
But Adrian was already moving, past Betsan, past his sister, shouting down the passage.
“I need the horses to be brought round at once, and for Captain Marlowe to be found wherever in this house or beyond it he has gotten to!”
“Yes, my lord,” Mrs. Scott said as she sent the orders around to the servants. “I will see to it.”
“I need every able-bodied man on the property to be roused from whatever he is about and armed with whatever comes first to hand. Now. This is my wife.”
Whatever name she had signed, whatever lie had first brought her through his gates, she was his now. Entirely and without qualification, Greaves had put his hands on her in the dark of his own garden and taken her from him.
He went back into his study. Behind the desk, he flung open the bottom right drawer and took out his pistol.
She is mine.