Chapter 29
Greaves sat back in the carriage, clearly pleased with himself as he took a flask out of his jacket pocket and sipped.
He offered her a slug, which she sneered at.
He did not raise his voice. Not when he took her, not in the carriage.
He did not so much as raise a hand to strike her, though his fingers still rested lightly on the seat between them.
They were close enough to remind her, without needing to say so, that he could reach her again whenever he chose. He put the flask back in his pocket and took out his pipe. He packed it with tobacco and struck the match on the roof of the carriage. He set it to the pipe and began to puff.
“You will want to know the whole of it, I think, now that there’s no purpose left in hiding any part of it from you.” He settled back against the worn leather of the seat, entirely at his ease, despite the carriage rocking hard over the dark, rutted road.
“I know enough,” Nell said as she wiped a tear away from her eye.
“Oh, do you?”
“Yes.”
“Then you must know it was I who placed Honoria Vane in the earl’s path to begin with?”
“What? What do you mean?” she asked, all strength from her body gone with the swirling wind that pounded against the carriage.
“Did you never wonder how so unlikely a match came about at all?”
“But how?” she pressed, all color draining from her face as she turned pale as alabaster.
“A quiet word to the family’s solicitor here, a helpful suggestion about the settlement there, enough small, careful touches to make the whole arrangement seem entirely sound and natural to everyone involved.”
“And when she balked at it?”
“When she finally dug deep enough to find me at the bottom, she came to me half mad with the thought of running rather than going through with a marriage she’d never chosen for herself.
It was I who steered her toward Plymouth, toward a certain surgeon’s daughter I already knew to be clever enough.
Can you imagine my surprise when I learned she had already visited your little operation, and more than once? ”
“You are terrible!” She hissed, the tone unfamiliar on her tongue as her blood began to boil.
“I must admit, I’ve been impressed with all the business you get in that back alley office. But being paid in crumbs? You can do better than that. You will have me now.”
“You are cruel! How can a man be so ruthless as you? How can I be worth so much trouble, so much plotting!”
“I do not like to lose.”
“I am nothing!”
“Oh, it is a bit of your own making, my dear. You were desperate enough, and skilled enough at holding your own self steady under pressure, that you could surely take her place convincingly.”
He watched her absorb this, some flicker of satisfaction crossing his face at the sight of her stillness, as puffs of smoke encircled his face. “You never once suspected, did you, that the whole shape of your own rescue was mine to design from the very start.”
“You arranged all of it.” Her voice came out flatter than she felt. “From the very beginning. Every piece of it.”
“Every piece,” he agreed, with something almost like pride.
“Coombe was my creature long before you ever set foot inside that little chapel, my lady.” He smiled at her, unhurried, entirely without shame.
“Every single ill that has crossed Ashcroft these past long months has been my hand at work, and no other’s.
Not fortune, not misfortune. My design, start to finish. ”
“Why tell me any of this now? What is the point?”
“Because you are the only person alive that I have ever cared to tell the whole of it to.” He said it almost gently, as though the admission cost him something after all.
“I have carried the whole of this design alone for a very long time, my lady. It seemed only fitting, now that the matter is settled, that you should know.”
She understood, listening to him, watching the easy satisfaction in his face as the carriage rattled on through the dark, that he told her all of it only because he believed there was no one left she could ever carry it forward to.
That the confession sat so safely in his own mouth precisely because he believed her voice was already silenced for good.
“You believe this ends with me standing quietly beside you? Grateful, I suppose, for the honor of your confidence?”
“I believe,” he said, “that you have very little choice left in the matter.”
Then hooves came up hard behind them on the dark road, closing the distance fast. The sound of each clop on the ground cut sharply through the steady rhythm of their own carriage wheels, so much that Nell could feel it in her chest.
The carriage lurched violently as the driver started to brake, throwing her forward against the seat.
She braced herself with her hands and fell back onto the velvet cushion.
Before it had fully stopped rocking on its springs, the door was wrenched open from the outside with a force that nearly tore it from its hinges.
Adrian.
“Coombe has been found,” Adrian growled as he scowled at Greaves. “He has told us everything, Greaves. And I’m sure whatever you shared with my wife in this carriage will only damn you more. I heard half of it, you lousy cad. There is nothing left in your hand worth trading. You. Are. Finished.”
Greaves opened his mouth to speak and said nothing. Instead, he lunged, sudden and vicious, some last desperate animal instinct driving him toward the open door rather than toward her.
“You think you can escape?” Adrian ground out. “You think you can get past me?”
Greaves bolted out the other door and took off down the road like a scared animal. Nell turned around and watched a brutal scramble begin in the black mud. Greaves ran, but his movements were futile in the wet sod. He tripped on his footing, and that was all the advantage Adrian needed.
She watched him lunge forward, catching Greaves by the waist as he tried to get up. Then, he pulled him up by his heavy collar and dragged him toward his horse as if it was effortless.
“You are no match for me.” Adrian scowled as he drew his hands behind his back and held them there tight.
“Nor I.” Tristan appeared then, and Nell was impressed. Despite his gait, Tristan was barely a half second behind Adrian. He dove into the chaos like a man who was trained for just that sort of thing. He got on the other side of Greaves to help Adrian pull him.
“Get off me, you ruffians!” Greaves yelled. “You should have just let me run off with the girl,” he hissed. “The trouble I went through, it is only right that I get what I want.”
At that, both men pushed him down hard into the sodden ground, the wet earth swallowing their knees and elbows as they drove their combined weight onto his chest and back.
He thrashed beneath them, kicking up spraying mud and gasping for breath.
Their grip held fast, smothering every desperate heave until whatever last spark of fight remained in him finally gave out entirely.
“You are not going anywhere, you fool,” Tristan warned.
His limbs went limp, his face pressed flat against the dark, saturated dirt. It was over in a matter of a heartbeat, for which Nell was grateful. Despite her years of patching and stitching up men after a skirmish, she did not enjoy the events that led to injury.
She watched Adrian come up out of it with his sleeve torn dark and wet at the shoulder, a gash laid open along the length of his arm where Greaves’s own struggling hand, or perhaps a blade she had not even seen, had caught him.
She gasped at the sight of that dark, spreading stain; every other single thing in the whole world went quiet in her at once. Greaves, the road, the cold, the carriage still rocking slightly on its springs behind her. None of it mattered any longer beside the sight of his blood.
She was out of the carriage and at his side, already tearing hard at her own hem to free a strip of clean linen to bind the wound before he bled out. Her hands moved with the same steady, practiced motion she had brought to a hundred wounds before this one. Steadying. Closing. Focusing.
Making right what had been torn open, the way her father had taught her a lifetime ago on a rolling ship’s deck.
Except this time, it was him beneath her hands, his warm blood soaking into the fine linen she pressed against the wound, and there was no lie left folded anywhere between her fingers and his skin.
Nothing hidden. Nothing borrowed. Only her own two hands doing the only work they had ever truly known how to do, for the one man she had ever wanted to do it for.
“Hold still,” she said, her voice rough, “let me see the whole of it properly before you go bleeding all over the road on top of everything else.”
He caught her wrist instead, holding her hands before she could finish knotting the makeshift bandage, and made her look up at him properly, his eyes finding hers in the poor light and holding her there.
“I know what you are,” he said. “All of it, Nell. And I want you still.”
“Adrian, your arm—”
“I am fine. Let me finish, please, before I lose whatever nerve I have left to say this properly.” His voice came out rough, unsteady in a way she had never once heard from him in all the weeks she had known him, not even on the worst night of the road, not even confessing his parents’ deaths to her in the quiet dark of his own study.
“I was a fool that night on the road, and a worse fool every single day since, punishing you for a wound that Greaves dealt us both, as though the two of us hadn’t both been caught in the same cruel scheme from the start.
I love you. I have loved you, I think, for longer than I let myself properly admit even to my own sister, and I mean to spend whatever time you’ll still grant me proving that I learned it in time to matter, whatever it costs me to prove it. ”