Chapter 29 #2
She was weeping now, openly, and trying still to finish the bandage despite it, her hands shaking in a way they had never once shaken over a stranger’s wound in all her years of practice, the careful steadiness she had built her whole life around finally, entirely, deserting her.
“You cannot simply say such a thing to me in the middle of a muddy road,” she managed, half laughing despite the tears, “with your own arm laid open and Greaves lying face down in the mud not ten feet from us.”
“I find I can say it nowhere else nor half as well,” he said. “I have tried saying it to myself, alone, in that study, a dozen times these past weeks, and never once managed to make it sound half so true as it does…standing here in the mud with you.”
“I suppose we have been here before,” Nell said, a small laugh escaping her lips in spite of herself.
Tristan was still kneeling on Greaves’s back a few feet away. He had one knee planted firmly between the man’s shoulder blades to keep him pinned and glanced over at the two of them with something between exasperation and delight.
“Well, I do hope you two mean to finish this particular conversation somewhere warmer and drier, once we’ve got this fellow properly bound and delivered to the authorities,” he said.
“I suppose that is wise.” Nell laughed once more at the sheer absurdity of it.
“Good. I would rather not spend the whole of tonight kneeling in a Cornish road while you settle your affairs.”
Neither of them properly heard him.
She let herself believe Adrian, standing there in the cold and the mud with his blood still warm and slick under her own fingers, his eyes steady on hers through the whole of it, never once looking away, not toward Greaves, not toward the road, not toward anything beyond her own face.
And for the first time in longer than she could properly remember, longer perhaps than her whole adult life, she was exactly who she was.
No borrowed name. No careful mask worn against discovery.
Only Nell Frayne, the surgeon’s daughter, standing in a muddy Cornish road with her hands full of another person’s blood, wanted entirely, and completely, for precisely that.
“You are quite right,” Adrian said and looked at his friend. “Thank you, Tristan.”
“Anything for you,” he replied, and Nell knew he meant it. “I’ll get our prisoner tied up and secured with the other men, then we can head back.”
She finished the bandage at last, her fingers steadier now, and drew the knot tight enough to hold without cutting off the blood beneath it.
When she looked up again, he had not moved, had not once glanced away to check on Greaves or Tristan or the darkened road behind them.
Something in his attention undid her more thoroughly than his words had managed a moment before.
“You’ll want a proper physician to look at this once we’re home,” she said, softer now, her thumb resting lightly over the pulse at his wrist as though she could not quite bring herself to let go of him entirely.
“I’ve only stopped the worst of the bleeding.
It will want stitching properly, and I’d rather not do it here, kneeling in the mud with Greaves not ten feet off listening to every word. ”
“I find I don’t much care who stitches it, so long as you’re the one holding my hand while it’s done. And I dare say you are the best doctor there ever was.”
“That is a very great deal of trust to place in a woman who lied to you not so long ago.”
“I have had a great deal of practice, these last weeks, in learning the difference between a lie and a woman telling me a hard truth because she cared too much to let me go on in the dark.” He lifted her hand from his wrist and pressed it, gently, against his own chest instead, over the place where his heart beat fast, unsteady beneath his ruined coat.
“Oh Adrian…”
“I trust this part of you completely, Nell. I have trusted it, I think, since the very first morning I saw you. I was only too great a coward, for a long while after, to admit what the trusting meant. This is new territory for me, but I think we can move ahead together.”
She could not speak past the tightness in her throat, and so she did not try. She only leaned into him instead, careful of the wound.
She let her forehead rest against his good shoulder, breathing in rain and mud and the warm, familiar smell of him beneath it all. His uninjured arm came round her and held her there, steady, entire, asking nothing further of her than to simply stay.
“Come home,” he said quietly, against her hair. “Both of you. I don’t care what your name is.”
“Are you sure you can handle the two of us?”
“I find I have room enough in this house, whatever your name may be.”
“Just call me Nell,” she said, a smile crossing her face.
“Nell,” he repeated. “Whatever will we do about all this?”
“Greaves will spend the rest of his life in a cell, or worse, surely.”
“I mean me…I mean us…Our marriage, the forgery—”
“I am an earl,” he said. “I will find a way to make this right. You need not worry. it is my job to do that for us both. I will find a way for those who would care to look the other way when it comes to your forgery. In the end, I am truly the only one implicated.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I suppose you are right. I have done enough worrying in my life. I think I will leave this to you to resolve.”
“I think that is wise. Well then, Nell. Shall we go home?”
“I would like nothing more.”