Chapter 27 Tom #2
“I want … everything.” Of course, what he had been about to say was “I want you.” “I’ll miss you, Amelia,” he said, instead.
She smiled sadly. “I’ll miss hearing you say my name. Also, you—I’ll miss you.”
A recorded announcement began, the calm baritone echoing along the platform, as if this was just any old day, any old train trip, when it felt like a portal between worlds. Tom gathered his crutches and leaned on them, as Amelia scooped her handbag onto her shoulder.
“Remember when you told me about the diamond?” he said. “I got this jolt of relief—excitement, even—despite all the crazy shit going on, that maybe I could save the estate. I guess it’s that classic thing—until you’re forced to fight for something, you don’t realize what it means to you.”
“There you go, you see.” She pulled up the top handle of the suitcase and tipped it onto its wheels. “Easy as that.”
He stood aside, balancing on the crutches. Any other day, he’d offer to take the bag for her. “I’m not sure it’ll be that easy.”
“I’m certain it won’t. But you get a chance to create a home that you get to define—not just a home but a community.
A thoroughly modern earldom. I think Miss Havisham would be quite restored by the thought.
Though I do feel a little bad for Tandy Upcycles.
I bet she has her stenciling all planned. ”
“C’est la vie,” Tom said with a shrug. “I wish you didn’t have to go,” he added, so suddenly he surprised himself.
But like with announcing he wanted to keep the abbey, it had to be said suddenly, because if he waited to rationalize it, to put it in perspective, see it in the wider picture, he wouldn’t say it at all.
And he knew he would regret that, far more than a rejection.
She tilted her head. “Are you serious about that?”
He swung around on the crutches so he stood between her and the train doors.
“You know what? I bloody am. We fought so hard to get this chance. What a waste to squander it now. Amelia,” he said, speaking louder and faster as the platform filled with people and noise, “you say that you get teased for looking too closely at the details. And you’ve quite rightly pointed out my flaw of looking too much at the big picture.
So, between us, we have all distances covered. ”
“Wait, your pitch to me here is that we’re a pair of progressive lenses?” She was almost shouting.
“Precisely. Together we see clearly. Apart, we’re just stumbling around bumping into things. We make a good team.”
She dragged her teeth across her lower lip. “I don’t want to go back,” she said, so quietly he had to read her lips, and he hoped like hell he was reading correctly. “I want to keep escaping. I want to keep escaping with you. Is that just me running away?”
“Like you said, you can’t outrun yourself. And, you know,” he added with a shrug, “if I am going to rebuild the abbey, I’ll need a textile conservator.”
Amelia grimaced, and he wondered if he’d pushed her from hypothetical territory to uncomfortably real territory. But hell, it was that or lose her forever.
“That might be tough,” she said. “There aren’t many of us around.”
“Well, if you hear of any… There would be visa issues to navigate, but I’m sure we’d figure something out—for the right person.
The perfect person.” His belly knotted, even while his chest filled with an unfamiliar emotion he identified as hope.
Pure, intoxicating hope. Half agony, half hope.
“Amelia, perhaps this is not about escaping life, but finding it.”
Amelia stood her suitcase back up, still clutching the handle. “It would be rude not to say yes, seeing as Jane Austen herself brought us together. Though it hasn’t all been the rom-com I would have liked.”
“You can rewrite it as a rom-com, if you like. It’s your story. Our story.”
“Or I could be grateful for all the pieces of the story that wove together to bring us to this moment. Yes, crappy stuff happened, to both of us, but it got us here today, to the start of something better. If we went back in time and erased even one of those crappy things, we might not have got to this very nice bit right now. Remember when you asked me: ‘What would you do if you didn’t have to be you?’ Ask me again. ”
“What?”
“Ask me!” she yelled, as an announcement sounded. “We don’t have much time.”
“What would you do if you didn’t have to be you?”
“I would move across the world because of a great guy I spent a few crazy days with. That’s insane, right?”
“Entirely mad. And obviously, we can get security cameras, gates, alarms, locks—and there’ll be more people around. Anything you need to feel safe.”
“Or maybe I need to figure out how to feel safe when there is no such thing as safety.” She grabbed his arm in warning, and he turned just in time to dodge a guy wheeling a bicycle.
“That first morning I was in the abbey, just before I met you, I came across a curtain—damask in sea-green silk with a gold fringe—and I thought, ‘This should be in a controlled environment—temperature, humidity, light, pests. Protected. Preserved.’ Where it could be safe.” He leaned in to better catch her words.
“But it would never again feel the sun’s warmth or billow in a summer breeze.
We can lock ourselves away in controlled environments for our safety—Rapunzel in her tower—but that’s not living.
Everyone needs to stand in the sunshine and feel the breeze, even if we age and wear and fade, or fall into thorns.
And love, everyone needs to love, even if that’s a risk too. ”
“I can tell you now that there will be a lot of things that’ll go wrong—multiple things at the same time, all the time. Plenty that’ll be out of our control.”
“Then I shall be like spider silk. Strongest tensile strength of any thread in nature, while also completely flexible. Though, to be honest, limpet teeth and hagfish slime threads are up there with spider silk.”
“Go with spider silk. Sounds cooler.” He juggled his crutches, shuffling his weight onto his good leg, and managed to take both her hands. She gasped, as if in fright.
“What is it?” he said, looking around for the threat.
“No, it’s…” She started laughing. “I just remembered something. That night with the salamander brandy—you proposed! You took my hands, just like this, and you proposed.”
“Blimey, you’re right! We were in the north turret. And you said yes! Ha! Then later we joked about how if we’d got married that night, we wouldn’t have remembered it.”
“I won’t hold you to it. But maybe we should see if this thing between us can survive not being shot at, hunted, driven off the road, held at knifepoint, poisoned by toxic love potion…”
“Oh, I’m definitely getting you that counseling.”
“But looking at the wider picture…” She gave a knowing grin. “Statistically, we’re now incredibly safe.”
“The safest. You could probably leap off the north turret without getting hurt. But don’t.” He kissed her nose, which she screwed up.
“It’s such a shame you don’t believe in quickly formed attachments.”
“I do believe you were in agreement. And I might be changing my mind on that. We’ll see. Besides, you fell for me the very moment we met.”
“I fell to you,” she said, laughing. “I guess there’s only one way to test this love-at-first-sight theory, and that’s to spend more time together.”
“Much more time.” A short, sharp whistle sounded. “Perhaps one day I’ll catch you looking at me the way you look at hand-knotted sixteenth-century carpets, and then I’ll know I was wrong.”
She smiled slyly. “Dress up in that Darcy costume again, and we’ll see.”
He kissed her, taking his time over it.
“My dear Miss Bennett with two Ts,” he said, nuzzling her ear as her train moved off. “Escape with me.”
She looked at the retreating train and then back at him, her eyes glittering. “I believe I just did.”
Thank you for reading A Murder to Remember.