Chapter One #2
In the gap, the thoughts she had been outrunning since she dropped from the window ledge rushed in like floodwater through an open door.
Words were a wall. So long as she kept building it, the fear stayed on the other side, and she could pretend she was a girl on an adventure rather than one in the midst of a catastrophe.
Without the wall, the catastrophe became terribly concrete.
She was one-and-twenty, unmarried, unchaperoned, carrying a travelling-bag packed in panic, and travelling towards a city where she knew no one, with an ankle swelling steadily towards the dimensions of a small melon and a plan consisting, in its entirety, of I will think of something.
Her father would find her room empty by morning.
He would be frantic.
He would be devastated.
Lord Vyne would be furious.
She thought of Vyne’s hands. She had noticed them at dinner: large, manicured, perfectly still.
He was a man who kept his hands very still while his eyes did all the work, and something about that combination—the stillness and the watching—had sent ice down her spine three weeks ago and sent it again now, here, atop a mail coach in the rain, miles from anywhere he could reach her.
She began talking again.
About the weather. About the relative merits of Bath and Brighton. About whether a woman of one-and-twenty, with no money and no connections, could build an entirely new life in a city she had never seen.
“Possible,” the driver said, after a silence that suggested he was choosing his words with the care of a man defusing a cannon. “Wouldn’t recommend it, though.”
“No,” Molly said. “I suppose not. Though I fear my life has reached a point at which sensible recommendations are more ornamental than useful.”
The driver made a sound that might have been agreement, disapproval, or merely resignation. Molly chose the most encouraging interpretation.
The rain stopped just before dawn. The clouds drew apart like curtains, the sky turned from black to grey to the pale, washed gold of early morning, and the city appeared below them as the coach crested the final hill.
Molly had never seen Bath. She had, in fact, never been farther from home than Taunton, where she had visited a cousin at sixteen and accidentally knocked a platter of sandwiches into a fountain, an incident which had brought the visit to a somewhat earlier conclusion than planned.
Bath was larger than Taunton.
It had crescents and terraces and the Abbey rising above it, its tower catching the first light; rows of pale stone climbing the hillside; the river threading silver through the valley; and streets broad enough for the sort of life that happened in places where people had choices.
She took in the city and felt something press against her ribs, a sensation she could only call possibility.
Hope, touched with early gold.
“Bath,” the driver announced.
“Bath,” Molly repeated, because saying it made it real.
The coach descended into the city and stopped in the coaching yard near the Abbey. Other passengers disembarked with purpose, greeting drivers, collecting trunks, and setting off towards inns and houses and lives that had structure and direction and, presumably, money.
Molly climbed down from the box, winced as her ankle met the cobbles, and stood in the middle of the yard clutching her travelling-bag with both hands.
She looked exactly like what she was: a girl who had jumped out of a window in the dark and was trying to pass off terror as a plan.
The driver climbed down after her. He stood for a moment, studying her like a man about to do something he would tell himself was foolish and do anyway.
“Thank you,” Molly said. “Truly. For the ride, and for letting me talk about Buttercup.”
He reached into his coat and held out a sixpence.
Molly’s hand started forward, then jerked back as though the coin had bitten her.
“I absolutely cannot take that.”
“It’s sixpence, miss. Buy yourself breakfast.”
“You have been extraordinarily kind already, and I refuse to compound your charity with further expenditure on my behalf.”
It was the most refined sentence Molly had spoken all night. She was rather proud of it.
She also desperately wanted the sixpence.
“Take it.”
He pressed the coin into her palm. It was warm from his pocket, and the kindness of it—this ordinary human decency from a man who owed her nothing and had endured hours of relentless conversation without complaint—struck somewhere behind her eyes in a way that the rain and cold and fear had somehow failed to do all night.
“I shall pay you back,” she whispered. “One day. I will find you, and I shall pay you back.”
“Just don’t go home to whatever you’re running from,” he grumbled.
Then he climbed back onto his box.
The coach pulled away, the sound of the wheels faded, and Molly Granger stood alone in a coaching yard in a city she had never visited, holding one sixpence, one splitting travelling-bag, one throbbing ankle, and the knowledge that somewhere behind her, the house would soon begin to wake.
She ought to have been terrified.
She was alone, broke, injured, and in possession of no plan beyond a sixpence and the general conviction that, if she kept moving forward, something would emerge to meet her.
But the sun was rising.
The pale stone of Bath was turning gold in the early light.
Somewhere nearby, a baker was drawing bread from an oven, because the smell of it drifted across the yard like a warm hand on her shoulder.
A bird was singing from a church spire. The city was waking around her, all footsteps and opening shutters and a cart rattling past with milk churns.
It was the most alive she had felt in a very long time.
She had been only half herself since the moment Lord Vyne walked into her father’s drawing room and turned those flat, patient eyes upon her.
She had been shrinking ever since, drawing herself inward, becoming smaller and quieter and less, in the slow, foolish hope that smallness might make him lose interest and look elsewhere.
She was done being small.
Molly Granger straightened her spine, adjusted her grip on the travelling-bag, tested her ankle with a cautious step—painful, swollen, entirely capable of carrying her—and faced the city spread golden and possible before her.
“Well,” she said, to nobody at all, because Molly Granger had never required an audience. “This will do.”