Chapter Two #2
“I need your help, Swifton.” Gerald had finally accepted the coffee Jennings pressed into his hands and now stood by the fireplace, gripping the cup as though it were the last stable object in a collapsing world.
“You are the only man I trust to find her and bring her back without a scandal. If word reaches Vyne before I can produce her…”
“Why should I involve myself in your family’s affairs, Gerald?”
“Because I helped your brother out of a debt scandal last year. Because we have been neighbours for decades. Because I am standing in your hall at half past ten in the morning looking like a man who has been dragged behind a horse, and I am begging.”
Cillian studied him.
Gerald Granger was a decent man: too soft for his circumstances, too proud, too desperate.
His estate had been haemorrhaging money for a decade, and Lord Vyne’s offer to marry Molly in exchange for settling the family debts had arrived like a rope thrown to a drowning man.
Gerald had seized it, as any drowning father might.
Cillian should refuse. He had no obligation to Gerald beyond neighbourly courtesy and no interest whatsoever in chasing a runaway girl across the countryside.
He waited for the refusal to form. It should have been easy.
I am sorry, Gerald. This is your concern, and yours alone.
“Where do you think she has gone?” he said instead.
Gerald’s shoulders dropped three inches with relief. “I have no idea. The girl has a gift for the unpredictable. She once released a goat into my drawing room because she felt it looked lonely in the garden.”
“A girl of decided methods, then.”
Cillian turned to Jennings, who had been standing in the doorway looking like a man who was hearing the most interesting thing that had happened in the house in two years.
“Pack a bag. Three days.”
“Three days, my lord?”
“She left at midnight with a travelling-bag and a gift for conversation. By now, she will have given her history to half the people between here and wherever she has come to rest. Finding her should not take long. Persuading her to return may prove the lengthier business.”
“And if she refuses, my lord?”
Cillian considered this.
The memory surfaced: Molly Granger at the Michaelmas fair, small and animated and absolutely certain that she held the moral high ground in a dispute over a bowl of punch.
She had looked up at him with those wide eyes, and there had been something in her expression beyond the cheerfulness, something sharp and alive and entirely unwilling to yield.
He remembered thinking, in the distant, clinical way he thought about everything now, that the girl would be difficult to move, if ever she decided to stand still.
“Then I will have wasted three days,” he said. “Which is no different from any other week.”
Gerald wrung his hand, thanked him six times, mounted his horse, and rode back towards his own estate and the approaching disaster of Lord Vyne’s noon arrival.
Cillian stood in the entrance hall and watched him go, waiting again for something to register: concern, curiosity, irritation, anything that might confirm he still possessed the internal machinery of a functioning human being.
The hall held its quiet around him, the long-case clock at the far end ticking out a measured rhythm that was somehow louder for the absence of Gerald’s voice.
Somewhere in the house, Jennings was packing a bag with the brisk satisfaction of a man who had been waiting for an excuse to make his employer leave the premises.
Cillian turned back towards his study.
He had letters to finish before he left.
The drainage report still required his signature.
There were decisions to make about the east cottage roof, and the Henley fence, and the seventeen other small administrative tasks that filled his days like sand filling an hourglass, steadily and impersonally, one grain at a time, measuring nothing except the passage of hours he had stopped caring about.
He would find the girl, deliver her to her father, and return to Harrowden Park—to the silence and the careful, competent, utterly empty life he had built for himself out of the ruins of the man he used to be.
Three days, perhaps four, and then this peculiar interruption would be over. Everything would go back to what it had been, which was what he told himself he wanted. If the telling felt less like conviction than repetition, he chose, as he chose every morning, to let that pass without examination.
Jennings appeared in the study doorway with the packed bag, his expression carefully blank in that particular way that meant he was thinking a great deal and saying none of it.
“The horse is ready, my lord.”
Jennings shifted the bag to his other hand, and the small movement carried the weight of an opinion he was deciding whether to voice.
“My lord, if I may.”
“You will regardless.”
“The young lady you are retrieving. Miss Granger.” Jennings paused. “Be patient with her, my lord. A young lady does not climb out of a window in the middle of the night unless matters have become very bad indeed.”
Cillian met his valet’s eye.
Jennings held his gaze, the same steady look he had once given Captain Swifton across a campfire in Spain, when the night was bad and the odds were worse and neither of them had been willing to be the first to look away.
“Pack an extra shirt,” Cillian said. “I have a feeling Miss Granger is going to be exhausting.”
He took his coat from the hook by the door, swung himself onto the horse the groom had saddled, and rode west.
Towards Bristol, perhaps. Towards Bath, more likely. Towards a girl who had climbed out of a window in the middle of the night with a travelling-bag and no visible plan.
And the morning was fine and entirely wasted on a man who rode through it seeing nothing.