Chapter Four #2
Her voice was exactly as he remembered it: carrying, certain of itself, and so alive that the sound of it landed somewhere behind his ribs with a small, involuntary jolt, like a signal arriving on a frequency he had forgotten how to receive.
“You looked rather stern then, too, if I recall correctly.”
“Miss Granger.”
“It is. Though you may have to take my word for that, since I appear to be eating an apple in a doorway like a stable boy.” She took another bite, deliberately, like someone folding her arms in protest. “Why are you in Bath, Lord Harrowden?”
“Your father sent me to bring you home.”
Her composure held. The apple remained in her hand, half bitten, and her chin stayed precisely where it was.
But a flicker moved across her eyes, quick and frightened, like a shadow crossing warm water.
Then it was gone, her jaw set, and her shoulders squared in a way that reminded him, absurdly and specifically, of Mrs Bramble downstairs.
“Then you have wasted a journey, my lord. I am staying in Bath.”
She took another bite of the apple, slower this time, with the deliberate calm of a woman holding a position she had not entirely expected to defend.
Cillian kept his hands clasped behind his back.
“Miss Granger, your father is deeply concerned.”
“My father is deeply in debt, which is a different thing, though he has confused the two. I am sorry for his worry, but I will not go back.”
He glanced past her into the room, then back to her face.
“This is a conversation better had inside than on a landing.”
“This is a conversation better not had at all, since its conclusion is already determined and nothing you say is going to alter it.”
Her eyes met his, warm and brown, the fear still there, banked beneath the bravado like coals beneath ash. She was holding the apple so tightly her knuckles had gone white.
She is terrified, Cillian thought. But she is standing here anyway, and she will not move, nor could I move her if I tried.
“I am not going home,” she said, very quietly.
The quietness was worse than the cheerfulness, because it meant she had stopped performing and was simply telling the truth. The apple lowered to her side, forgotten.
“I am not going back to that house, and I am not marrying Lord Vyne.” Her free hand pressed flat against the door frame, fingers spreading as though the wood might steady her.
“I am not going to stand in a church and promise to obey a man who looks at me as one looks at something one intends to break.”
A breath. Uneven.
“So, unless you are planning to carry me home over your shoulder, which I assure you I will make extraordinarily, memorably, and publicly difficult, you might as well go back to Somerset and tell my father that his daughter has made her choice.”
She shut the door in his face.
The sound of it was definitive, hard and clean and unequivocal, settling into the silence of the narrow stairwell like a full stop at the end of a sentence that left no room for amendment.
Cillian stood on the landing.
Somewhere behind the closed door, Molly was already talking again, her voice only slightly thicker than it had been a moment ago. She was either fine or very good at pretending to be.
Cillian, an expert in the latter, suspected the latter.
He stood there longer than he ought.
Something in her voice when she said break had landed in a place he had believed permanently sealed, and the image of her in that doorway—half pinned, poorly bandaged, holding an apple like a weapon—was doing something to the carefully curated emptiness he had spent two years constructing.
He found himself wondering, against his better judgment, what precisely she was afraid of.
He went back downstairs.
Mrs Bramble was in the parlour, pouring herself a cup of tea, having heard the door slam and drawn her own conclusions.
“Well?”
“She shut the door.”
“I told you she would not go quietly.”
“You did.” Cillian paused in the parlour doorway. “Mrs Bramble. The man she is running from. Lord Vyne. What has she told you about him?”
Mrs Bramble set the teapot down and held his eye for a moment. The sharpness in her gaze was no longer assessing. It was something else. Something harder and older and more personal.
“Enough,” she said. “She has told me enough.”
Cillian nodded.
He walked to the door, stepped into the street, and stood on the pavement in the late afternoon light while Bath went about its business around him, all carriages and pedestrians and the ordinary noise of a city that had no idea a girl with a travelling-bag and a twisted ankle was rewriting Cillian Swifton’s understanding of what it meant to want something.
He was supposed to track her down and bring her home. He had given his word to Gerald. The correct course, after his failed attempt, was to return to Somerset, report her location, and let her father handle the rest.
Instead, he walked to the White Hart, secured a room for the night, sat on the edge of the bed, and stared at the wall.
He reached for the travelling writing case beside the bed, opened it, then closed it again without drawing out a sheet of paper.
He was not going home.
And this, he suspected, would take more than three days.