Chapter Eight #3
“She told me before dinner. Or tried to. Very delicately.” Molly gave a small, breathless laugh.
“She said a gentleman had settled my account through the end of the month and would not give his name. The number of gentlemen in Bath who know I exist, possess the means to do it, and would imagine secrecy made the matter less objectionable is rather small.”
“I should have told you.”
“Yes.”
“You would have refused.”
“Yes.”
“Which is why I did not tell you.”
“Which is why I am deciding whether to be angry.”
They walked a few steps in silence. Ahead of them, Dorothea glanced back once, took in the distance between them, and then very deliberately resumed her conversation with Mrs Bramble.
“I am choosing to be grateful,” Molly said finally. “For the present. But if you make another decision about my life without consulting me, I shall be furious, and my fury is not a small thing.”
“I shall remember that.”
“You should. My father once said it was like being shut in a room with a thunderstorm that wished to explain itself.”
The corner of his mouth moved, almost despite him. “A vivid comparison.”
“An accurate one.”
They reached Mrs Bramble’s door. Mrs Bramble went in first to light a candle in the hall, Dorothea following, having accepted an invitation to stay the night at the boarding house after Teddy’s generous wine and the lateness of the hour.
She gave Cillian a pointed goodnight as she passed, communicating, with perfect clarity, that she was allowing him exactly one minute and not a second more.
Molly paused on the step.
The boarding house was dark except for the parlour window, where a lamp had been left burning.
The light fell behind her, soft and gold, while the moon silvered the edge of her cheek and the curve of her bonnet.
Cillian became aware, with a specificity he could no longer pretend was merely tactical observation, of the way she clasped her hands before her, fingers interlaced, as though holding herself steady.
“Thank you,” she said. “For the dinner. For the position. For the room, though you should not have done it as you did.” She looked down at her clasped hands, then back at him. “And for not sending me home.”
Cillian went very still.
“I have not yet decided what to do.”
“No,” she said softly. “But you could have decided already. You could have written to my father the moment you found me. You could have put me in a carriage and called it duty.” Her smile trembled faintly at the edge. “You have not. I know what that costs you.”
He looked at her then, and the familiar brightness had not quite rearranged itself across her face. What he saw beneath it was tired, grateful, and frightened enough that he had to close his hand at his side to stop himself reaching for her.
“I am still the man he sent,” he said.
“I know.”
“I cannot pretend that is nothing.”
“I am not asking you to.” Her voice thinned a little, but it did not break. “Only—thank you for letting me remain myself a little longer.”
The words struck him more deeply than they ought to have done.
“You should not have had to run in order to do that.”
“No,” she said. “But I did run. And now I must go on being brave, whether I feel brave or not. That is the trick, I think. I pretend until the pretending becomes useful.”
She said it with a steadiness that made his throat tighten. He wanted, suddenly and with a force that startled him, to take her clasped hands and hold them in his own. To tell her that she need not hold herself together alone.
He did not. Mrs Bramble was in the hall. Dorothea was almost certainly listening. Molly was unmarried. And he had no right to comfort her with his hands.
So, he stood on the pavement and let the impulse pass through him.
It left a mark all the same.
“Goodnight,” she said softly.
“Goodnight.”
She went inside. The door closed behind her, and a moment later the lamp in the parlour was extinguished.
Cillian stood on the pavement for several seconds after, his hands at his sides, the moonlight turning the pale stone of the street to silver.
He thought of the way she had thanked him for a mercy he had not meant to give, and how bravery, when one stood near enough to see it clearly, looked less like fearlessness than fear that had decided to keep walking.
He returned to the White Hart and did not sleep.
He sat on the edge of the bed in his shirtsleeves and turned the evening over in his mind: the smile that had ambushed him, the goat called Reginald, the dinner he had not expected to survive, and Molly on Mrs Bramble’s step, holding herself together with her own hands.
Inside the boarding house, Molly leaned against the closed front door and pressed one hand flat against her breastbone, breathing carefully.
The smile she had caught across the table would not leave her alone. Small, private, real. The unguarded crack of it. The dangerous warmth of knowing she had caused it.
She understood, more plainly than she wished to, that she was developing feelings for the man her father had sent to bring her home.
Oh no, she thought, with her hand against her chest and the moonlight falling through the passage window.
Oh no.