Chapter Twenty-Three
“He has been gone two days, Molly. He will come back. He told you he would.”
“I know he told me. I am merely observing, as a matter of fact, that two days is a very long time when one has become accustomed to seeing a person every day, and that absence creates a particular kind of empty space not easily filled with wine sales and conversations with a cat.”
“You have been talking to the cat for an hour.”
“Wellington is an excellent listener. He does not interrupt, he does not offer unsolicited advice, and he maintains eye contact with a steadiness most humans cannot match.”
Dorothea regarded Molly with the expression she reserved for situations that were simultaneously touching and exasperating, which was to say the expression she wore most often in Molly’s company.
They were sitting in Mrs Bramble’s parlour, the rain falling outside with the patient, persistent thoroughness of English rain that had committed itself to the enterprise and would not be deterred by wishes or convenience.
“He went to Somerset to see your father. He went to settle the debts and ask for your hand. Such things take time.”
“I know such things take time. I am a patient person.”
“You are the least patient person in the history of human civilisation. You once told me you could not wait for toast and ate the bread as it was.”
“Bread is not improved by ceremony. Toasting is merely an additional step, which I chose to omit in the interest of efficiency.”
“You are deflecting.”
“I am absolutely deflecting. I am deflecting because if I think directly about the fact that Cillian Swifton is in Somerset, talking to my father about marrying me, I shall lose the capacity for rational thought, and rational thought is the only thing standing between me and walking to Bridgwater myself to discover what is happening.”
“Bridgwater is twelve miles away.”
“Then I should have a great deal of time to think.”
Dorothea took her hand. The gesture was unusual for Dorothea, who rationed physical contact much as Cillian rationed words, and Molly understood that Dorothea had seen what lay beneath the deflection, the cat conversations, and the arguments about bread: terror dressed as impatience.
It was not the old terror, not the Vyne terror, that cold, specific, bone-deep fear of a man who wanted to break her.
This was a different species altogether: the warm, vulnerable terror of a woman who had found something she wanted to keep, and could not quite believe, despite all evidence, that keeping it was permitted.
Twenty-one years had taught her that wanting things was often a prelude to losing them: her mother, her father’s strength, the life she had wanted before it was promised to Vyne. Even now, some part of her still watched the horizon for the next wave.
Cillian was in Somerset. He was talking to her father, perhaps sitting in the study at Granger Hall at that very moment. Molly was in a parlour in Bath with a cat, a friend, and a cup of tea. The miles between them felt like the width of the world.
“He will come back,” Dorothea said again.
The repetition was itself a kindness. Dorothea Finch did not repeat things without reason, and the reason was that Molly needed to hear it twice.
“I know.”
“He will come back because he is a man who does what he says he will do, which is the rarest and most valuable quality a man can possess. And because he loves you with the sort of love that walks through walls. I know this because I have been watching him love you for six weeks, and I have never, in thirty years of observing human behaviour, seen anything quite like it.”
“Dorothea.”
“What? I am not being sentimental. I am being accurate.”
Molly looked away first, because accuracy, in this instance, was difficult to meet directly. Wellington had settled onto the arm of her chair with the grave authority of a magistrate, and she rested a hand on his back, and she rested her hand on his back, grateful for his warmth.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Do not thank me. Thank me by ceasing to converse with the cat and going for a walk. The rain will do you good. You have always been better in motion than at rest.”
This was true. Molly had always been better in motion.
She had been in motion since the night she climbed out of the window, and that motion had carried her across Somerset and into Bath, through weeks of building, fighting, and falling in love.
The stillness that waiting required was, for a woman whose natural state was a kind of joyful forward momentum, a very particular form of torture.
So they went for a walk.
Molly put on the cloak she had worn the night she fled Somerset, and Dorothea took an umbrella with the resigned competence of a woman who expected weather to behave badly and prepared accordingly.
The rain was steady, cold, and determined, the sort that turned Bath’s pale streets to mirrors and drove every sensible person indoors.
Molly walked beside Dorothea with her hood up, her face damp, and her umbrella tipped against the rain, letting her feet carry her, as they so often did, towards the place that felt most like hers.
The Royal Crescent was empty. Its long sweep of stone faced the dark lawn beneath a low grey sky, grand and quiet as a theatre after the audience had gone.
They walked past Lady Whitfield’s house and Colonel Whitmore’s, and the place where, on an afternoon that felt like another lifetime, Molly had asked Cillian whether the war had been awful. He had said yes, and she had squeezed his arm.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
It was easier, somehow, to be silent in motion. The waiting that had been unbearable in Mrs Bramble’s parlour became something she could carry step by step, with Dorothea beside her, the rain tapping against their umbrellas and the wet stone shining beneath their feet.
“I hate this,” Molly said at last.
“The rain?”
“The not knowing.”
Dorothea’s hand tightened briefly around the handle of her umbrella.
“I know.”
“I keep imagining him in my father’s study.
I keep imagining my father’s face. I keep imagining all the things that might have been said, and then correcting myself, because I do not know what has been said, which means I have invented twelve possible conversations and suffered through all of them for no useful purpose. ”
“That sounds very like you.”
“It is exhausting, sometimes, being me.”
“I have often suspected as much.”
Molly laughed, but softly. The sound disappeared into the rain almost at once.
They had reached the middle of the Crescent when Dorothea slowed.
“Molly.”
There was something in her voice that made Molly turn.
Dorothea was no longer looking at the houses. She was looking beyond Molly, down the sweep of pavement, towards the far end of the Crescent.
Molly followed her gaze.
For one suspended moment, the rain and the stone and the whole grey afternoon seemed to hold still.
Cillian stood on the pavement of the Royal Crescent, without a hat, his dark hair wet against his forehead, his coat darkening at the shoulders.
He looked as though he had come straight from the road.
There was mud on his boots, rain on his face, and an expression in his eyes she had never seen before: open, present, almost radiant.
He had come back.
Dorothea lowered the umbrella a fraction, then looked at Molly with an expression that managed, somehow, to be both composed and deeply pleased.
“I believe,” she said, “that my usefulness has expired.”
“Dorothea—”
“No. Go.”
Molly did not need to be told twice.
She surrendered her umbrella without looking to see whether Dorothea had taken it, then crossed the wet pavement towards him, not quite running, because the stones were slick and Dorothea would have had strong opinions about broken ankles, but moving quickly enough that her cloak lifted behind her.
Cillian came to meet her.
“You are back,” she said.
“I am back.”
“You went to see my father.”
“I did.”
“And?”
“He sends his love,” Cillian said. “His apologies. And his blessing.”
Molly stared at him, rain slipping down the edge of her hood.
“His blessing for what?”
The rain fell on the Crescent and the lawn and the two of them standing on the wet pavement, steady and patient and entirely indifferent to the fact that a man was about to ask a question that would change the shape of his life.
Cillian took a breath.
“Molly Granger.” His voice was rough from the ride and the rain and the emotion he was no longer attempting to hide.
“I came to Bath to bring you home. Instead, you gave me one. You gave me a city I had not cared to see, and made me see it. You gave me laughter in a wine shop, a dancing lesson in a dusty room, and a reason to step away from the wall. You brought me back to myself, and then you loved what you found there.”
The rain ran down his face. It ran down hers.
“Will you marry me?”
The question hung between them.
Molly looked at the man before her: hollow once, and now full; silent once, and now speaking; a man who had spent two years protecting himself from wanting anything and was now standing in the rain, wanting everything.
“Yes,” she said.
Cillian went utterly still.
Then she threw herself at him.
It was pure Molly: ungraceful, unhesitating, and entirely unconcerned with dignity, propriety, or the physics of two wet people colliding on slick pavement. Her arms went around his neck and she held on, held on, held on.
He caught her.
Of course he caught her.
His arms closed around her waist, and for a moment, he lifted her clean off the ground. She was laughing against his neck, or crying, or both. He could not tell. He did not need to. He held her in the rain, his face in her hair, while somewhere in the city a church bell rang the hour.
“You are soaking wet,” he said.
“So are you.”
“You said yes.”
“I did. Very efficiently.”
He drew back just enough to see her face. Her hair was coming loose beneath her hood, rain shone on her cheeks, and her eyes were bright with tears she made no attempt to hide.
For one breath, he only looked at her.
Then he kissed her.
It was their first kiss, and it was not at all the sort of first kiss Molly had imagined for herself.
There was no moonlight, no music, no convenient privacy, no graceful arrangement of hands.
There was only rain, and the cold stone of the Crescent beneath her feet, and Cillian Swifton kissing her as though the word yes had undone the last of his restraint.
She kissed him back with both hands in his wet hair.
The kiss was clumsy for half a second, because they were both smiling, and because she rose on her toes at precisely the moment he bent his head, and because romance, Molly discovered, involved rather more noses than novels had led her to expect.
Then his hand settled at her back, hers found the line of his jaw, and the awkwardness became something tender and breathless and entirely theirs.
When they parted, he rested his forehead against hers.
“You are laughing,” he said.
“I am happy,” she said, as though the word surprised her.
His expression changed.
“So am I.”
“That is new for you.”
“It is,” he admitted. “I am still determining what to do with it.”
She smiled through the rain.
“You might begin by holding on to me.”
His arms tightened around her.
“That,” he said, “I can do.”
A discreet cough sounded several yards away.
Dorothea stood beneath her umbrella, Molly’s own recovered and held ready in her other hand, wearing an expression that combined satisfaction, vindication, and the faintest trace of triumph.
“Finally,” she said.
Molly turned, still within the circle of Cillian’s arms.
“You were watching.”
“I was supervising. There is a difference.”
Molly’s smile softened. “Thank you, Dorothea. For everything. I do not think I could have come so far without you.”
“I know.” Dorothea held out Molly’s umbrella. “Now let us return to the house before you both take a chill.”
Molly looked back at Cillian. Rain fell around them. The Crescent gleamed, pale and silver in the wet afternoon, and Dorothea waited with the patience of a woman who understood that people in love required a certain amount of time to stand in rain before they could be persuaded to behave sensibly.
“We should go inside,” Molly said.
“We should.”
Neither of them moved.
Then she took his hand, opened her umbrella, and drew him beneath it with her.
They walked back through the rain with Dorothea beside them, who observed the arrangement with raised brows and chose, magnanimously, not to comment on the fact that Cillian’s shoulder remained thoroughly exposed while Molly was perfectly dry.
At Mrs Bramble’s, the door opened before they reached it.
The house was warm. The tea was ready. The fire was lit.
Outside, the rain fell harder.
Neither of them noticed.