Chapter 22
Anna had not expected packing to feel like anything.
Mrs. Henderson had most of it in hand, the dresses that Rachel had given her, the small things from the dressing table wrapped in cloth and placed in the case.
Anna sat in the chair by the window and assisted where she was useful and tried to be sensible about it.
“Wiltshire,” Rachel said as she appeared in the doorway and saw the trunk. She walked in and sat on the edge of the bed.
“Wiltshire,” Anna agreed.
“It will be very quiet.”
“I expect so.” Anna looked at the maid, folding the blue dress, and then at her hands. “I think I could use ‘very quiet ’ for a while.”
“I understand,” she replied. “I will not try to take it personally.”
“Birchall’s solicitor confirmed this morning,” Anna said. “The manor is called Ludlow House. It is modest, but the grounds are good. And there is an allowance, which is more than I could have—” She stopped.
It was still strange, the thought of being free.
Having things that were hers. A house with her name on it, and money that belonged to her.
She had not had those things in a very long time, and before Birchall she had not fully understood how much a life could shrink without them. It was all an impossible blur.
“It is yours,” Rachel said.
“It is.” She looked at the window, the November London morning, grey as it always was. “It is entirely mine.”
“And you may do precisely what you like with it.” Rachel paused. “All of it. Everything. For the first time.”
Anna breathed in. “Yes.”
“I am going to miss you enormously. I am not going to make a performance of it because you’ve had enough to deal with and don’t need my dramatics, but I want it known,” Rachel said. “I’ll visit you as soon as you’re settled!”
Anna looked at her.
“It is known,” she said. “And please do. I’ll write to you when the house is ready for guests.”
Rachel crossed the room and threw her arms around her and grabbed her tight. Anna held on, and Rachel held back, and the maid tactfully found a reason to take a dress into the corridor.
She is truly the sister I never had.
“Just so you know… Percy,” Rachel said. “He will miss you. Even though he’s not my cat, I know him, and he’ll definitely miss you.”
Anna pulled back and looked at her friend’s face. “I’ll miss him too,” she replied, knowing she wasn’t only speaking about the cat.
Frederick had been in the study, pacing the floor so much he nearly wore a hole in the wood.
Then he went to the corridor, and then somehow he was in the entrance hall with no specific reason to be there, when Anna came down the stairs.
Her bonnet was already on, and her gloves in her hand.
She stopped one step from the bottom and looked at him.
“Your Grace,” she said.
“Miss Cartwell,” he ground out, his throat suddenly dry as dust.
“Thank you,” she said. “For everything. I—” She stopped.
He could see her composing it, finding the version that would hold.
“There are not adequate words, so I won’t try to find them.
Only that I am aware of what you have done, and I am aware of what it cost you, and I am…
I am…” She stopped again. “I am grateful. I am more grateful than I know how to say.”
She was standing one step from the bottom of his stairs, in a travelling dress and her bonnet. She had spent three months with them, eaten at his table, sat in his garden in the dark, and stood alone in his entrance hall when she should not have had to stand alone anywhere.
More than that, she was grateful, and she was looking at him with eyes that had seen a very great deal of him that he normally showed no one.
Tell her how you feel…
“You’re Rachel’s closest friend,” he said. “Of course I would help a friend of Rachel’s.”
He watched something crack in her eyes, and he hated himself for it.
It’s for the best. I’ll only let her down. She deserves better.
She looked down, briefly, and when she looked back up, the expression was composed.
“Of course,” she said. “Yes, Your Grace.”
She came down the last step. She bent to Percy, who had appeared from the direction of the kitchen next to the luggage. She ran her fingers along his head, and he pressed into it.
She’d even won Percy over.
Frederick’s fists clenched. His entire body clenched.
Let her go. Let her free. That’s what she’s always wanted.
Finally, Anna straightened and looked at him once more. Rachel appeared from the morning room and embraced her, and there was something said between them that he did not hear.
The blood in his ears was pounding so hard, he could hardly hear his own breathing. Then, the footman had the door, the trunks were already in the carriage, and Anna was on the front steps.
She turned once more. She looked at him.
He did not say it. She turned and went down the steps and got into the carriage, and the footman closed the door, and the carriage moved. He stood in the entrance hall.
Percy sat at his feet and looked at the closed front door with an expression of professional dissatisfaction. Then he looked up at Frederick. Frederick looked down at him.
“Don’t,” he said.
Percy looked at the door again and meowed.
The carriage turned off the square, and the driver urged the horses up to pace. London moved past the windows in its usual indifferent fashion.
Anna focused her attention on the other carriages, the pedestrians, the grey sky above the rooftops. She sat with her hands in her lap and her bonnet straight and her posture as it should be.
Rachel’s closest friend. Of course I would help a friend of Rachel’s.
She knew. She knew what he would say. She knew what was coming and braced herself, and it arrived anyway and was still, somehow, more than she had prepared for.
I must focus on the positive. I am free. I am going to Wiltshire.
She had a house with her name on it and an allowance and no one directing her days, and she was going toward all of it, and the life she had wanted was ahead of her.
The carriage turned another corner, and Rathbourne House was behind her. She could not see it from the window.
She looked at her hands. She looked at the London street.
She pressed her lips together, which had begun to quiver. She was alone, the carriage was moving, and there was no one to see.
Heavens, she was very tired of being composed. She had ridden a stolen horse through London in a wedding dress. She had written her own name at the bottom of a deposition, had her face held in the hands of a man who would not say what she knew he felt.
Anna pressed the back of her glove to her mouth and wept.
Not quietly. Not in the contained way she usually cried, when she had kept it inaudible, so no one would have the satisfaction of it.
The real kind, the kind that came from all the months of it.
More specifically, from a man at the bottom of a staircase who had said of course in the voice of someone closing a door.
She thought of her parents, of Rachel, of all of it.
The carriage went on; London dissipated into country. She wept until she was empty, and then she sat with her face against the window glass, which was cold, and looked at the road ahead.
It is over.