Chapter 29 #2
“Do you know how remarkably pleasant it is to travel when everyone believes you are a man? No one questioned why I was alone. No one warned me that I ought to choose a safer road or asked whether someone was expecting me. I purchased food, ink, and a quill without the shopkeeper once suggesting that I consult my father about any of it.”
She looked down at herself, and a trace of bitterness entered her expression.
“Apparently all I required to move freely through the world was a pair of trousers.”
Rosalind’s mouth twitched. William suspected laughing would be physically dangerous, so he resisted.
“Did you encounter the magistrate’s men?” she asked.
The satisfaction faded from Isabella’s expression. “Yes. Reinforcements arrived just before I did.”
William felt himself tense. “Algernon?”
“Gone. Pembry took him.”
For a moment, William could only stare at the pink light spilling across the blankets.
His brother was under arrest.
There was nothing surprising about it. William had heard Algernon confess to murdering their father.
He had watched him raise a pistol toward an innocent man and had a bandage wrapped around his own ribs to prove how that had ended.
Yet knowing what must happen and discovering that it already had were strangely different things.
Algernon was gone.
Soon they would return to London, and there would be questions William did not know how to answer. Questions about Algernon’s birth and what it meant for the title. About their father’s death. About Edmund’s imprisonment and everything that had happened at Bryn Hir.
His mother would be forced to confront secrets she had spent decades trying to contain, and William did not know what would remain of the family he had believed he possessed when all of them were finally dragged into the light.
A hand slipped into his.
He looked down to find Rosalind’s fingers threaded through his, then raised his gaze to her face.
She did not ask whether he was all right.
William was grateful for that. He would not have known what to tell her.
Isabella seemed to sense the shift in the room. “I should find your father.”
“He was resting when I left him,” Rosalind said.
“Yes. I am certain he has stopped.”
She collected the parcel of food and started toward the door, but paused at the threshold and looked back at William.
“It is good to see you awake, Lord William.”
There was no teasing in her voice this time.
William smiled. “Thank you, Miss Hartwell.”
After she left, silence settled over the room. William remained aware of Rosalind’s hand in his, warm and steady, until his attention drifted once more toward the strange rosy light filling the bedchamber.
“What is that?”
Rosalind followed his gaze. “The cloth?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” For some reason, she looked suddenly self-conscious. “The morning light was rather harsh yesterday. Isabella found it somewhere in the house, and we hung it over the windows.”
William studied the pink fabric for another moment. “I thought I was dead.”
Rosalind turned sharply toward him. “What?”
“When I woke. Everything was peach-colored.”
Something changed in her expression, though William could not determine what.
“I had a strange dream,” he said.
Rosalind became very still.
“I was walking somewhere.” He closed his eyes, searching for pieces of the dream that already seemed determined to escape him. “There were fields and hills, and a road that seemed to go on forever. The sky was peach-colored too.”
When he opened his eyes, Rosalind was staring at him.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“That is very clearly not nothing.”
Her eyes had begun to shine again, and William frowned. “Rosalind?”
“It sounds like a magical place.”
He thought about it.
There had been warmth there. An endless road beneath an impossible sky and the peculiar sense that nothing waited at the end of it except whatever he chose to find. No expectations. No duties pulling him one way or another. He could have gone anywhere.
And yet, looking at Rosalind now, William knew what had been missing.
His fingers tightened around hers. “It would only be magical if you were there.”
Her breath caught.
William had not intended to say it. Or perhaps he had. He was beginning to suspect that some truths simply grew too large to keep politely tucked away.
So much of his life had changed in the space of a few weeks. His father was no longer the man William remembered. His brother was almost a stranger to him, and even the Sinclair name seemed to carry a different weight now that he understood how many secrets had been hidden beneath it.
But Rosalind...
But Rosalind was startlingly simple.
Whatever else had become uncertain, whatever pieces of his life he would have to sort through when they returned to London, he knew what he felt when he looked at her.
“Do you remember the solstice, when we were children?” he asked.
A small smile touched her mouth. “Which one?”
“The disastrous one.”
“You will have to be more specific.”
“The one where you informed me that I had ruined everything.”
“I believe there have been several occasions when I informed you of that.”
William smiled carefully, mindful of his ribs this time. “The summer solstice. We were young, playing outside among the trees. You told me it was supposed to be the longest, brightest day of the year.”
“And you mocked me.”
“Repeatedly, if I remember correctly.”
“You do.”
“I was charming.”
“You were unbearable.”
Rosalind laughed softly, and William watched her for a moment. Somewhere between the familiar teasing and the warmth of her hand in his, the words he had been trying to find no longer seemed difficult at all.
“I thought it was nonsense,” he said.
“What was?”
“The solstice. All that talk about light and beginnings and whatever other magic you claimed to be performing.”
“I performed excellent magic.”
“So I have been told.” He lifted their joined hands slightly. “But I think I understand it now.”
The teasing faded from her expression.
“My entire life feels different than it did a month ago. I do not know what will happen to Algernon or what becomes of the title. I do not know how much my mother knew, or what I am supposed to do with everything I have learned.”
Rosalind squeezed his hand, and William drew a slow breath.
“But I know what I want.”
She became very still.
“You.”
Her eyes filled immediately, but now that he had begun, William found he had far more to say.