Chapter 30 #2
She knew what he meant. Tomorrow they would leave Wales. Tomorrow they would begin the journey back toward London and everything waiting there.
“Tomorrow,” she agreed.
“We go home.”
The word settled strangely inside her.
All her life, home had meant London, her parents, the familiar rooms where she had grown up. Yet after everything that had happened, she was no longer certain it could be contained so neatly within a place.
Perhaps that was another thing she would have to discover.
Rosalind squeezed his fingers. “Rest.”
“Yes, my tyrant.”
She left him smiling.
Downstairs, the house had gone quiet beneath the lazy warmth of the afternoon. Gabriel had disappeared sometime after breakfast, and Isabella had not been seen for nearly an hour, which meant she was almost certainly occupying herself with something interesting.
Rosalind found her father in the drawing room beside one of the tall windows, a blanket draped over his knees and an open book resting forgotten in his lap. Some color had returned to his face over the past four days, though he was still thinner than he ought to be.
The sight of him no longer brought the same breathless disbelief it had at Bryn Hir.
Instead, it brought something quieter.
Rosalind had sent word to her mother almost as soon as they reached Merriton’s estate, telling her that Papa was alive, that they were together, and that they would return as soon as William and her father were well enough to travel.
She could only imagine what that letter had meant to her mother after so many weeks of uncertainty.
“Papa?”
Edmund looked around, his face warming immediately. “There you are.”
Rosalind crossed the room and settled into the chair beside him. “William says we may leave tomorrow.”
“So I have heard.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“I was hoping to remain here long enough to become intolerable to our host.”
“You have made excellent progress.”
That earned her a smile, though it faded as he closed the book in his lap.
“There is something I have been meaning to say to you.”
Rosalind eyed him suspiciously. “That sounds ominous.”
“It is not.”
“That is precisely what people say before something ominous.”
The look he gave her was so familiar that for an instant she might have been ten years old again, testing the limits of his patience merely to discover where they were.
Then his expression softened. “I have never properly thanked you.”
“Papa, you do not need to thank me.”
“Perhaps not, but I would like to.”
There was enough quiet determination in his voice that Rosalind did not argue.
He reached for her hand. “When I was at Bryn Hir, I spent a great deal of time thinking about you and your mother. I wondered whether you were safe, what you had been told, and whether you believed any of it. But whenever I thought of you, I realized I was still imagining the little girl who used to follow me from room to room asking questions until I surrendered merely to make her stop.”
Rosalind smiled. “I was very persistent.”
“You were exhausting.”
“I prefer persistent.”
“I am sure you do.”
His thumb moved slowly across the back of her hand, and when he continued, the humor had left his voice.
“Then you came to Bryn Hir.”
Rosalind’s throat tightened.
“You questioned what everyone else was willing to accept. You followed the evidence, crossed half the country, and found me.”
“I did not do it alone.”
“I know. Accepting help does not diminish what you did.”
Her father looked down at their joined hands. “I spent so many years thinking it was my responsibility to protect you that I failed to notice when you stopped needing me to.”
Something tightened in Rosalind’s throat.
When her father looked at her again, there was pride in his face, but something deeper too. For perhaps the first time, he was not looking at the little girl he remembered.
He was seeing the woman she had become.
“You are stronger than I knew.”
Rosalind could not answer around the sudden tightness in her throat, so she leaned forward and wrapped her arms around him instead.
He held her close.
“I missed you,” she whispered against his shoulder.
“I missed you too.”
She closed her eyes and allowed herself to remain there for a moment. “I never believed you left us willingly.”
His arms tightened around her.
“I knew something was wrong,” she continued. “I did not know what, and there were days when I wondered whether I would ever understand any of it, but I knew you. That letter never changed that.”
Edmund drew a shaky breath. “I hoped it would not.”
Rosalind pulled back and wiped beneath one eye. “Although you could have made the entire affair considerably easier by not being kidnapped.”
“I shall bear that in mind should the situation arise again.”
“It had better not.”
That coaxed a laugh from him, and some of the emotion in the room eased.
Rosalind’s gaze wandered toward the pianoforte across the room. The sight of it brought back quieter evenings at home, her mother reading near the fire while Papa pretended not to listen whenever Rosalind played something she had not practiced nearly enough.
“Would you like some music?”
Her father followed her gaze. “Very much.”
Rosalind crossed to the instrument and lifted the fallboard. It was slightly out of tune, but she chose a familiar piece and began anyway.
Her fingers remembered what her mind did not need to think about. The melody filled the room, soft and familiar, carrying with it memories of evenings before forged letters and secret carriages, before Bryn Hir and all the terrible truths they had uncovered.
Yet it did not make Rosalind wish to return to the person she had been then.
Too much had changed. Perhaps she had too.
When the final notes faded, Rosalind let her hands rest on the keys for a moment before turning toward her father.
He was discreetly wiping beneath one eye.
She smiled. “Are you crying?”
“Certainly not. There is dust.”
“In both eyes?”
“A particularly aggressive sort.”
Rosalind laughed and rose from the bench, but before she could cross the room, her father cleared his throat.
“There is one more thing.”
The note in his voice made her pause. “Why do I suspect this is the ominous part?”
“Come sit down and find out.”
She returned to the chair beside him, regarding him suspiciously until he finally took pity on her.
“William spoke to me this morning.”
Her heart gave a peculiar little leap. “About what?”
“You.”
That leap became something considerably more unruly.
Her father watched her for another moment before continuing. “He asked my permission to propose to you.”
For once, Rosalind had absolutely nothing to say.
Of course he had. That impossible man had apparently found time between recovering from a gunshot wound and becoming suspiciously acquainted with walls to arrange a conversation with her father.
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him I could not give it.”
Her happiness faltered, and his mouth twitched before she could even protest.
“Because,” he continued, “it is not mine to give. I told him I would ask you what you wanted.”
Rosalind stared at him for a moment before the meaning fully settled.
Then she threw her arms around him.
He laughed and caught her carefully. “I shall take that as a favorable response.”
“He asked you this morning, and you have made him wait all day?”
“I thought it would be good for him.”
Rosalind pulled back to look at him. “Papa.”
“I am recovering from a kidnapping. I require entertainment.”
She laughed and kissed his cheek.
“So,” her father said when she settled beside him again, “what am I to tell him?”
There was no answer to consider. William had begun as the gentleman she was never supposed to want, then somehow become her accomplice, her favorite source of irritation, and eventually her dearest friend.
“He is the only gentleman who has ever courted me properly,” she said.
He raised his brows. “Is that so?”
“Admittedly, he ruined a considerable portion of the courtship while doing it.”
“That sounds rather less convincing.”
“We have a manual now. I expect the next attempt will go much better.”