50
CECILY
She was back in the solar at Veyron Hall.
The chair was by the window. She had not touched the embroidery frame for days. The light coming in at an angle meant it was afternoon, though she could not remember the morning.
She was being poisoned.
The thought arrived with a clarity she hadn’t felt for days, cutting through the slow, muffled heaviness that had made everything feel slightly wrong and slightly far away.
She had to get up, get out of this room, get away before someone came to poison her again.
She pushed herself upright in the chair.
Her legs wouldn’t hold her properly. They moved, but without strength, without certainty, as if the connection between her will and her body had come partly loose.
She got as far as standing and stopped there, swaying, her hands braced against the chair back.
The window. If she could reach the window. There was something outside. Someone outside. Waiting. She could feel it.
She began to move. Each step sapped her strength, costing her something.
The floor seemed to rock slightly beneath her feet, as if she was standing on a boat’s deck.
She kept one hand trailing along the wall for balance.
The cold wall was the only thing that felt solid.
She crossed the room one slow step at a time, breathing through the effort, until her hands found the windowsill and she could lean against it and look down.
The courtyard lay below in afternoon light. A figure stood at the far edge of the yard, near the gate. Tall. Dark-haired. The set of his shoulders unmistakable even at that distance.
Finn.
She opened her mouth. His name gathered in her throat and stopped there, as though the air between her and the sound had thickened into something she couldn’t push through. She tried harder, pressing forward against the sill, her mouth open, putting everything she had into it.
What came out was a thin, reedy pull of air, so meager it faded into nothingness immediately.
He was still there. He hadn’t moved yet. She tried again, straining to make a sound, and this time felt something—a pressure, a stirring—but still no voice. Not even a whisper.
Then he turned back toward the gate.
No!
She tried to make a noise, to call his name, with everything left in her, and what came out was not a sound at all. A scraping, a rasp. The ghost of a word that dissolved before it reached the air.
Finn walked through the gate and was gone.
She stood at the window. Her hands were shaking. She kept trying to call his name again, but the courtyard was empty now and there was no one to hear the small, broken sounds she was making.
She was alone.
The room had grown darker. The light that had marked the afternoon was now something closer to dusk, gray and still.
She was cold in a way that had nothing to do with the air, cold that lived in her bones, that no fire could reach.
She tried to push herself back from the window, and her legs gave out entirely.
She went down hard, clutching the sill on the way, ending up on the floor with her palms flat against the floor and her cheek pressed against it.
She could not get up.
She lay there and tried to move but couldn’t. She was so tired. She had been so tired for so long.
Then came a knock at the door.
She lifted her head.
The knock again. Firm.
She opened her mouth. The words formed clearly in her mind:
Don’t come in, go away, I don’t want you here.
But they came out as nothing at all, not even a whisper. She watched the door. She could not look away. She could not move. She could only wait.
The door opened.
Julian.
He stood in the doorway, his dark coat neat, a dimpled smile on his face. His eyes moved through the room with the unhurried attention of a man taking stock. They found her on the floor. He smiled.
“There you are,” he said. In his hands he held a glass. He extended it toward her. “Time for your wine, my dear. Drink up.”
The face above her seemed to ripple, the sharp lines of Julian’s smile softening into a round, uncertain mouth. His dark coat bled into the shape of an apron.
It was a girl, her maid, holding a basin of water and looking down at Cecily with wide, worried eyes.
“There ye are, my lady.” Edith’s voice was small and worried. “Time fer yer mornin’ meal. I knocked but there was no answer, so I… are ye alright? Should I fetch someone?”
Cecily realized she was sitting upright in her own bed. She pressed her hands flat against the mattress. Her own ceiling above her. Her own room. The familiar dark wood, the familiar smell of the rushes, the sound of the household stirring below.
She was home.
“I’m alright,” she said. Her voice came out steady, which surprised her. “It was a dream. I’m alright.”
Edith curtsied, still uncertain. “Cook says breakfast is near ready, my lady.”
Cecily looked at the girl’s face for a moment longer. Edith, not Julian.
“Thank you, Edith,” she said. “I’ll be down shortly.”
∞∞∞
The day before, it was Edith who saw Cecily arrive home first. The maid had been crossing the yard with a bundle of linen and stopped dead in her tracks when she saw Cecily walking across the courtyard toward the front door. The linen nearly slipped from her arms.
“My lady!” Her voice came out as a half-whisper, half-squeak. “Ye’re back. Ye’re here.” She looked wildly toward the hall. “They’ll want to know. I must tell them.”
“Go,” Cecily said gently. “Tell them I’m coming.”
Edith was already running, clutching the linens as she raced inside.
Cecily stood outside for a moment before following Edith inside. Malethurst Hall, her home, looked the same. The smell of the kitchen fires drifted across from the east wing. The sound of servants singing inside, slightly off-key. She’d grown up with these sounds. These smells.
Now they struck her with a force she hadn’t expected. It was so good to be home.
She reminded herself again that she’d only been gone four days from this time. But she—her body, her memories, her soul—knew it had been much longer. She’d experienced a lifetime in those four days.
She thought of her Uncle Stephen with fondness.
Some day, when she was long gone, he would inherit Malethurst Hall.
Then she thought of Isabel, who had wept at her own wedding, who had slipped coins into Cecily’s hands and told her to run.
Cecily could not bear what that thought meant.
If they had changed history, would Isabel exist in the future?
Cecily straightened her back and took a slow breath. She knew what was coming. She was ready for it.
Her mother appeared in the doorway before Cecily had taken three steps toward the hall.
For a moment, neither of them moved. Then her mother crossed the yard in a way that had nothing ladylike about it, quick and unguarded and entirely unlike the composed woman who presided over the household with such quiet authority.
She pulled Cecily into her arms so tightly that it was difficult to breathe.
“You foolish, foolish girl,” Rosamund said into her hair. Her voice was muffled and unsteady. “Do you have any idea, any idea at all—”
“I know,” Cecily said. “I’m sorry, Mother.”
“We searched everywhere,” Rosamund said. “Your father rode out himself. Three times.” She pulled back just far enough to look at Cecily, hands gripping her shoulders, eyes moving over her face as if checking for damage. “You’re not hurt?”
“I’m not hurt.”
“Where were you?”
“I was at Grandfather’s.”
“You should have sent word.”
Cecily held her mother’s gaze. “I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was frightened, and I ran. I’m sorry.”
Her mother looked at her for a long moment. Then she pulled her close again, and this time the grip was less desperate. Cecily felt the tension go out of Rosamund’s shoulders. She felt her own go with it.
Her father appeared in the doorway.
Thomas didn’t rush across the yard. He stood there, watching them. When Cecily met his eyes over her mother’s shoulder, the relief on his face was so plain and unguarded that her throat tightened. He was not a man who showed his heart easily, but he showed it now.
Thomas crossed the yard slowly and put both arms around them, Rosamund and Cecily together, and held them without speaking.
For a moment, Cecily simply let herself be there. Between them. Home.
She thought of the other Cecily, dying alone in that dim room in 1301, with no one left to hold her this way. To have this—her parents’ arms around her, the solid warmth of their bodies—was a treasure she hadn’t understood until she’d nearly lost it forever.
How easy it is to forget what a moment like this is worth, she thought. God, never let me forget again.
She pressed her face into her father’s shoulder and said nothing.
∞∞∞
The warmth did not last long.
They moved inside. Rosamund composed herself with visible effort, straightening her veil and smoothing her sleeves.
Thomas’s expression settled back into something more measured.
They sat her down in the small receiving room off the entryway, the room where serious things were discussed.
Cecily understood that the reunion was over and the reckoning had begun.
“You will never,” her mother began, with quiet precision, “leave this house again without an escort. Not to the village. Not to Anton’s. Not anywhere.”
“I understand.”
“Do you? Because I need you to truly grasp the seriousness of your actions, Cecily, not simply to agree with me.”
Cecily looked at her mother and then at her father. At their faces, still slightly pale, still carrying the shadow of four days’ fear. She thought of everything she’d seen. Everything she knew now about the future that they didn’t.
“I do,” she said. “I promise you. I’m done running. Whatever happens, I want to face it here, with you. I trust you.” She paused. “I should have trusted you from the beginning.”
Her mother’s face softened at those words. Thomas watched Cecily steadily.
“I hope you mean that. We are trying to protect you,” he said. “We always have.”
“I know that now.”
He nodded slowly. Then he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and spoke plainly. “Alard de Veyron is not a man to be dismissed lightly. You know this.”
“I know.”
“He has not threatened us directly.” Thomas’s voice was careful.
“But he has made clear, in the way such men do, that our trading interests, and our position within the nobility, depend in part on his goodwill. He is well connected. He has the ear of men whose goodwill we cannot afford to lose, as well as King Henry.”
Rosamund kept her hands folded in her lap, very still.
“I will not be bullied into handing my daughter over to a man old enough to be her grandfather,” Thomas continued.
His mouth tightened at the corners, as though he’d tasted something bitter.
“But I will also not be a fool about it. There is a difference between refusing him and managing him.” His eyes met Cecily’s.
“We have been trying to manage him. We have been buying time.”
“How much time?” Cecily asked.
“As much as we can.”
Cecily took a breath. “Then let me help.” She hesitated, gathering her thoughts.
“What if you tell him I’m too young? That I’m willful and difficult?
You could use what I did, tell him I ran off.
Let him wonder if I’m worth the trouble.
He wants a wife who knows her place, doesn’t he?
Let him think I don’t know mine. If you can postpone things, perhaps his eye will be caught by another young lady. ”
Rosamund’s eyes widened slightly. Thomas tilted his head.
“I see you’ve thought about this,” he said.
“Yes.”
Her parents exchanged one of their long, wordless glances, a silent conversation Cecily had watched her whole life. She had grown up in the strength of that bond, and now, after everything she had seen, she felt she finally understood it.
“She’s not wrong,” Rosamund said at last to Thomas. “Cecily’s behavior, as childish and selfish as it was, may work to her benefit if Lord Veyron knows of it.”
Thomas did not exactly smile, but his face softened.
“Agreed.” He looked at Cecily. “We’ll tell him you need more time to mature.
That a girl who rides off alone without warning is perhaps not yet ready for the responsibilities of a great house.
” A faint, dry note entered his voice. “He won’t like it.
But it’s harder to argue with than an outright refusal. ”
“And in the meantime?” Cecily asked.
“In the meantime,” her father said, “you stay close, you behave impeccably in company, and you let us handle Lord Alard.” He held her gaze. “Can you do that?”
“Yes,” Cecily said. “But wouldn’t you like me to misbehave a little? Just to make the story true?”
They gazed at her somberly, her father frowning. A corner of Cecily’s mouth twitched, then lifted into a small, sure smile. “Of course I agree,” she said, a lightness in her voice that surprised them both. “I will behave myself.”
Her mother rose and came to her then, and Cecily stood to meet her. Rosamund took her face in both hands the way she had when Cecily was small. Her mother looked at her for a long moment.
“You came back different,” she said. It was not an accusation, but an observation.
Cecily held her gaze. “I grew up a little.”
Her mother nodded slowly, as though she recognized the truth of it, even if she didn’t understand it. Then she pulled her close, and Cecily laid her head on her mother’s shoulder and felt her father’s hand come to rest gently on her hair.
Outside, Malethurst Hall went about its business. Somewhere a door banged. A dog barked once and fell silent. The fire crackled in the hearth.
Cecily closed her eyes.
She had been Lady Veyron, dying. She had been a fugitive, a servant, a woman with no name and no home, and no one who knew her whole story.
She had crossed nearly sixty years in a single breath and come back to find this—this ordinary room, these ordinary sounds, these two people who loved her without condition or agenda.
She had almost thrown it away.