Chapter 16 #2
“Penharrow,” Oliver said, “cannot admit to what he’s done.
He cannot go into any court in England and say the reason you have no documentation is because you were abducted at seven and held in a Welsh hunting lodge for fourteen years.
He cannot produce the altered birth records without producing the originals alongside them.
He has built this entire petition on the assumption that you have no one to contest it.
That you are still alone.” His voice had gone very quiet. “You’re not alone, Megan.”
She looked at him. The unguarded light again, and this time she didn’t look away from it.
Her throat was doing something she did not entirely approve of.
“Your uncle,” she said. “The Duke.”
“My grandmother says to leave him to her.”
“That is not comforting.”
“It shouldn’t be, but if she has no objection, how can you? She’s never failed to manage him yet and he’s been alive for sixty years, so I’m inclined to trust her record.”
A sound escaped her. Not quite a laugh. But something that had pressed flat inside her chest for a very long time shifted slightly.
She turned away from him and looked at the garden wall.
Old stone, patched and settled, with small plants she didn’t know the names of growing in the cracks.
She had been learning the names of things, slowly, since she’d arrived.
The footmen and the housemaids and the cook who left pastry scraps for the kitchen cat.
The shape of the rooms and the way the light moved through the windows in the afternoon.
All these small, careful measurements of a world she was trying to learn to trust.
“I don’t know how to be a wife,” she said.
Her voice came out very quiet, and she hadn’t quite meant it to be a confession, but it was.
“I don’t know how to be—” She stopped. “I know how to survive. I know how to endure and how to plan and how to make myself small enough to pass through whatever space is available without drawing attention. But being someone’s wife—being your wife—I don’t know what that means when the someone is a man who—” She pressed her lips together. “When the someone is you.”
She heard him move. Not toward her, just a shift of weight, the small sound of a man steadying himself.
“You’d learn,” he said. “We’d both learn.
I don’t know how to be a husband. I’m not—” He stopped, and when he spoke again there was something rougher in it, less composed.
“I’m not asking you to perform a role, Megan.
I’m not asking you to be a particular kind of thing or to manage yourself into a shape that suits me.
I’ve seen you in circumstances that would have broken most people and I have watched you, every single day, choose to be exactly who you are.
I am asking because I want you. Not a wife in the abstract. You. Just as you are now.”
She closed her eyes.
Fourteen years of being held captive by a man who had never once asked. Fourteen years of being told she was precious, treasured, his special girl, his—
This was different. She would never be free if she married, but would that be so bad when it was Oliver. A part of her longed to have made the choice but as usual a choice was being thrust upon her.
All because of Penharrow. Would she ever escape him?
“It’s your reputation,” she said. It was almost a last attempt. Not quite a genuine objection, and she suspected he knew it. “If it came out. If anyone discovered—”
“Then I would stand beside my wife and explain, to anyone who wished to know, that she survived an extraordinary ordeal through extraordinary means, and that she came through it with more grace and more courage than I have ever seen in a person in my life.” He paused.
“And then I would probably hit whoever was being unpleasant about it, because I have always had a poor temper in defense of the people I love.”
She turned back around.
He was looking at her in that direct way of his, the way that had startled her when she first encountered it, because she had so rarely been looked at rather than assessed. Just looked at. Like she was a person and not a problem to be managed or an object to be arranged.
Perhaps this was a choice after all.
This terrified her in a way that fourteen years of captivity somehow hadn’t, because those years had required only survival, only endurance, only the flat forward motion of continuing to breathe.
This required something else entirely. Something she had no practiced skill for.
The particular vulnerability of wanting something, of reaching toward it, of saying yes, I will trust this. I will trust you.
She had not said that to anyone since she was seven years old.
“I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was very steady. It surprised her. “I don’t know how to do this, Oliver. I mean that honestly. I’m not—I’m not saying no. I’m telling you truthfully that I don’t know how.”
He nodded, slowly, and some of the tension went out of his shoulders.
“Neither do I,” he said. “Entirely. I’ve been a soldier and a marquess and fairly recently a kidnapper, none of which are excellent preparation for taking a wife.
” The corner of his mouth moved. “But I’d rather learn it with you than not try at all.
I’d rather not lose you. I want you in my life. ”
She looked at him for a long moment. The garden was still around them, the bees and the lavender and the roses waiting to bloom, all of it suspended in the mild spring air.
“Ask me again,” she said. “Tomorrow. Or the next day. Ask me when I’ve—” She exhaled. “When I’ve had time to understand that it’s real.”
“However long you need.”
She sighed. “I’m not being realistic, am I? That is not how injunctions work. I don’t have the luxury of time.”
“No.” His voice was dry. “But it’s how people work. And you matter considerably more to me than the timeline.” He held her gaze. “I’ll ask you again tomorrow. I hope that is enough time.”
She nodded once and turned back to her roses. Her hands were perfectly steady. Her heart was not, but she had always been better at managing visible things than invisible ones.
She heard him move toward the gate. Stop.
“Megan.”
She looked back at him.
“For what it’s worth,” he said. “Whatever you decide. You are not going back to him. That much is already settled. He doesn’t know you’re here.
He thinks you’re at Saxton Castle. We do have a little more time to figure something out.
I want you to have a choice too, but I also want you to pick me because I love you.
I don’t expect you to say it back, but I hope a marriage to me is not such a hideous idea. ”
He left her with that. She stood in the garden in the mild spring air, with her hands still dirty from the earth and her heart doing something she had no name for, and she thought about choices.
She had never had choices.
She thought she might need a little longer to understand how to make one.
She wished for the millionth trillionth time she had family, someone to confide in. someone to advise her. She thought of Oliver’s grandmother, the Dowager Duchess what did she think?
Perhaps she should ask her. What would she advise?
She brushed the dirt from her hands and made her way inside the house to the apartments of a woman she’d come to think of as a friend and confidant.
* * *
She found the Dowager Duchess in the blue sitting room, which she had come to understand was Dorothea’s particular domain in the way that certain rooms in certain houses belong entirely to one person.
Not by declaration but by accumulated presence.
The chair by the window with its worn arm.
The small table with its permanent arrangement of correspondence, spectacles, and a volume of Voltaire that appeared to have been read so many times it had given up trying to hold its spine together.
Dorothea looked up when Megan appeared in the doorway and said nothing, which Megan had also come to understand. The Dowager Duchess did not fill silences with noise. She let them be what they were and waited to see what you did with them.
“Forgive me,” Megan said. “I don’t wish to intrude.”
“Then come in and sit down, because you’re already intruding by hovering in the doorway and at least the chair is comfortable.”
Megan came in and sat down.
The fire was low and pleasant, the kind that existed for company rather than warmth, and the room had the quality of a place where difficult things had been said before and the walls had absorbed them and carried on.
Megan folded her hands in her lap and looked at them for a moment, then looked at Dorothea, who was looking back at her with the composed patience of a woman who had long since stopped pretending she didn’t already know what was coming.
“He told you,” Megan said.
“He did.”
“And it was your idea.”
“The practical solution was mine, yes.” A pause. “The rest of it was entirely his own, and I want that understood.”
Megan absorbed this. “He said you’d been thinking about it longer than the conversation.”
“I had been thinking about the legal architecture, yes. The other matter I had been thinking about for considerably longer, but it wasn’t mine to act on.” Dorothea set down the Voltaire. “How are you?”
The question was so direct and so unadorned that it caught Megan slightly sideways.
The staff at Saxton Houses had been careful with her in the way you were careful with something that might break, and she had managed it with the patience of someone who understood why but found it quietly exhausting.
Dorothea asked questions the way she did everything else. Without performance.
“I don’t know,” Megan said. It was becoming a familiar answer. She was beginning to think it was the truest one she had. “I told him I needed time.”
“Sensible, but also stupid. You don’t have time.”
“He agreed immediately, which I found—” She stopped. “Disconcerting.”