Chapter 17
Megan did not go back to her room.
She meant to. She had fully intended to walk from the blue sitting room to the staircase and up to the east wing and the quiet room with its white curtains and the view of the garden, where she could sit with everything Dorothea had said and do the careful, methodical thing she had always done with difficult information.
Turn it over. Examine it from every angle.
Find its edges. File it away somewhere she could access it when she was ready.
Instead, she found herself standing at the window at the end of the corridor, looking out at the south lawn where the last of the afternoon light was going gold and flat across the grass, and she understood that she was not going to be able to do the careful methodical thing this time.
Because the careful methodical thing required a degree of distance from the subject.
And she did not have any distance from this subject at all.
She had spent her time at Saxton House becoming herself.
Thinking she was finally free. That was the only way she knew how to describe it, the strange unfolding process of learning to occupy her own life without bracing for the next blow.
Learning the names of the footmen. Learning that the kitchen cat was called Hector and had a strong opinion about where he was allowed to sleep.
Learning that she was permitted to have preferences about what she ate, what she wore, which rooms she sat in, what books she read, how she spent the hours of a morning, and that expressing those preferences would not result in punishment or loss or the sudden withdrawal of whatever small warmth she had been permitted to feel.
She had been becoming herself. And somewhere in the middle of it, without entirely noticing, she had also been becoming something else.
The kind of person who looked up when Oliver came into a room.
The kind of person who registered his presence before she’d consciously registered anything at all, the way you registered weather. The quality of light changing. Atmospheric pressure. The particular shift in a room when someone entered it who mattered to you.
She had noticed it and filed it away under the category of gratitude, which had seemed reasonable at the time. He had saved her life. He had asked her to trust him and she had. That in itself was a miracle.
He had carried her out of Wales on his back, practically, and brought her here and promised to keep her safe and then moved heaven and earth attempting to do it. Gratitude was appropriate. Gratitude explained it.
Except.
She stood at the window and was honest with herself, in the way she had always been honest with herself, because dishonesty was a luxury she had never been able to afford.
Not about important things. Not about the things that had to be faced in the dark at nine o’clock when Penharrow’s footstep was on the stair and the only thing standing between herself and what was coming was the quality of her own nerve.
She was honest with herself now.
What she felt when Oliver walked into a room was not gratitude.
Gratitude was warm and settled and asked nothing of you.
What she felt when Oliver walked into a room was a good deal more inconvenient than that.
It was the particular suspended quality of a person who has been holding their breath without realizing and then releases it.
It was the involuntary thing her face did when he said something dry and understated and looked at her sideways to see if she’d caught it.
It was the way she had noticed, over weeks of proximity, the precise shape of his hands and the scar on his left temple and the particular quality of his voice when he was containing something difficult and the way he was different when they were alone than when they were not, quieter and less managed, more himself.
It was the fact that when she imagined tomorrow’s visit to the Dowager Duchess of Newbury, her first coherent thought had been I’ll tell Oliver about it when we get back.
She leaned her forehead against the cold glass and looked out at the golden lawn and thought, oh.
Oh, there it is.
It was not a comfortable realization. It did not arrive with the clean clarity of something that simplifies everything. It arrived with its full weight, the way important things did, and the full weight of it included the terror.
Because she knew how to endure things. She had made herself into something extraordinary at endurance, at the specific art of continuing to exist through the unsurvivable.
But loving someone—loving someone freely, wanting someone, choosing someone—that was a different architecture entirely.
That required an exposure she’d had no practice at.
It required putting something precious outside the walls of yourself and trusting that the world would not destroy it.
The last time she had trusted someone with something precious, he had been a twenty-year-old groom named Daniel, and Penharrow had hanged him in the stable yard.
She closed her eyes.
She knew the argument. She had been making it at herself all afternoon since Oliver’s proposal, in various forms, since Oliver had stood in the garden turning his hat and said I am in love with you in that direct plain voice of his, like a man who has decided and is not interested in ornamentation.
She knew every version of you shouldn’t, you can’t, think of the risk, think of what you are.
And she knew, with equal precision, that it was all of it cowardice.
Not the sensible kind. Not the earned kind, the kind that had kept her alive for fourteen years. This was a different kind of cowardice entirely, the kind that disguised itself as pragmatism. The kind that said I am protecting myself and meant I am too frightened to reach for something real.
She thought about Dorothea’s words. The whole of them, and not just the parts she had taken in fully.
Not because of what you’ve endured. Because of whom you are underneath it.
She had known she was more than Penharrow said she was. She had kept the knowledge of it like a candle in a locked room, small and stubborn, refusing to go out.
If a man like Oliver could love her. If a man who had seen her at her worst and her most frightened and her most complicated could stand in a garden with his hat in his hands and say it plainly—
Then perhaps the candle had been right all along.
Perhaps she was not what Penharrow had made her.
Perhaps she was what she had always suspected, in the locked room, in the dark.
Something worth loving.
The lawn had gone from gold to gray. The light was almost gone. Somewhere in the house she could hear the distant rhythm of the household preparing for the evening, the soft percussion of doors and footsteps and the muffled instructions of the housekeeper on the floor below.
She thought about tomorrow. She had told him she needed until tomorrow.
She thought about the morning, and the visit, and the Duchess of Newbury and whatever was waiting at the end of it.
She thought about the practical things, the injunction and the solicitor and the archbishop’s special license and the Duke, who would apparently be managed by Dorothea with or without his cooperation.
She thought about Oliver asking her tomorrow, and the day after if she needed, however long she needed.
And she thought about never seeing him again. About the version of things where she said no, or where she disappeared, or where the careful pragmatic part of her won, and she spent the rest of her life having chosen safety over this.
The thought hit her somewhere she hadn’t been expecting.
It was not the large romantic terror of it.
It was smaller than that, and therefore worse.
It was the specific, mundane, unbearable image of the empty chair across from her at breakfast. The absent sideways look.
The room without his particular quality of presence in it, that warm, solid, complicated thing that she had apparently made herself entirely dependent on without noticing she was doing it.
It made her feel hollow in a way that fourteen years of captivity hadn’t managed.
Captivity had been awful. Captivity had been a specific, endurable kind of terrible, because it had asked nothing of her but survival.
This—the absence of Oliver—asked something she did not have a word for.
It was the absence of something that had made her understand what it meant to be alive rather than just continuing to exist.
She was in love with him.
She had been in love with him, she suspected, since somewhere on a Welsh mountainside in the rain, when he had handed her his coat without asking and then pretended he wasn’t cold so she wouldn’t have to feel guilty.
She had not known it was love then because she hadn’t known what love felt like, the chosen kind, the kind that had nothing to do with fear or dependency or the captive’s complicated attachment to the only warmth available.
This was nothing like that. This was entirely the opposite of that. This was a thing she was choosing with her whole self, with the full knowledge of who she was and what she was and exactly how frightened she was and precisely how much it mattered, and she was choosing it anyway.
She stepped back from the window.
She smoothed her gown, which was one of the ones Dorothea had organized the dressmaker to make for her, a soft gray with dark blue trim that she had learned was better for her coloring than she’d expected. She looked at her hands. The garden dirt was gone. They were steady.
She knew where his room was. The end of the north corridor, the door with the slightly worn brass handle, the room that looked out over the mazed garden.
She walked up the stairs and along the north corridor, and knocked.