Chapter 23 #3
“When things were very bad.” She returned her gaze to the window, not because she couldn’t look at him, but because it was easier to say certain things to the middle distance.
“I used to imagine escaping north. Not to anywhere specific. Just north, and then north again, until the land ran out of obligation. Where no one knew me. Where there was nothing but sky and rock and weather that didn’t care what I’d survived. ”
The carriage moved. The golden light was fading now to the soft blue of early evening, and they would soon reach their first coaching inn.
“I knew I couldn’t go there,” she continued.
“I knew that even if I managed to escape, which I never did for long, I had nowhere to go and no money and no identity anyone would believe. But I could think about it. Imagine what being free in Scotland would be like. Penharrow couldn’t take that.
” A pause. “He took rather a lot. But not that.”
Oliver was quiet. He was always quiet when she said things like this, not the quiet of a man who had nothing to say, but the quiet of one who understood that there were moments when the most valuable response was simply to be present in them.
“So we’re going,” she said. “That’s what I was thinking. We’re actually going.”
“We are actually going,” he agreed. “I want to give you everything your heart desires.”
“You are what I desire. Always.” She looked at him. He was watching her with an expression she recognized now, the specific, unguarded quality that he reserved for moments when he did not bother to manage what his face was doing.
“This trip will be different though,” she said. “The thing I imagined and the thing we are actually doing. It’s entirely different.”
“Are you okay with that?”
“Yes.” She shook her head. “It’s completely different. The one I imagined was about escape. This one is about starting anew.”
They sat in companionable quiet as the light continued to fade. The motion of the carriage was steady and warm. After a while Oliver said, quite conversationally, “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Children.” He paused. “Do you want them? I want to know what you want, not what you think I expect.”
“You will need an heir.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” he persisted.
She looked at their joined hands. She had been thinking about it, in the margins of everything else. She had known he would ask, eventually.
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
“But?”
She glanced at him. “You heard the but.”
“There was quite clearly a but.”
She exhaled slowly. “I am afraid I will ruin them.”
“You won’t ruin them.”
“Oliver.” She turned to face him. “I was taken as a child. I watched what happened to people who were kind to me. I learned to live in a world where danger could arrive from any direction at any time.” She shook her head.
“What if I cannot let them out of my sight? What if I make every open door feel like a threat because every open door once was? What if I spend their entire childhoods trying to protect them from things that haven’t happened and are not going to happen, and in doing so I make them afraid of a world that needn’t frighten them? ”
The carriage swayed gently on the road. Oliver was looking at her with great attention and not interrupting, which she appreciated.
“That is a completely reasonable fear,” he said.
“I know it is.”
“And it tells me something important about you.”
She waited.
“Bad parents,” he said, with the careful deliberateness he used when he was certain of what he was saying, “do not lie awake worrying about becoming bad parents. They simply proceed without the question ever occurring to them.” He paused.
“Your fear of that specific harm is evidence that you will work against it. It is not evidence that you will cause it.”
She looked at him.
“Besides,” he said, “you will not be doing it alone.” He met her eyes steadily. “If you find yourself unable to let go of something, you tell me. That is what I am here for. You have spent years managing everything entirely by yourself, Megan, with no one to share the weight of it. That is over.”
“You make it sound very simple.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think it will be simple.
I think you will have days when the fear is stronger than the reasoning and it will be very hard indeed.
But you will not be alone in it. And your children will not be alone with you in it.
” He paused. “They’ll have Webb fussing over them within the year, which will give them a thoroughly unrealistic expectation of adult capability, but I don’t see how to prevent that. ”
A sound escaped her that was nearly a laugh. “Webb is not fussing.”
“Webb bought the baby a pony. We don’t have a baby.”
“He bought a pony?”
“Well, a foal. It will grow with our baby he said. He’s calling it an investment.
I’m calling it Webb being Webb.” Oliver looked at her with that expression she had learned to read, the unguarded one.
“We will be all right,” he said quietly.
“I cannot promise you that nothing will ever frighten you again. But I can promise you that you won’t meet it without me beside you. ”
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then she moved across the carriage, and he made room for her without a word, and she settled against his shoulder, and his arm came around her, and the countryside continued to go past in the soft evening way of things that required nothing of you.
“How long until we reach the inn?” she asked.
“An hour, perhaps a little less. It’s getting dark.”
“Good.” She closed her eyes. The motion of the carriage was steady and warm. Beneath her ear she could feel the solid, reliable fact of him, the particular quality of a person who is where they intend to be.
She thought about Scotland. About what it would look like from a carriage window as they crossed into it, the particular shift in the land that the map promised and that she had imagined for so long she had a private version of it that bore no necessary resemblance to the truth.
She was looking forward to finding out how wrong she had been.
She found, to her own quiet surprise, that she was looking forward to a great many things.
Oliver pressed a kiss to the top of her head.
“You can sleep if you want,” he said. “I’ll watch the road.”
“You always watch the road,” she said.
“Someone has to.”
She smiled against his shoulder. Outside the window the last of the light was going, and full moon and the stars were coming out one by one over the dark English fields, and ahead of them was a long road and an enormous sky and all the time she intended to take in the living of a life that was, at last, entirely her own.
“Oliver,” she said.
“Yes.”
She turned her face up. He looked at her.
“Thank you for coming to Wales,” she said.
Something moved in his face. He looked at her for a long moment, and then he leaned down and kissed her, slowly and very thoroughly, and when he lifted his head the stars outside the window had multiplied considerably.
“Thank you,” he said, quiet against her hair, “for letting me.”
The carriage rolled on into the dark, north and north and north, toward Scotland.
She was finally free and, in her freedom, she’d chosen Oliver.
What a life they would have.