Chapter Twenty
Helena woke before dawn the next day.
She had not slept well, her mind refusing to properly settle after the tavern fight.
Even now, as she pushed off the covers, she felt stirrings deep inside of her when she thought of him in that ring, fearless and drenched in sweat.
She exhaled shakily as she planted her feet on the cold floor.
You need to stop this, she told herself.
Yet even as she crossed the room to the chair where she had left her dress the night before, the memory of Isaac's eyes meeting hers across the crowded tavern refused to fade.
"Morning," Mary said sleepily from her bed in the corner of their room.
Helena turned. "Morning," she replied.
Mary sat up, smiling. "I slept like a log," she said. "Must have been because of all of the excitement yesterday."
Helena smiled at her but said nothing.
Mary got up and fetched her clothes, and together they dressed in the grey half-light, moving through the familiar motions of laces and pins by feel more than sight.
"You're quiet this morning," Mary said as her eyes found Helena's in the small, spotted looking glass propped against the wall. "Quieter than usual, even for you."
"I am just tired," Helena offered. "I didn't sleep well."
"So I take it there was no dark, handsome Baron visiting you in your dreams?"
The back of Helena's neck instantly warmed, and she refused to meet Mary's eye in the mirror.
"What's happening with you and Lord Rowan?" she asked, her eyes not leaving Helena. "And don't tell me nothing—I saw the pair of you looking at each other across that whole tavern like the rest of us had simply vanished."
“I don't know what's happening, Mary. Truly."
It was, Helena reflected, honest. She had turned the whole tangled business over every night—the ballroom, the barn, the library, the tavern—and had arrived at no clearer an understanding than she'd started with.
She only knew that something had shifted between them, some careful balance tipped past the point where either of them could easily set it right again, and that she had not the faintest notion what either of them meant to do about it.
"Mmm," Mary said knowingly. "Well. Whatever it is you don't know, your face certainly seems to know it well enough."
"That's not remotely true."
"Isn't it?" Mary turned from the glass, grinning now in earnest. "You go the most extraordinary shade of pink whenever his name comes up, Nell, in case no one's mentioned it to you before. It's rather difficult to miss."
Helena felt the heat rise in her cheeks precisely on cue, which did nothing whatsoever to help her case. She snatched up the nearest thing to hand, a balled stocking, still warm from where it had been tucked beneath her pillow overnight, and threw it at her friend with more affection than force.
Mary caught it neatly, laughing outright, unrepentant.
"There, you see? Pink as a rose. I rest my case."
"You're impossible," Helena said, though she was laughing too, the sound of it loosening something in her chest that had sat tight and unexamined since the tavern.
They made their way down to the kitchen still laughing quietly, and the morning's usual business of laying fires and starting the day's bread absorbed them both until the rest of the household began to stir.
The easy warmth of Mary's teasing lingered pleasantly even once the more serious work of the day had properly begun.
It was shortly after breakfast that Isaac found her in the scullery.
"Nell," he said. "May I have a word?"
Mary eyed Helena, a smirk on her lips, before she bowed her head.
"I have some sweeping to occupy myself with," she said.
Then before Helena could say a word, her friend dipped out of the room, and she was left alone with Isaac.
"I'd like your eye on the old dower house, out on the western edge of the property," he said.
"Fletcher tells me the roof's begun failing after years without attention, and I'd rather judge for myself how many men the repair wants before I commit to hiring them.
You've a better sense for what a household actually needs than half the men I've consulted on the matter.
Mary can tend to the chores here and Tom's off to the village to fetch workers, so it'll be a short ride, just the two of us, if you're willing. "
She was not, if she was honest with herself, willing at all.
The prospect of an entire morning alone with him, after weeks of careful avoidance, struck her as more dangerous than any leaking roof.
Yet she could think of no reasonable objection.
And so she found herself, within the hour, riding beside him along a narrow track through Ashworth’s western woodland with the whole weight of unspoken things sitting heavily between them.
The morning was fine, mild and bright with the last warmth of the season. Their conversation, such as it was, remained carefully unremarkable. The weather, the estate's ongoing repairs, some small observations about the changing colour of the leaves.
Both of them, Helena suspected, were working equally hard to avoid any mention of the ball, the library, and the whole tangled knot of feeling neither of them had yet found the courage to properly name.
A while later, the Dowager cottage came into view. It was a modest stone dwelling tucked among the trees.
"The house used to serve as a residence for a Dowager Lady Rowan on visits to Ashworth," Isaac explained without prompting. "But it has stood empty for a long time."
Helena said nothing, as her eyes remained on the building, wondering what it might have looked like all those years ago.
"Should we get started?" Isaac said.
Helena nodded as they climbed down from the carriage and headed into the house.
Inside, Isaac headed into the attic to inspect the damaged beams himself, while Helena moved methodically through the rooms below, noting which ceilings showed water stains, which floorboards had begun to warp, which windows wanted new glazing before winter arrived in earnest.
"You'll want the beam over the eastern room replaced, not merely patched," she called up to him, consulting the notes she'd made.
"And I'd see the chimney in the sitting room swept and inspected before you light any fire in it—there's soot fallen across the hearth that suggests it hasn't drawn properly in years. "
Isaac's head appeared through the attic hatch, an expression of mild, familiar surprise crossing his face.
"How is it you know to look for such things? Half the tenants I've visited these past months couldn't have told me as much themselves."
"I've picked up a great deal working in various households," Helena said. It was close enough to the truth.
They had nearly finished their survey, the morning's light beginning to shift toward early afternoon, when Helena noticed, through the sitting room's small window, a bank of dark clouds gathering with alarming speed along the western horizon.
"Isaac—"
He was beside her at the window within moments, and together they watched the sky darken with a swiftness that left little time for anything beyond simple astonishment before the first heavy drops began striking the glass.
"We ought to start back," Isaac said, already reaching for his coat.
They did not make it as far as the carriage before the storm broke with a violence that seemed to arrive all at once.
"Inside," Isaac shouted over the storm.
She turned and hurried back into the house with Isaac at her heels.
Rain lashed sideways against the windows, thunder rolling close enough to rattle the old panes in their frames. The narrow track they'd ridden in on was visibly flooding within minutes.
Isaac stood at the door for a long moment, studying the deluge with open frustration, before finally accepting what had already become obvious.
"We're not getting back to the house in this. Not safely."
He turned to her, something apologetic in his expression.
"We'll have to wait it out."
"I am sure it won't last long," Helena offered, shivering.
"I'll make a fire," Isaac said.
Helena stood by the door while she watched Isaac move across to the hearth.
As he worked to coax a fire to life, Helena couldn’t help but feel the irony of the situation. She had tried to avoid him, and now they were trapped alone together.
She felt it keenly as the fire caught and the small room began to fill with warmth, the storm outside settling into a steady, relentless drumming against the roof that showed no sign of easing anytime soon: that they were in danger of the library repeating itself.
They sat, eventually, on either side of the modest hearth, the silence between them stretching long enough that Helena began to wonder whether they might simply wait out the whole storm without exchanging another word.
She turned her head to Isaac for a moment. To her surprise, he was smiling.
"What is it?" Helena asked.
"Nothing," Isaac said, still smiling. "It's just the storm."
"What about it?"
"Takes me back rather further than I'd like to admit," he confessed. "I grew up in a house in Southwark where the roof leaked something dreadful every winter."
He paused for a moment, staring into the fire.
"We never had money enough to have it properly mended," he continued.
"My Ma used to set out every pot and basin we owned under the worst of it, and swore the different sizes made different notes when the drops struck them.
So every time it rained, she'd have my sister and me guess which pot was singing which note. "
Helena found herself smiling as she pictured Isaac as a boy listening to the rain and the pots singing.
"She made a kind of game of it, so we'd stop complaining about the cold long enough to fall asleep."
He shook his head slowly, still watching the fire. "Strange, what a man carries with him."
"You've never spoken of her before. Your mother."
"No."
Isaac was quiet for a moment.
"Tom knows most of it, having lived through a fair share of it alongside me. But I don't believe I've ever sat down and said the whole of it plain to another living soul."