Chapter 24
“Titan?” She asked again as the dog dropped to his haunches, ears pricking.
Emma crouched beside him and peered into the overgrown boxwood. For a moment, she saw nothing but leaves and shadow. Then a small pink nose poked between the branches and vanished at once.
She paused, wondering if she had seen that at all. Then the nose returned, followed by a sliver of grey face and two wary eyes, pale green as old bottle glass. The poor creature froze at the sight of Titan.
“Back, back!” Emma exclaimed, shooing the great dog away and coaxing the grey cat out from the hedges.
It didn’t blink. Didn’t move. It simply stared at her as she offered her hand.
“Where did you come from, sweet one?” she asked the tiny kitten.
The kitten crept forward half an inch, gave a soft, miserable mewl, and darted back into the leaves.
The poor thing was likely hungry. As queasy as it made her, she called Titan forward to stay guard over the kitten as she hurried back to the house and to the kitchen to ask Cook for scraps of fish or fowl.
The old lady looked mystified but swiftly filled a shallow saucer, and Emma took a bowl with water too before heading back out to the bushes. She passed Vincent as he began to lift out the water, and she gently coaxed Titan behind her as she crouched and set the food down.
She hopped back and waited for the little furball to inch forward and sniff the food. Backing away slowly, she collided with something hard, wet, and very much not small.
“We need to move further away,” she murmured to Vincent as the kitten sniffed the food again.
“Of course. And I’ll surrender the rest of my garden to the hedgehogs next,” he said wryly.
As they retreated, the kitten grew bolder and began to nibble. The poor thing was heartbreakingly skinny with its ribs poking out of its skin. She turned to Vincent and murmured, “Titan found it.”
“I’m not surprised,” he chuckled, taking up a towel from the bench nearby and calling Titan to heel. “He’s got a habit of finding misfortune and appointing himself its guardian. Titan, boy, here.”
But the hound stayed solemnly by Emma’s side. She smiled, keeping her eyes on the kitten, who had abandoned caution and was devouring the food in frantic little bites .
“Yous’ve stolen my hound’s loyalty, and now you’re thinking of bringing that ball of fur into the house, aren’t you?” Vincent asked.
“I am,” she pouted.
“I suffer rather badly from catarrh around cats.” He dragged the towel over his wet hair, then paused. “Though I have the distinct impression you would put me in the stables before you put that creature back in the hedge, so perhaps I’d better keep my objections brief.”
Emma looked back at the kitten, her pleasure dimming. “If it makes you ill, then perhaps I should find another solution…”
Vincent glanced from her to the kitten, then sighed as though he’d already lost the argument.
“How about we compromise,” he said, and bent to kiss her cheek. “I’ll have a stable boy care for it for a few days. Warm straw, food, water, no hounds looming over it. You may visit as often as you like and make certain it is being properly adored.”
Her smile returned, soft and immediate. “Thank you.”
That evening, after supper, the weather turned. What had been a mild grey sky over the meadows thickened into a bruised, black-bellied storm, thunder grumbling somewhere beyond the meadow while rain needled softly at the shutters.
As the faint splatter pinged against the window, Vincent, fresh from a warm bath, padded into his room and tugged on a loose shirt. The fireplace and lamps kept the chamber lit and warm, but still he felt a coldness sitting under his ribs that neither flame nor whisky would touch.
Taking up a candle, he set off to check the maids had latched the east windows before the rain got in.
That was the lie he told himself, at least.
The truth was, he wanted to look in on Emma. To see how she was faring in the storm.
Walking the dim corridor on silent feet, he passed her door and found it quiet with no light beneath.
After a time of loitering like a foolishly smitten husband, he trodded forward to the East wing and came to a door he hadn’t opened since he’d returned to St. John’s Wood, and thinking it a passage back to the stairs, he pushed it in.
It was an old, abandoned study.
Dust sheets had been thrown over the chairs, the hearth was cold, and a heavy mahogany desk sat angled toward a window streaked silver with rain. A single ladder-back chair had been left standing in the middle of the floor, set apart from everything, facing nothing.
Vincent stopped dead on the threshold.
His candle guttered, and the chair threw a long shadow across the boards. His father’s study at the Hertfordshire house had looked just so.
The desk turned toward the window.
The chair dragged to the middle of the floor.
A peal of bellowing thunder shook the house, and the rain came down all at once like gravel flung against glass.
It’s only a room. It’s only a room…
His legs wouldn’t obey him. His pulse roared louder than the storm, and his feet stood rooted to the threshold as though the boards had grown up around his ankles. He could not make a single part of himself move in the order he commanded it.
He didn’t hear her come down the hall. That, more than anything, told him how far gone he was.
“Vincent?” Emma’s voice was soft with sleep. “I couldn’t sleep with the storm, and I heard you walking—” she came up beside him, her gaze flicking from his face to the open room and back again, slower this time, “—are you well?”
Stepping in front of him, Emma put her small body between him and the doorway, a slight thing in a pale wrapper, and somehow made herself a wall between him and the chair.
“Look at me,” she whispered.
He tried, but the room kept pulling at his gaze. The dark behind her shoulder. The pale shape of the chair. The window silvered with rain.
Reaching up, she cupped his jaw in her small palm and coaxed his face down to hers, as gently as he’d once tipped her scratched temple toward the light.
“There you are,” she murmured, her thumb stroking the corner of his mouth. “Come away now. Come with me.”
Her other hand found his on the doorframe, where his knuckles had gone white around the wood. She didn’t pull. Only covered that brutal grip with her slight fingers and waited until, one by one, his fingers remembered how to let go.
Then she drew him back a step, then another, and reached past him to shut the door on the chair.
The click of the latch broke whatever had gripped him, and he dragged in a full breath at last.
“There,” Emma whispered. “It’s only us in the hall now.”
For a few seconds, Vincent did nothing but breathe and despise himself for needing to. The Duke of Highminster, the Phantom of the Great Wen, all undone by a shut-up study and a summer storm. It was an embarrassment of the highest order.
“I’m quite well,” he rasped at last.
“Of course you are,” she said gently. “Come and sit by the fire. You’re cold.”
She led him by the hand into his room, and he let her. The firelight struck warm over the rumpled bed, the discarded towel, the open bottle of shaving soap—ordinary little things that had nothing to do with rope or rafters or death.
Titan rose and pressed his shaggy head into Vincent’s thigh, and Vincent dropped a hand to the dog’s ears. Emma steered him to the edge of the bed, then went to the cabinet to liberate a bottle of brandy and poured a couple of mouthfuls. Returning, she pressed the glass into his hand. “Drink.”
His lips twitched despite himself. “You’re beginning to sound like me.”
“Well, perhaps now you’ll know how I feel around you. Drink.”
He drank, and the brandy burned a clean line down to his belly.
Staring into the amber dregs, he murmured, “That room was my father’s study.
Or near enough to it.” He turned the brandy slowly, watching the crystal scatter the firelight.
“My father did not die of drink, Emma. That is just the tale we put about.”
His jaw worked.
“He hanged himself. In a study laid out very like that one… the chair pulled to the middle of the floor. I was the one who found him that night. His silver pocket watch had slipped from his coat and cracked, exactly, at half past nine. And I kept it with me since to remember what was taken from me.”
The words landed in the quiet, and he braced for the flinch, the horror, the careful retreat he had imagined every time he thought of saying them aloud, which was almost never.
It did not come. Some confessions were too heavy to meet with anything but silence, and Emma seemed to know it. She lowered herself onto the bed beside him, her shoulder brushing his, and after a moment, her hand slid into his as quietly as a ribbon drawn through a loop.
“I have not set foot in a room like it in ten years,” he admitted.
“Then we won’t go in tonight,” she said simply.
A fierce thunderclap rattled the panes, making the lamp flames tremble, and Titan whimpered from his corner. Emma let out a soft breath. “I know how you feel,” she told the dog wryly, and Vincent surprised himself with a low laugh.
“Did this fear start when you were younger?” she asked, her fingers still resting inside his.
“I wouldn’t really call it a fear of rooms. Or storms.” He rubbed the back of his neck.
“I did fear heights, however. I remember trying to cure it by climbing the tallest tree near the house with Benjy and staying up there from night to morning. Mother was worried to death, but Father had footmen surrounding the tree from dusk to dawn.”
“And you got over it?”
“No,” he laughed quietly. “But at Eton, Benedict and I were dared to climb to the chapel roof and fly a pair of trousers belonging to a master we didn’t much like.”
“What?” Emma giggled, then jumped at another peal of thunder.