Chapter 26 #2
Seraphina let out a short soft laugh, shaking her head. “Oh, that is rich! Remarkable entertainment from the Duke of Norwyn? You are many things, William, but funny is hardly the first adjective that comes to mind.”
“I am hilarious,” he stated. “I am simply selective with my audience.”
“You are sarcastic,” she corrected, leaning back against her seat. “There is a profound difference between wit and sarcasm.”
“You cut me to the quick,” he said, resting a hand over his heart with exaggerated dismay.
For a brief, fleeting moment, the suffocating weight between them vanished. The carriage felt light, warm, and safe, filled with the familiar banter that had once drawn her to him in the first place.
Then William turned his head back to the window, the smile fading from his face as his gaze drifted back to the passing trees, and the silence returned.
Seraphina’s smile slipped away. She turned her face toward her own window, staring out at the gray, bleak horizon, an aching sadness settling back into her bones.
Euphemia’s voice echoed in her mind again. ‘If you spend all your time fighting what you feel right now, you are going to look back when he is gone and deeply regret that you never took the chance to see what this could have been.’
The regret was already here. It was sitting right beside her in the space of the carriage, choking her.
Once they reached the coast, once they confronted this woman and reclaimed the signet, the contract would be fulfilled.
The blackmail would end. The path to their annulment would be clear, smooth, and legally sound.
He would return her freedom, her independence, exactly as they had agreed.
They would part ways cordially, two sensible adults who had conducted a successful transaction.
But she would spend the rest of her life utterly miserable.
She stared at her reflection in the glass. Could she truly live like that? Could she go back to her home, her books, her scientific journals, and pretend that she hadn’t been completely rewired? Could she pretend that her heart hadn’t woken up?
She had spent her entire life priding herself on her honesty, her courage, and her refusal to back down from the truth, no matter how uncomfortable or inconvenient it might be. She was a woman who faced facts. She observed the evidence, reached a conclusion, and stood by it.
Yet here she was, clinging to the cowardice of her pride, hiding behind a lie because admitting the truth meant risking the total destruction of her composure.
She looked across the carriage at William. He looked so severe, so composed. He was a man who lived by unyielding parameters, a man who had already drawn his line.
If she spoke... if she laid her shattered heart entirely bare before him... would he cast it aside? Would he look at her with pity, or worse indifference?
Seraphina squeezed her eyes shut, pressing her hand against the cold glass of the window, the silence of the carriage wrapping around her like a shroud. She didn’t know the answer. But for the first time in her life, the fear of remaining silent was far, far greater than the fear of being broken.
Curse that kiss. Curse that stupid kiss.
“My apologies for keeping you waiting,” William said, adjusting his cloak as he took his seat in the carriage. “I needed to check that the horses were properly shod for the remaining leg of the journey.”
The second day of their journey dawned in a cold mist that hung low over the frost-bitten fields.
Seraphina had been seated in the traveling carriage for nearly ten minutes, her hands tucked neatly inside her fur-lined muff, watching the light slowly turn the horizon to silver.
“It is no matter,” Seraphina replied softly. “I was quite comfortable.”
“I trust you had a restful night?” he asked, his eyes sweeping over her face.
“Yes,” she lied smoothly. “Quite restful.”
The carriage lurched forward, the iron wheels grinding over the cobblestone yard of the inn where they had retired for the night, the day before. It had been too late to continue the journey, so they had taken shelter there.
In truth, Seraphina had not slept a single wink.
She had spent the hours in her small chamber at the inn staring at the ceiling, listening to the distant creak of the floorboards and the whistling of the wind. Her mind, usually so neat and orderly, had thrashed against the walls of her own stubbornness until the early hours of the morning.
In that darkness, she had reached her final, unavoidable conclusion.
She was going to tell him.
She would lay it all bare. It was the only logical...
the only honorable way forward. For years, she had wrapped herself in the armor of intellectual superiority.
She had been the rigid, uptight, insufferable person who always insisted she was right, who reduced every human warmth down to a chemical reaction or a flaw in logic.
She had scoffed at Euphemia’s romantic sensibilities, she had ignored Leonora’s warnings.
She had been wrong. About everything.
Admitting it was terrifying, but it was also the only way she could leave this arrangement with her dignity intact.
If their marriage was to end in an annulment, if she was to walk away from Norwyn Manor and return to her solitary life of books and her columns, she refused to do so as a coward.
She had grown. Alice had softened the edges of her spirit, William had completely rewritten the geography of her heart.
The least she could do was face the truth with the same courage she demanded of the world in her writing.
Seraphina smoothed the wool of her skirt, her fingers trembling slightly within her muff. The nerves in her stomach were a wild, chaotic swarm, but her mind was set.
William sat opposite her, his face turned toward the window as he watched the hedgerows slip by in the light. He looked quiet. Too quiet.
“William,” she began, her voice barely louder than the creak of the carriage springs.
He turned his head, looking at her with an inquiring tilt of his brow. “Yes, Seraphina?”
“Before we arrive at our destination... there is something I must say to you.”
William looked at her for a long moment, then reached into his coat and withdrew his silver pocket watch, clicking it open.
“We should be less than an hour away now. The house lies just beyond the next turn of the valley, nestled among the old orchards.” He snapped the watch shut and met her gaze, his expression softening slightly.
“If it is about the woman, if you are anxious about what we might find, you need not fear. I will handle it. Already I have contacted the magistrates in the area. A rider had gone ahead of us yesterday to make sure they were alerted to our arrival and prepared to issue a warrant the moment we secure the evidence.”
“It is not about this blackmailer,” she said quietly.
Seraphina drew a deep breath, gathering every ounce of her resolve.
“William... do you know of the heliotrope mechanism in the sunflower?” she asked.
William blinked, a puzzled smile touching his lips. His brows pulled together and he squinted. “The sunflower? I cannot say I have spent my mornings studying botany, Seraphina, but I know it follows the sun.”
“It tracks the sun,” she explained, looking down at her hands. “From dawn until dusk, regardless of the cloud cover or the chill in the air, the young flower steadily pivots its stem to face the light. It does not choose to do so. It is simply its nature. It cannot grow in any other direction.”
“Yes,” William said gently, watching her closely. “Why do you bring it up now?”
Seraphina swallowed hard, her pulse hammering against her throat. She forced herself to look up, meeting his eyes directly.
“I reckon I have become the sunflower, William, and you... you have been the sun.”
William went still. The curiosity on his face vanished. His brows softened and his eyes went wide. The look in his eyes told her instantly that he understood. He knew precisely what she was laying at his feet.
Seraphina’s chest ached, but now that the floodgates were open.
“You know, I have spent my entire life trying to be different from my sisters,” she said, her voice shaking slightly.
“Effie was always the gentle one... so lively, so warm, the very heart of any room she entered. People love her effortlessly. Leonora... Leonora is a mystery even to me. But she is brilliant and guarded. She possesses a profound strength. Then there was me.”
She let out a laugh, looking out the window for a fleeting second before returning her gaze to him.
“I was the rigid one. The uptight, impossible girl who could not hold a simple conversation without dragging logic, mathematics, or natural philosophy into it. People found me... tedious. They found me cold. But the truth is... science was never just an interest for me. It was my shield.”
William leaned forward slightly, resting his elbows on his knees, his eyes fixed entirely on her face. “Seraphina, you do not...”
“When my papa died...” she continued, her voice cracking slightly at the mention of him.
“...it broke something inside me. I loved him more than anything. He was the most wonderful, brilliant man I ever knew. My passion for writing, my curiosity about the world, it all came from him. My very pseudonym is a play on his name, and when he vanished from my life... when my mother died before I ever truly got to know her... the pain was a little overwhelming.”
She pressed her hand to her chest, feeling the frantic beat of her heart.