Chapter Eleven The Hunting Lodge #3
“They told me I had signed. I said I had not.
They showed me a paper. I could not read it properly because my head was heavy, but I saw my name.
Or something like it. Evangeline Maria Rookwood.
I told them I never used Maria. Lord Ashmont said a lady could hardly dispute her own baptismal name.
Mr Mordaunt said distress often disturbed memory.
Blackwood said it did not matter whether I remembered, only whether others would believe I had reason to forget.
“I tried to leave. Ashmont stood before the door. Not touching me, not roughly. It would have been easier if he had been rough, because then I might have screamed and called it by its name. He only stood there smiling with pity.
“They spoke of letters. They had pieces of mine.
A foolish note about a dance. A jest sent to Marianne?
No, not Marianne. I am confused. To Helena?
To no one. I cannot think. They had cut and copied and joined words.
They said if I denied the transfer, they would show the letters.
They would say I had importuned Ashmont, borrowed against my portion, begged for secrecy, then turned hysterical when he would not marry me without settlement.
“I said Sebastian would not believe it.
“Ashmont said Sebastian already thought me reckless.
“Blackwood said brothers prefer a troublesome sister to be wrong rather than ruined, because wrongness can be corrected in private but ruin makes noise.
“Then I was afraid.
“Not before. Angry before. Sick, yes. Confused. But there, when they spoke of my brother as though they knew the shape of his disappointment better than I knew his love, I was afraid.”
Marianne’s voice faltered.
Sebastian’s eyes were fixed on the page. He had not moved. His face had become so still it seemed almost emptied of life, except for the muscle working once at the corner of his jaw.
“Continue,” he said.
She did.
“I was taken from the room by a side passage. At home, Father was waiting. Not Sebastian. Father. I do not know whether Sebastian had been sent away, or whether he asked and was refused. I write this because I cannot bear not knowing and yet I cannot bear the thought that he did not ask.
“I told Father everything. I told him my head had been drugged, that the signature was false, that the letters were pieces, that Ashmont and Mordaunt had trapped me.
Father did not call me a liar. I must record that.
It would almost have been cleaner. He said I had been foolish enough to allow wicked men tools.
He said a woman who gives society rope should not be astonished when it binds her.
He said truth was less important than containment, for no court, no drawing room and no respectable household would thank us for making public what could be buried.
“I said I would tell Sebastian.
“Father said Sebastian had enough burdens.
“I wrote anyway.
“I bribed a groom with my mother’s little pearl clasp. I told him to take the letter to Sebastian, not to Father. I wrote that I was at Eastmere and begged him to come. I believed he would. I believed that if he heard me without Father in the room, he would know my voice beneath the shaking.
“Father came instead.
“I think that was when something in me broke, but not in the way they meant.
I did not become mad. I became separate.
I stood outside myself and watched my father fold my letter into his pocket as if it were an unpaid bill.
I watched Mr Mordaunt set papers on the table.
I watched a physician I had never met speak of nerves, quiet and removal.
I asked again for Sebastian. Father said I must stop clinging to childish hopes.
Mordaunt said affection did not alter evidence.
The physician said agitation proved the necessity of care.
“I was removed the next day.
“I do not know where they will send me after this.
I am told Bath, perhaps. I am told the country.
I am told no one will know my name until I am well enough to be sensible, and sensible means silent.
I have hidden these pages because I cannot carry them with me.
I have hidden them because I have no witness left but wood, dust and God.
“If my brother ever reads this, let him know I did call for him. Let him know I was not ashamed until they told me my truth was inconvenient.
“Let him know that I loved him before I doubted him.
“And if love is not enough to undo what has been done, let it at least tell him where the lie began.”
The page ended there.
Marianne’s hands had gone cold.
There were more pages, but for a moment she could not lift them.
Sebastian had stopped looking at the paper.
He was looking at the hearthstone, though Marianne did not think he saw it.
All the control he had spent a lifetime building around himself had not shattered dramatically.
It had simply ceased to hold. He sat back slowly against the side of the bed, one knee bent, one hand still resting uselessly on the floor.
The blue shawl lay beside him, forgotten.
His face had lost all expression, and that was worse than weeping.
“Sebastian,” Marianne said softly.
He did not answer.
She set the pages carefully upon the oilcloth, weighted them with the little knife, and moved to kneel beside him.
The room seemed too small for what had been revealed. Sixty-three tally marks inside a wardrobe. A shawl kept against the cold. A loose board near the hearth. A sister’s voice buried beneath a floor while men sat in clubs speaking of containment and reputation.
“She called,” he said.
“Yes.”
“She wrote.”
“Yes.”
“He came.”
Marianne closed her eyes briefly. “Yes.”
“I was in London. I was at home. I was within reach.”
“You did not receive the letter.”
He turned his head then, and the look in his eyes stopped her from saying anything else too quickly. “Do not absolve me.”
“I am not.”
“You always say that.”
“Because it is always true.”
“She thought I might come.”
“She wanted you to know.”
“I did not.”
“No.”
“I cannot repair it.”
The words were not angry. That made them worse.
Marianne sat back on her heels. “No.”
He flinched, but she would not lie to him. Not here. Not in the room where Evangeline had carved I called into the inside of a wardrobe door.
“No,” Marianne said again, more gently. “You cannot repair it.”
His gaze dropped.
“But you can stop helping them bury her.”
Something moved through him then, like pain finding a path out of stone.
He covered his face with one hand.
Marianne stayed where she was.
She did not touch him at once. There were times when touch comforted and times when it claimed knowledge it did not possess. She had learned that at Lantern House too. So she knelt beside him in the cold room and let the truth stand between them without trying to make it kinder than it was.
After a long while, he lowered his hand.
His eyes were dry, but altered. Ruined perhaps. Or made more honest by ruin.
“She wanted me to know she loved me before she doubted me,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I do not deserve that.”
“Love is rarely given according to merit.”
He looked at her, and something in his face broke again, but differently. Softer. More dangerous to her own defences.
“She came to Lantern House because Lady Theodosia gave her something we did not.”
“A place where her words were not symptoms.”
“And you,” he said.
“I was barely anything then.”
“No.” His gaze held hers. “You remembered. You carried her forward when her family did not. You have done more for Evangeline than anyone of my blood.”
“Lady Theodosia began it.”
“And you carried it.”
The words entered her too deeply.
Marianne looked away, toward the open wardrobe, the scratched days, the terrible little sentence: S came not. I called.
“I do not know if I carried it well enough.”
“Marianne.”
There was no title now.
He reached for her hand.
She should have refused. Not because she wished to, but because refusal would have preserved the safer arrangement of things.
They had been adversaries, then reluctant allies, then partners wounded and mended by degrees.
Touch would alter the ledger again. It would record something neither could easily cross out.
She let him take her hand.
His fingers closed around hers with a care that was almost reverent. He did not use the grip to draw her closer. He did not claim. He held, and in that holding there was gratitude, grief, apology and something warmer that neither of them had named because naming it would make it accountable.
“You should not look at me like that,” she said, because honesty had become a habit and defence a reflex.
“How am I looking at you?”
“As though I am kinder than I am.”
His thumb moved once over her gloved knuckles. “No. As though you are braver than you think.”
She looked at him then.
He was very close. Too close for propriety had there been anyone to witness.
Too close for safety, though safety had become impossible long before this room.
The cold light from the unshuttered window fell across his face, showing the lines of grief around his mouth, the tiredness near his eyes, and the unguarded tenderness that frightened her more than his first anger ever had.
She knew he was thinking of kissing her.
She knew because she was thinking of letting him.
It would not have been a ballroom kiss or a seduction or a triumph. It would have been something born from grief and truth and the unbearable relief of being known in the midst of ruin. Perhaps that made it more dangerous. Passion one could distrust. Tenderness asked to be believed.
Sebastian’s gaze dropped to her mouth.
Marianne did not move away.
A sound cracked through the house below.
Not memory.
Not settling wood.
A door.
Both froze.