Chapter Eight
They walked to the Plygain in the darkness before dawn, the whole household together, each carrying a candle. The half-buried lane led down to the little stone chapel of Llanfechan, where one lit window burned against the black mountain.
Adrian had attended Christmas services at St. George’s, with the fashionable crush and the verger bowing him into the Calder pew, and supposed he knew what Christmas in a church was.
He had not expected anything like this.
The chapel was cold, and lit only by the candles the congregation carried.
Men and women rose alone or in small groups to sing the old Plygain carols, unaccompanied and in Welsh, the winding tunes filling the stone chapel to its rafters.
Mr. Pugh, a gentle, stooped curate with a country voice, said the prayers between them.
The flames bent in the draught, and Adrian stood beside his aunt with snow melting from his borrowed coat and his throat unexpectedly tight, a hymn book he could not read held loosely in one hand.
He looked, as he had taken to looking at every turn, at Miss Jones.
As one of the carols ended, her lips moved. Adrian was near enough to catch a few low notes, soft and private, words sung in a language he did not know. Then she pressed her lips together and was still, looking at the floor, her dark eyes bright with unshed tears.
He understood that he had glimpsed something not meant for him. Miss Jones carried another language inside her, along with memories no one in the valley shared, and for a moment she had allowed them to rise to the surface.
He no longer wanted to unmask her. He wanted her to open the door to him, of her own volition.
The distinction frightened him, or it should have.
They walked back after the service under a sky the colour of iron, their candles guttered out and the cold gone into their bones. The others strung out ahead and behind along the trodden path, Bronwen lending Miss Pettibone an arm, someone laughing softly over a joke Adrian did not hear.
Adrian fell into step beside Ophelia. For a little while they walked without speaking, their breath steaming in the icy air.
“I heard you singing in the chapel,” he said at last. “Not one of the Welsh carols, I think? It did not sound like Welsh, anyway.”
“No.” She watched her boots in the snow. “It was my mother’s.”
“A Christmas song?”
“Yes. She converted to Christianity when she married Father, and she loved Christmas. She put the words into Gujarati when I was small. I do not know whether anyone else has ever sung it as she did.”
He wanted to ask which hymn it had been and what the words meant. He asked neither.
“Will you sing it again?”
She glanced at him. “You would not understand it.”
“No. But I should understand that you had chosen to sing it to me.”
She looked at him for a long moment in the grey light, weighing the request. Then, so quietly that he had to bend his head to hear, she sang.
It was only a few phrases, a simple melody meant for one voice rather than a chapel. She stopped almost at once, as though she had frightened herself.
Adrian did not praise it. He did not ask for a translation. She had given him the song; he would not turn the gift into another question.
For the first time, she had not merely allowed him to glimpse something of herself. She had chosen to show it to him.
He knew he would do a great deal to be trusted with such a choice again.
The danger came later, at the Christmas feast.
The thaw was nowhere near and the valley remained sealed, but several neighbours from the village had come to share the goose. Among them was Mr. Vaughan, a gentleman-farmer whose land lay farther down the valley.
Mr. Vaughan had returned from Shrewsbury shortly before the passes closed, bringing with him the last mailbag to reach Llanfechan. In it had been a London paper, now more than three weeks old, and a letter from his cousin carrying the latest gossip from town.
Mr. Vaughan relished being the bearer of news, and he had waited all evening for his moment, turning it over like a coin in his pocket.
They were at table, the goose demolished, the flaming plum pudding carried in to applause, and the wassail going round again when he produced the paper.
“You’ll not have heard, snowed away up here,” he said, settling in with the air of a man about to spend his capital, “but the town is still mad for the runaway heiress. The James girl, the nabob’s daughter, who left Lord Markham waiting at the altar.”
Adrian’s attention sharpened.
Mr. Vaughan looked around the table, delighted with his own importance.
“Well, she has not been found. Vanished on the very day of her wedding, if you can credit it, and surely a sheltered young lady could not disappear into thin air without help.” Vaughan tapped the side of his nose and nodded knowingly.
“My cousin writes that Markham means to sue for breach of promise and drag the father’s business through the courts.
Says he was deceived over the money and means to recover every farthing the match has cost him.
There is a deal of money in it and a deal of spite, and the two together make a famous lawsuit. ”
He leaned forward, lowering his voice without lowering it enough.
“The on-dit is that the girl is ruined wherever she has run, and her father with her. Serve them right, my cousin says, for thinking trade money could buy a viscountcy.”
The instant the man had said the James girl, Adrian had turned towards Ophelia without deciding to, as a needle turns north.
He saw the blood leave her face between one word and the next. Her hands folded carefully in her lap, the knuckles whitening. The whole of her went still with the terrible stillness he had seen at that very first dinner.
She did not drop anything this time. She sat motionless and let the talk break over her, and only a man who had spent three weeks unable to stop watching her would have seen the terror beneath her composed face.
Adrian had known her name for weeks, or been certain enough that the distinction no longer mattered. Any remnant of doubt was ended now, but that was not what shook him.
She was not safe merely because Markham could not find her.
He had not known that Markham meant to use the law against her, nor realised that while Ophelia hid behind the snow, her father’s name and business remained exposed in London.
And from the look on her face, she had not understood that either until this very moment.
Adrian looked away before his attention drew the notice of the table. Then he did what he had always done best. He took command of the conversation with a smile.
“A poor business, making a young woman’s troubles into a horse race for the bettors. I have no stomach for it. Let us leave the wretched girl wherever she has got to and drink to a better Christmas than she is likely having.”
He reached for the wassail bowl.
“Mr. Vaughan, you have not tried this. It is exceptionally good, better than any I have ever had in London, I must say. Can I help you to a cup?”
Mr. Vaughan accepted the wassail, and the conversation moved with it, the danger passing over like a cloud shadow crossing a field.
Across the table, Ophelia drew one careful breath. A little colour returned to her face.
Until now, keeping her secret had required only his silence. For the first time, it had required something more of him, and he had given it without hesitation.
The noise went on around him, Miss Pettibone’s happy mishearings tangling with Mr. Vaughan’s anecdotes while his aunt watched the room with brittle attention. The Yule log shifted in the hearth with a shower of sparks.
Beneath it all lay one cold certainty.
Whatever waited in London had not paused because Ophelia had fled. Markham’s spite could still reach her through her father, and she had been forced to sit silent while a stranger announced the danger over Christmas pudding.
Adrian remembered her voice in the frosty air that morning, singing the song her mother had made for her, and her laughter over the kissing bough, the warmth of her hands wrapped around his.
The truth settled quietly into place.
He loved her.
He had not meant to. He had taken no care against it, because he had not believed himself capable of falling in love. Yet there it was, plain and undeniable, sitting across the table from him in borrowed candlelight.
She was Ophelia James, the runaway bride of a man Adrian knew well. She was living under his aunt’s protection, frightened and dependent, with scandal and legal danger waiting beyond the snow. Whatever Adrian felt, he had no right to burden her with it.
He could still escape. The old door stood open at his back, as it always had. He could say nothing, allow the snow to melt, and return to London with his honour technically whole. He could spend the rest of his charming, weightless life feeling the draught left by this Christmas.
He looked across the candles at Ophelia. She would not meet his eyes.
“Tomorrow is St. Stephen’s,” Elise was saying to Mr. Vaughan. “We will carry the boxes round to the tenants, snow or no snow. They will look for us.”
Adrian heard himself answer that he would sooner carry boxes through every drift in Wales than face his aunt’s displeasure.
The table laughed. Ophelia almost smiled.
Adrian smiled too, and knew, quite suddenly, that it no longer mattered that the door stood open behind him.
He wasn’t leaving, not this time.