Chapter Eleven
The strangest days of Ophelia’s life were the days after her confession, and the strangeness was that they were happy.
She had expected everything to grow harder once Adrian knew. Instead it grew simpler. The danger remained, larger now that they had named it, but she no longer had to police every word in his company or feel his attention gathering her up clue by clue.
He knew.
Into the space where she had kept herself folded, the rest of her emerged by inches. Ophelia discovered, to her surprise, that there was a great deal of her, more than she had ever realised.
Adrian appeared to like all of it.
They were careful in company. At the table and in the hall, they remained the duke and his aunt’s quiet goddaughter. Lady Elise’s sharp eye missed nothing, and the small society of a snowbound house watched itself more closely than any ballroom.
Yet Plas Eira was old and rambling, its passages full of odd turnings, and the days were long. There were corners, the small library most of all, where they could speak for an hour without interruption, the fire burning low and the wind working at the shutters.
They talked hungrily.
Ophelia told him about Bombay, or the Bombay she half remembered and half possessed through her mother’s stories. She had left at ten. Her memories came in bright fragments: white houses, green water, the hammering from the timber yards, and ships rising on the stocks like wooden cities.
Adrian repeated Gujarati words after her, patiently and badly, and allowed her to correct him.
“No,” she said, trying not to laugh. “You have just called the candle a goat.”
“An easy mistake.”
“Not in any language!”
“You underestimate the similarities between candles and goats.”
She stared at him, incredulous. “They have none.”
“They are both improved by being lit.”
“A burning goat would not improve anything.”
“It would improve this conversation immeasurably.” His eyes were alight with the challenge, and she could no longer contain her laughter.
It had never occurred to Ophelia that a memory might grow stronger by being given to another person. Each word he learned became one less thing she carried alone.
One afternoon he asked about the wassail.
“What did you put in it? The whole valley was talking about it.”
“Ginger, long pepper, and more nutmeg than the English generally use. My mother would have added cardamom, but there was none, so I crushed coriander seed instead.”
“Was that what I tasted? It was remarkable.”
“My father’s English cook considered my mother’s spicing heathenish. She said so frequently and within my mother’s hearing.”
“What did your mother do?”
“Smiled and continued.”
“That sounds like a devastating victory.”
Ophelia ran a finger along the edge of her book, thinking of the recipes in it, written in her mother’s delicate hand.
“She said a person’s food was the last of their country to leave them, and she would not let it leave us both at once.”
The smile faded from Adrian’s face.
“I have so little left,” Ophelia said. “The food. A few words. Her song and her bangles; a handkerchief she embroidered. The memory of the way light fell, in a place I can hardly remember. Every year there is less of Bombay in me. I let it go because here it was only a danger or a shame. Then you ask me a question, and for an hour there is more of it again. I do not know whether to thank you or ask you to stop.”
“Which do you want?”
No one had ever answered her grief with a question.
“Do not stop,” she said.
“I will not. I like to hear you speak of Bombay, and of your mother.”
He reached past her to place another log on the fire. His shoulder brushed hers, and neither moved away.
Sometimes Adrian spoke of his own upbringing, no longer arranging every hurt as a joke. Sometimes she answered. Sometimes they sat together and allowed the truth to require nothing more of either of them.
The happiness might have continued in that quiet fashion until the thaw if word had not come from the Pritchard cottage.
Their youngest boy had taken a fever.
Lady Elise had nursed the valley’s sick for years, but she was herself confined to bed with a chill she refused to acknowledge. There was no doctor inside the valley, and the snow remained too deep for one to enter.
“I will go,” Ophelia said.
She had grown up watching her mother nurse both family and servants. She knew how to cool a fevered child, how to coax water between unwilling lips, and how to sit through the long hours when there was little to be done except watch and wait.
Adrian fetched the basket Miss Pettibone had packed for them, muttering a great deal of confused instructions as he collected it.
“I am coming with you.”
“You need not.”
“I know. That is what makes the gesture so affecting.”
She gave him a look.
His smile faded into seriousness.
“The path will be difficult. You will need someone to carry the basket, break the ice at the well, and keep the fire fed. I can do those things, and more if you show me how.”
He had not announced that he would protect her. He had told her what use he might be and left the decision with her.
“Very well,” she said, wondering how long he would last.
They spent a night and the long day that followed in the Pritchards’ cramped cottage, the air thick with tallow smoke and the sourness of fever-sweat.
Ophelia directed the nursing. She measured willow bark into tea and persuaded the child to drink it a spoonful at a time, watching for every change in his breathing. Mrs. Pritchard sat with her when fear allowed and slept when it did not.
Adrian did whatever was required.
He split wood in the yard, broke the ice on the well, kept the fire low and steady, and carried water without being asked. When the boy grew restless and frightened in the night, Adrian walked him slowly around the room while Ophelia prepared another drink.
The child clung to his neck and demanded the rhyme from the wren hunt.
“I do not know it.”
“Yes, you do,” the boy mumbled.
“I assure you, I do not.”
“You heard us.”
“That does not mean I understood a word. I don’t speak Welsh.”
The child supplied one line. Adrian repeated it badly. The boy corrected him. They continued in this fashion until Adrian was repeating something resembling the rhyme and the child had fallen asleep against his shoulder.
Ophelia watched from beside the fire.
There was no audience to admire him here: no society hostess to charm, no mother angling a marriageable daughter into his path, no grandfather to defy. There was only a sick child and a frightened family, and hours of unglamorous work that would not do itself.
Adrian remained.
By the afternoon of the second day the fever eased. No one said they had conquered it. They waited, hardly breathing, until the boy woke clear-eyed and asked for bread.
Mrs. Pritchard began to cry.
She tried to kneel to Ophelia, who caught her by the arms before she could. Adrian found bread and sliced and buttered it, playing at grave ceremony, before informing the child that any man who had caused so much trouble ought to eat at least two pieces.
The boy demanded three.
“A born negotiator,” Adrian said. “He will be in Parliament before he is twenty.”
Mrs. Pritchard laughed through her tears.
Ophelia looked at Adrian across the small room.
She had believed that charm was what men used when they wished to be excused from substance.
In Adrian, she saw something else entirely.
He could make fear easier to bear, could turn a child’s tears into indignation over bread.
He could stay awake, carry wood, and learn the same Welsh rhyme twenty times over because someone needed it done.
He had spent years calling himself useless, and she had begun to suspect that the only person who still believed him was Adrian.
She loved him.
The knowledge came without drama. It was simply there, quiet and complete.
She loved not the idea of him, but the foolish, brave, unfinished man himself. The runner, learning to remain. The man who had been told he was merely what was left, and had decided, at last, to become something better.
It was the most dangerous truth Ophelia had ever admitted.
They walked back to Plas Eira through the snow, tired enough that silence came easily. Instead of offering his arm for her support, Adrian took her hand in his and held it, all the way back. The heat of him reached her even through the thickness of both their gloves.
That night, when the house had gone quiet, Ophelia came down to the small library in search of a book she did not want.
Adrian was already there, pretending to want one too.
Neither of them remarked upon the coincidence.
They sat beside the dying fire and spoke softly until the candle guttered low in its own wax. Then Adrian walked with her to the foot of the stairs.
The kissing bough turned overhead in the draught.
He lifted one hand, then stopped.
“May I?”
Ophelia nodded.
His fingertips touched the side of her face.
She turned her face the smallest fraction into his palm, and closed her eyes.
They stood that way for a long moment, breathing as though they had climbed the mountain again.
“I must not,” she whispered.
The words held no refusal in them, only a confession of how much she wanted what she could not yet have.
“I know,” Adrian said. “Not like this. Not in hiding, while another man claims the right to punish you and I have nothing to offer but another secret.”
His thumb moved once against her cheekbone.
“If I come to you, Ophelia, it will be in the open. The choice will be wholly yours. But do not doubt that I will come.”
Something in her chest turned over at the certainty of it.
“I have run from everything in my life,” he said. “I am not going to run from you.”
He lowered his hand, bowed, and went upstairs.
Ophelia remained at the foot of the stairs with her fingers pressed to the place he had touched, listening to the last of his footsteps fade above her.
She had staked her whole heart upon a snowbound happiness the thaw must end. Yet for that one night, she allowed herself to possess it without counting the price.
In the morning the wind changed.
By noon, water had begun to drip from the eaves, and at the bottom of the valley the river stirred, remembering how to run.