Chapter Nine
“It is nothing. The horse is young, and the bird was ill-timed. Walk him home for me, would you, Rourke? He is more embarrassed than I am.”
Ash brushed the grass from his coat, laughed and waved away the groom who had dismounted to help him.
He made the kind of casual self-deprecating jest that a duke was expected to make when his horse had thrown him in front of fifteen people, and the jest landed well enough that Rourke laughed, and Devlin smirked from his saddle.
The riding party moved on, the horses picking their way along the ridge path toward the stables, and Ash stood in the long meadow at the western edge of the estate, watched them go and felt, beneath the performance, the first cold curl of panic.
The watch was gone.
He had felt it leave his waistcoat pocket during the fall, the small shift of weight, the absence arriving at the same moment as the ground, and he had reached for it before he had reached for the reins and even before he had assessed whether anything was broken.
His hand had found an empty pocket. The gold casing, the worn hinge, the portrait inside, the years of carrying, gone.
Somewhere in the long grass between the stile and the ridge path, an area of perhaps two hundred yards of meadow that was knee-high in late spring growth and sloping toward the woods.
He waited until the last horse had disappeared over the ridge. Then he went down on his hands and knees in the grass and began to look.
The grass was wet from the morning’s dew, soaking through his breeches at the knees and the palms of his gloves; the ground beneath it was uneven, the soil soft in some places and stony in others, and the watch could be anywhere.
Under a clump of grass, wedged against a root or half-buried in the mud where his shoulder had hit the ground.
He moved through the meadow on his hands and knees, methodical at first, parting the grass with both hands, checking each patch before moving to the next.
Then he moved faster, less careful, his fingers raking through the stems, and after a while frantic, his gloves coming off so his fingers could feel the ground directly, his coat abandoned on the grass behind him, and the panic was no longer a curl.
It was a fist, closing around something in his middle that he could not name and did not want to examine.
He had never lost it before. In eight years of carrying, through ballrooms, brothels, country houses, carriage rides and one memorable evening at Watier’s when Lord Aldous had knocked the entire table sideways and sent glasses, cards and candlesticks flying, the watch had never left his person.
His father had carried it for thirty-one years without losing it.
His father had carried it through two decades of grief, loneliness and the slow erosion of wanting to be alive, and the watch had survived all of it, but now Ash had lost it in a meadow because a partridge had risen from the grass and a young horse had taken exception to the partridge and a duke who should have known better had not buttoned his waistcoat pocket.
The carelessness was unbearable. His hands were shaking, and it was harder to feel the ground.
“Your Grace.”
Her voice came from behind him, quiet and steady, but he did not turn around because turning around would mean showing her his face, and his face had not yet been assembled into anything he could show anyone.
“Your Grace… Ash.”
She had used his Christian name. She had never used his Christian name, and the sound of it in her voice, low and unhesitant, did something to the panic that he had not been prepared for.
It did not ease it. It did not fix it. It gave it a witness, and the witnessing made it possible, just barely, to keep breathing.
He looked up. Imogen was standing at the edge of the meadow in her walking dress, her boots muddy from the path, her hair already coming loose from its pins in the wind that had been building since midday.
She had come from the direction of the house, which meant she had slipped away from the women’s drawing room and followed him.
She had seen through him and had known, the way she seemed to know things about him without being told, that something was wrong.
She saw his face, and he watched the recognition arrive; the small sharp adjustment in her expression as the panic in his face registered in hers.
She did not ask what had happened. She did not exclaim, offer comfort or say any of the things people said when they encountered a man on his hands and knees in a wet meadow looking desperate.
She walked forward, knelt in the grass beside him, and began to search.
They searched together in silence for twenty minutes.
The grass was thick, and the ground was wide, but the watch was small, and the searching was the most intimate thing that had ever happened between them.
More intimate than the conservatory or the library, because it was not charged and it was not heated; it was simply her, kneeling beside him in the wet grass, her skirt darkening at the knees, her bare hands in the soil, looking for something she did not yet understand the importance of because he had not explained it and she had not required an explanation.
“It is my father’s watch,” he said, after the silence had gone on long enough that speaking felt possible. “He carried it for thirty-one years. I have carried it for eight. I cannot lose it.”
She looked at him. The wind was pulling hair across her face, dark strands against her cheek, and her eyes were very steady, but she did not ask what was inside. She nodded once, returned to the ground and kept searching.
The storm came off the western edge of the estate before they had covered half the ground.
It arrived fast, the way summer storms arrived in this part of the country: a darkening at the horizon that became a wall of gray in the time it took to stand and look at it, and then the wind changed direction, the temperature dropped, and the first drops of rain came in fat heavy bursts.
They hit the grass, his shirt and her hair and within thirty seconds had become very strong; the kind of rain that soaked through to the skin before you had finished deciding whether to run.
“The cottage,” Ash said, and pointed toward the treeline at the far side of the meadow, where the derelict gamekeeper’s cottage sat at the edge of the woods.
He had not been there in years. The roof leaked, the chimney smoked, and the estate manager had been asking for permission to pull it down since before Ash’s father died.
Ash had never given it because pulling down a building required a decision and decisions required caring, but caring had not been part of his vocabulary for a very long time.
They picked up his jacket and started running.
The rain was coming sideways now, lifting her hair from its pins entirely, the dark strands streaming behind her as she ran, her skirt heavy and dragging at her legs, her boots slipping on the wet grass.
He grabbed her hand without thinking, his bare fingers closing around hers, and they ran together toward the treeline.
It was terrible and oddly exhilarating; the rain hammering their faces, the wind strong against their bodies and neither of them able to see more than twenty feet ahead.
Somewhere behind them in the meadow the watch was lying in the wet grass, unfound, and he could not go back for it, not now; but the inability to go back was a pain he put aside because the woman whose hand he was holding needed shelter more than his grief needed attending to.
The cottage door was swollen shut. He shouldered it open, and they stumbled inside and stood dripping on the stone floor.
The rain was hammering on the thatch above them and leaking through in three separate places: thin steady streams of water that hit the floor, pooled and ran toward the low spots near the hearth.
A single room, a smoke-mottled hearth, a wooden table with one leg shorter than the others, a chest against the far wall.
There was a window with no glass, but with a shutter banging in the wind until Ash crossed the room and latched it.
The room went dark. The only light came from the cracks in the thatch and the thin gray glow around the door, and the darkness smelled of damp stone and old wood and the particular musty sweetness of a building that had not been lived in for a very long time.
He got a fire going. The kindling box beside the hearth had not been touched in years, but the wood was dry enough, sheltered under the stone mantel, so he built a small fire with hands that were shaking from cold and from the panic that had not entirely released its grip.
He was also shaking from the awareness that the running was over and they were alone in a single room with a fire, and that Imogen Goodall was standing behind him in a dress that was soaked through to the skin and clinging to her body in a way that the morning light in her drawing room had only hinted at.
He did not look at her. He concentrated on the fire and fed it kindling until it caught properly. The smoke began to rise badly because the chimney had not been swept in years, but the warmth was real, and the warmth was what mattered.
“We need to get out of the wet clothes,” he said, still facing the fire. “There are blankets in the chest. They will smell of moth, but they will be dry.”