Chapter Eighteen
“He is wasting away over a woman, Mrs. Patton tells me. The whole village is talking of it. I thought you ought to know, my dear.”
Mrs. Drummond said it at the village shop on a Tuesday morning, standing between the flour bins and the soap, her voice gentle and uncertain, the voice of a woman who was not entirely sure she was doing the right thing but was doing it anyway.
She was the curate’s wife, a small kind woman in a brown pelisse who knew everyone in the parish and who believed that information was a form of charity and withholding it was a form of cruelty.
“There is a duke at the Hart and Hare,” Mrs. Drummond continued, her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes searching Imogen’s face for permission to keep talking.
“He has been there for three days. Mrs. Patton says he has not been seen to take a proper meal. He sits at the window and watches the road. He writes letters and the letters come back, and he does not eat and he does not sleep. I do not presume to know what is between you, Miss Goodall, but Mrs. Patton is worried, and Mrs. Patton does not worry easily, so I thought you ought to know.”
Imogen stood in the village shop with a basket of eggs in one hand and the other hand pressed flat against her stomach where something had just turned over, slowly, like a key in a lock she had believed was rusted shut.
She thanked Mrs. Drummond and paid for her eggs.
She walked home very slowly along the lane with her hand pressed against her chest.
He was here. Half a mile from her door. Sitting at a window watching the road she walked twice a day. He was not eating and not sleeping. He was writing letters that she was returning unopened.
She went home, set the eggs on the kitchen table and went upstairs to her room. She sat on the edge of her bed and pressed her hand against her chest and breathed.
The fourth letter arrived that afternoon.
She held it at the kitchen door where the footman delivered it along with the previous three and looked at the seal, unbroken, his handwriting on the front, her name, and she did not return it.
She carried it upstairs and placed it, unopened, in the drawer of her uncle’s writing desk.
The placing was the first thing about the situation that surprised her about herself, because she had been returning letters for a week and the returning had been automatic, a reflex, anger made into action, and now the reflex had broken, and the breaking was not a decision.
It was an exhaustion. The anger that had powered the returning had run out.
The fifth letter arrived the next morning. Same drawer.
The sixth delivery was not a letter. It arrived on the morning of the sixth day, a small parcel tied with twine, unsigned, no note. Inside, wrapped in brown paper, was a book. She unwrapped it and her hands went still.
The first volume of her late uncle’s Crébillon.
Le Sopha. The edition he had collected over thirty years.
The edition that had been pawned twelve years ago to settle the family debt and that she had been looking for ever since, in every bookseller’s shop in London and in three counties, without success.
She held the book. The leather binding was worn but intact, the spine cracked, the pages foxed at the edges, and the smell of it was the smell of her uncle’s library, old leather and dust and the faint ghost of his tobacco. The smell went through her and sat in her lungs and did not leave.
He had tracked it. She had mentioned the Crébillon exactly once, in the cottage, sitting by the fire in her shift with his arm around her, and she had mentioned it because the conversation had been about lost things.
The book was a returning. He was giving back a thing she had lost, and the giving was not an apology and was not a strategy but an act; quiet, specific, expensive and unsigned.
Unsigned meant he did not want credit, and not wanting credit meant the gift was for her and not for his conscience.
She sat on the bottom step of the staircase with the book in her lap and opened it to the first page and read the first line.
The words sat on the page, and she could not make them move, because between the words and her eyes was the memory of the cottage, the fire, the rain and his voice saying his father had carried the watch.
The second volume arrived the next morning. Bethany, finding her on the staircase with both volumes in her lap and her face very still, sat on the step beside her without speaking.
Cassie spoke to her that evening over a cold supper.
She had taken the gig that morning, with the head groom beside her because unmarried young women did not drive gigs across the countryside alone regardless of how capable they were, and she had driven to the Hart and Hare because she had received a letter that morning from Mrs. Bromley, the Dowager Duchess of Saintbury’s woman of business.
She was congratulating her on the Dowager’s offer to sponsor her next season under the Saintbury name.
The letter mentioned, in passing, that the arrangement had been requested by the Duke of Ravenhurst some weeks before, with the express condition that Miss Imogen Goodall was not to be told the source.
“He asked the Dowager,” Cassie said, her fork untouched on her plate, her young face carrying an expression that was older than eighteen. “Mrs. Bromley said weeks before.”
Imogen set her fork down, rose and walked to the window. She looked at the garden before turning to Cassie.
“Did he ask you to keep it from me?”
“He asked the Dowager to keep it from you. He did not ask me. He said he did not want it to count as a chip in any apology he owed you. He said he wanted me to have a season, not a transaction.”
She went upstairs, opened the drawer and looked at the five unopened letters, which had been sent back to her.
She read them all that night. In order, by candlelight, sitting at her uncle’s desk with the two Crébillon volumes beside her and the apple orchard dark outside the window.
They were not pleas. They were not apologies.
They were accountings. Each letter named one thing he had done wrong, in order, without asking forgiveness.
She read them all, slept and woke with a decision.
She sent a note to the inn. She would see him at three in the afternoon in her uncle’s library. She would see him for one hour. Bethany and Cassie were not to be present.
***
At three o’clock, the housekeeper showed him in.
He stood in the doorway of the library, and she saw what ten days at the inn had done to him.
He was thinner. The coat was loose at the shoulders, and the jaw she had traced with her fingers in the cottage was sharper, the hollows beneath his cheekbones deeper, and there was a small bandage at his temple where Mrs. Patton had dressed a cut from when he fell against the inn writing desk three days into not eating.
He was pale. He was gaunt. He was the most honest-looking man she had ever seen, because the honesty was carved into his body, visible in every lost pound, every sleepless shadow and every line that exhaustion had drawn across his face.
He was not performing. He had stopped performing.
The man standing in the doorway of her uncle’s library was not the Duke of Ravenhurst the ton had known for eight years.
He was someone else. Someone thinner, quieter and more frightened, a man who had dismantled every structure he had ever built and was standing in the rubble of it asking to be seen.
“Sit down,” she said.
He sat, and she sat across from him.
The reckoning that followed was long. She asked every question she had, and he answered without performance.
“What did you tell Devlin about the conservatory?”
“He pressed, and I gave him something to keep him satisfied. I just said you surprised me. All the rest is his own doing, and to this day I do not know how he found out.”
“Why did you stay next to me the night he trapped me?”
“Because for the first time in my life, I knew exactly which person in a room I belonged beside. There was nothing else to do.”
“Why did you ask the Dowager to keep Cassie a secret?”
“Because I did not want a single thing I did to be something you could weigh against the wager. I wanted to give you something that could not be measured.”
“Why did you not tell me that night that you had been to your solicitor?”
“Because I wanted to ask you in front of every person who had ever ignored you, and I needed twenty-four hours to arrange it. Twenty-four hours was the most expensive mistake I have ever made.”
“Why did you let me give myself to you with the wager still active?”
He did not answer for a long time.
“Because I wanted you,” he said. His voice was low, rough, stripped of everything except the words themselves.
“Because I told myself the wager was a paper thing and that what was between us was a real thing, and that the paper would not touch the real. Because I was a coward who should have walked out of your bedroom and told you everything before I touched you. Because I have spent eight years taking what I wanted, and I did not know how to stop.” He paused.
“There is no answer that makes it bearable. You should not forgive me for it. I have not forgiven myself.”
She listened, did not interrupt and asked her last question.
“Why did you lose so much weight?”
He did not answer.
She rose, lifted her hand to his face and found the hollow under his cheekbone, and her hand rested there. He closed his eyes.
“Take out the watch.”
He took it from his waistcoat pocket, opened it and showed her the small portrait.