‘An actor in a circus, then?’
‘No.’
‘A cowboy. A preacher. A gunslinger.’
Phillip could not remember a conversation he had enjoyed more as he shook his head to each one of her outlandish suggestions, and without meaning to he told her the truth.
‘I was simply running away from myself.’
That stopped her mirth as nothing else could and she was quiet. Waiting.
‘A very hard thing to do?’
‘The hardest.’
‘I know that because I did the same.’
He reached out for her hand and brought it into his.
‘Yet now you live well?’
‘I do.’
He looked away but did not drop her fingers. Rather, he cradled them closer.
‘Thank you for today.’ The words were torn from the innermost part of him.
There were more people on the paths now in the distance and he could see his manservant on a horse cantering towards them.
He had asked him to do this to allow him an escape in case…
He cursed under his breath and let her go, the wind rising between them and the sky returning to grey.
Jamming his hands in his pockets, he watched as Bates came closer.
Every time she saw the Earl of Elmsworth Willa was more bewildered. It was if he had a certain amount of hours to give her before some invisible clock struck twelve and like Cinderella he fled away.
From her. From the truth. From a conversation that might expose him.
But his laughter had not been forced and the jesting between them had been…she tried to think of the right word. Real? Genuine? Exhilarating? A connection that had felt just the same as in the kitchens of Elmsworth.
He’d held her hand to warm it against his coat and she’d known the heavy beat of his heart. Steady. Constant. That of a man who had stood against the forces that had been thrown against him and survived.
Chapter Five
Phillip came awake with a familiar dread, the years-ago horror of the gunshot reverberating in all corners of his mind. His finger on the trigger and Oliver falling, Gretel by his side, her face flushed, her eyes aglow, and the words she had uttered ones that could never be taken back.
Sitting up and leaning over, he tried to find the breath that he had lost, tried to piece himself together, tried to stop the trembling.
Shaking his head hard, he got out of bed, opening the curtains to let in some light. A half-moon at least. He bathed in the glow with relief, feeling his heartbeat slow, feeling that scene in the Elmsworth library fade.
The cry of a small child in a room along the corridor was welcomed. There was other life here, fragile but real. He longed for a further wail but there was only silence.
His brother, his wife and their two sons had arrived at the town house in the late afternoon, their eldest son having broken his arm and Esther wanting it to be seen by the Elmsworth physician in town. Phillip liked that he could hear even in the middle of the night some sound of life, which promised comfort. He wondered where the little girl was, the one with the doll. He searched his memory for a name. Juliette.
‘Wherefore art thou, Juliette?’ he whispered to himself, his small attempt at humour another ease.
He would not sleep again now. Two o’clock. A long way until dawn and no chance of wandering the house, as was his usual habit, with his brother’s family close.
