These thoughts occupy me as I walk back to Red Oaks from the Nutting estate, and although the distance is approximately three miles, it feels like only one, for the peel comes into view far sooner than I would have liked.
I do not relish seeing Sebastian.
For the first time since I met him, there is not a slight tremor of excitement at the prospect of being near him again. Hurt by his lack of respect for my intelligence, I am deeply reluctant to admit that his conclusion was correct and mine is wrong. The confession will add weight to his belief that I am flighty, or slight, as Mrs. Dowell describes me in her letter.
I am weighty—though nottooweighty, as I should hate to be mistaken for a political hostess, like Mrs. Palmer, or the sort of girl who tussles with bulls, like that female matador…what’s her name…on the Peninsula—and the fact that I am compelled to assert my weightiness to Sebastian is highly troubling.
We are in a race, I think, and I am barely keeping up.
A race is not a partnership.
Sebastian and I are not partners.
If we are not partners, then we are not equals, and if we are not equals, then I am wasting my time.
This visit has been a disaster from the very beginning, with his mother sneeringquaintat me and my suspecting his sisters of murder. For weeks I thought all I had to do was make a decent showing and Sebastian would propose, and now as I trudge across the field, weighty and weightless at the same time, I am annoyed by the intractability of his scruples.
Damn his rigid code.
If he loved me, he would want to marry me.
If he wanted to marry me, he would propose without his father’s sanction.
He is a full-grown man of thirty years of age.
(Well, in fourteen months he will be.)
It is time for him to act like one!
Or is it past time?
Maybe our moment has already come and gone.
Stricken by the possibility that our love may not in fact be fated, I walk even faster, as if to outrun my own sadness, and bythe time I knock on the front door of Red Oaks, I am winded. If the butler notices my labored breathing, he does not reveal it by word or deed, merely observing that dinner will be served in little more than an hour.
An hour!
That means everyone else is already changing for the meal.
I should be changing, too. I am too miserable to even consider eating, and with my naturally rosy cheeks, my appearance cannot even take on an air of delicate tragedy like Miss Nutting.
Mama must be beside herself with anxiety by now, alternately terrified that I have been taken by a highwayman and horrified that I will not have enough time to prepare for dinner. It is impossible to say which would upset the poor dear more: a ransom note or ill-placed hairpins.
Glumly, I climb the stairs, keenly aware of the contrast with earlier in the day, when I bounded down the steps full of purpose to find the killer even at potentially great cost to myself. How fearlessly I crept into Mrs. Dowell’s bedchamber and invaded her privacy to evaluate her handwriting.
I stop.
Mid-step, my foot hovering inches from the next tread, I am struck by the glaring flaw in Sebastian’s theory: the letters. Even if they were not modeled onThe Fate of the Dark Dawn,the hand that composed them is impeccable. Practiced and precise, the cursive belongs to a man whose education included extensive instruction in penmanship. A peasant destined to till the field would not have spent so much of his education learning how to form perfect script letters.
The killer is a gentleman.
It is the only explanation that fits the circumstance.
Is he a gentleman who has come down in the world and now works the land?
Probably.
Impoverishment happens with alarming regularity: bad investments or an uncontrolled gambling habit or an evil guardian who siphons all his funds.
