“Fetch my footmen!” the duke roared. “We shall have to carry her to the carriage!”
“Please, Your Grace, let us not be too hasty,” Fox began.
“But she’s not breathing!” the duchess wrung her hands. “Help us!”
Madeline glared at them all from her place on the floor, her lips ashen and blue.
“She’ll be coming one way or another!” the duke shouted.
A choked sob sounded beside Fox.
He turned and looked into Leah’s anguished eyes.
Shaking her head, his wife pivoted and fled the room.
27
Leah raced from the great hall, down the (wider) staircase, through the front door, across the courtyard—past the Duke’s fine carriage engraved with the Westhampton coat of arms—and onto the moor.
She ran blindly, feet stumbling on the uneven ground, her slippers unequal to the boggy heather and grass. Her stockings were soon soaked through.
Leah scarcely noticed. She ran and ran until the burning in her lungs matched the burning of her heart.
It was fitting, she supposed.
Her whole world was devolving to ash.
Before this very moment, Leah would have described herself as strong. Resilient.
Time and again in her life, she had dusted herself off and stood tall amid the wreckage of catastrophe.
But this . . . this clawing desperation overwhelmed her.
She couldn’t watch Madeline be torn from them without breaking.
Even Leah had her limits. A point at which the pain in her heart became too much to bear and she simply . . . buckled.
She continued to stagger onward, climbing higher and higher until the bowl of Corrie Finn spread before her. The mountain peaks reached toward the racing clouds overhead, while autumn peeked here and there among the ferns. Part of her wanted to keep running until she became one with the mountain, until she reached the highest peak and touched the sky.
But her legs gave out. She collapsed on a worn boulder, its top covered in green and yellow lichen. Her gasping pants of exertion rapidly turned to wrenching sobs.
Her heart couldn’t abide this. This ongoing disintegration of all she knew and loved.
Aileen’s death.
Malcolm’s grief.
Madeline’s leaving.
Fox’s sorrow.
How much more loss would her husband have to suffer?
And how cowardly of Leah . . . that she simply couldn’t endure it.
She pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes, cries leaving her chest in heaving gasps.
What would Madeline’s loss mean for herself and Fox? For their marriage?
