She had yet so much to say to him. “But I—”
“Now!”
At last, his command broke through the fog clouding her brain. One foot, then the other, stumbled into motion, leading her through Gardencourt’s expansive grounds, toward Rosebud Cottage. Over her shoulder, she stole one last glimpse of Percy, leaning over Montfort, trying to save the man. Trying to save them all.
For that was who Percy was. Those beneath his care were safe. Had she only trusted it sooner.
His words swirled through her mind.Before it’s too late.But she knew: it was already too late. Their game of pretend was over.
The brief hope that was, evaporated into a hollow void.
Chapter 28
London
Buried on the third page of theTimes, tucked below a story about the explorer Alexander Gordon Laing reaching Timbuktu, Isabel located the news item she’d been hunting in the broadsheets these last few months.
Stalwart friend of Crown and Country and younger brother of the Earl of Surrey, Lord Bertrand Montfort, was tragically injured in a shooting accident at a country estate. The grievous event has left him with a shard of shrapnel in his spine. Speculation holds he will never walk again. No further details are forthcoming.
Isabel allowed the newspaper to fall to the table with a papery slap.
A shootingaccident.
She reread the words to confirm their existence. There they lay in black and white. A relief both calming and upsetting sang through her.
“It is being handled.”
Those had been Hortense’s exact words that night as they’d rattled toward London inside the Duke of Arundel’s coach and four, packed to the gills with five women and a baby.
Later, after they’d arrived at the shop and it was only the two of them, Hortense had elaborated. “It will be a hunting accident.”
“During a country dance? At dusk?” It stretched credulity.
Hortense gave Isabel a hard stare. “Aristocrats do as they like, when they like.”
Isabel had no argument for that particular truth.
Hortense then explained it was a preferred manner of explaining away this sort of situation. Isabel shuddered at how manysituationsHortense and Percy hadhandledfor Hortense to be so cavalier.
No matter. The woman’s meaning had been clear: the law wouldn’t be coming for Eva. It was an assurance Isabel had a difficult time trusting in the light of day, and all the days since.
Today, at last, she could let the matter recede into the distant nightmare from a night that might or might not have happened.
If only.
One person from that night—although she’d neither seen nor heard from him since—refused to leave her thoughts be.
Where was Percy? What was he doing this very moment?
Oh, to have her mind as her own again.
“Miss?” Isabel heard at her back. She pivoted to face Nell, who was smoothing several yards of gray wool across a large rectangular table, one of three taking up much of the room. “Yes?”
“Do I cut it like this?” Nell indicated the vertical length of the cloth. “Or like this?” She waved across horizontally.
Isabel folded the newspaper and tucked it into the waistband of her apron. “Along the grain, here.” She grabbed a pair of scissors. “Like this.” She began to make the cut and quickly determined the scissors were dull and would fray the fabric. “I shall fetch a sharper pair.”
As Isabel made her way to the back of the shop, her step felt a hair lighter. In truth, a part of her—her heart, namely—would never recover from the events of that strange week or the night that had ended it. That she hadn’t succeeded in freeing Papa . . . It was a pain that never wholly receded, sticking in her heart with its flat ache. But it hadn’t truly been an option, she understood that now. Bertrand Montfort never intended to keep his word.
