“Why did you run off together?” Dot asked, setting the fairy tale aside and adjusting her posture toward him, completely toward him. “And why did she run away?”
He tried to swallow past the lump in his throat, failing and giving a dry cough. “I … we … it was obsession,” he managed with an apologetic grimace and a shrug. “We both got caught up in it. I followed her home. It was a mess, to tell you the truth. We had already eloped before I had a single critical thought about the thing. I saw her for the first time and I completely lost my mind.”
Dot looked intensely thoughtful. “Yes, all right,” she said, nodding. “You were both young and attractive. Stranger things have happened.”
He gave a humorless little laugh. “Right, yes, I’m sure they have,” he said, darting another look at his sleeping brother. “Certain they have, in fact.”
“Indeed,” Dot agreed, softening long enough to also look at Silas, to touch him again, just a brush of her fingers at his temple.
“As to why she left,” Freddy said with a humorless little smile, “that was the gambling. It was the worst I ever let it get. It was burrowed so deep into my bones that I’m surprised I ever surfaced again. We had to keep fleeing city to city every time I lost a little too much. I woke up one morning expecting my wifeand instead found a quartet of Dutch policemen and an empty safe.”
“She robbed you,” Dot said with a nod. “Yes, I suspected she had. You deserved that, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” he allowed, strangely finding a bit of ease in his shoulders at having it acknowledged. He had robbed Ember. Claire had robbed him. It was fair. “What about Ember? How did you find her?”
At that, Dot flashed her teeth again, a look of nostalgia settling over her face. “She found us,” she said with a giggle. “She was following us. By then, Silas had already started to lean on us to stop the sheets, attempting to call it slander and so on. I think Mr. Murphy was likely already following us as well, trying to prove that I had Claire hidden in my house. Ember had read the sheets of her own volition, like any other Londoner, and had immediately seen an opportunity for alliance. She was in dire straits too, you understand.”
“Yes,” Freddy said through clenched teeth. “I understand.”
“It is all in the past now, Freddy,” Dot said, soothing him like he was only about as old as Oliver and about to lose his hold on himself. “You did ask.”
“I did,” he agreed, blowing out a lungful of steam and shaking his head. “I know.”
“Ember lived with us too, during that time,” Dot continued, gazing to the side like she could see through time, right past the window. “Without all four of us, including Millie, who was the only one thinking clearly about it, we would not have come to the solution we did. We would not have been made whole.”
“Is that what you are?” he asked, wondering in all sincerity. “Whole?”
She nodded, a look of long-held awe in her eyes. “Yes. I am. Millie and Ember certainly are.”
“Not Claire?” he asked, surprised.
“Oh, Freddy,” she replied with a little laugh. “Of course not.”
He didn’t laugh himself, but he did let a grudging sort of smile come onto his face, because he knew that Dot understood everything, just like she always had. “Good,” he said at last. “I’m not either.”
“Well,” Dot answered, turning to flip through the box and dig out the gossip sheets. She held them out to him, offering the knowledge he wasn’t sure he wanted. “Maybe you could be.”
He took them. “Thank you, Dot.”
“Hush,” she said, scooting back into her seat and throwing him one last little look of sympathy. “I’m reading.”
CHAPTER 20
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Claire huffed, watching her son cross his arms and collapse, bottom-first, into the dirt outside of the cottages. “Oliver, be reasonable!”
“I’m staying with Papa!” the boy insisted, setting his jaw in a way Claire suspected he’d gotten from her. “I want Papa!”
“He’s not even here yet, love! You are going to stay with me, in this cottage here. Isn’t it lovely?” She sighed, pressing her fingers into her temples and shaking her head. “It is too small for all three of us.”
Tommy was watching from a distance while Abra sniffed around, marking this rock or that weed. She hadn’t said anything yet, choosing instead to lean on her walking stick and observe the tantrum as it unfolded, knowing that Oliver’s governess was farther behind in the carriage train and could not yet intervene.
“There are bigger ones!” Oliver wailed, pointing at three in the immediate vicinity. “Bigger!”
Claire groaned.
It was already dark. Even in ideal circumstances, the trip would have taken most of the day across the hilly terrain. As it was, they had hit a rainstorm about halfway in and had to contend with misty horizons and muddy roads for almost double the usual travel time.
In the distance, there was the thrum of voices and revelry alongside a few orange glows from bonfires. She was tired and hungry and nursing the beginnings of what promised to be a spectacular headache.
