And with the very final motion she had left, she reached for his fingers and held them, falling below the horizon just as the sun began to crest it.
CHAPTER 26
If the servants found anything amiss about finding their lord and lady abed together the next morning, they did not make it known.
Claire supposed that was likely just professional decorum, and that they were likely deeply scandalized and irreparably shocked. Certainly they hadn’t all seen this coming. Surely it hadn’t been the assumed outcome on the day Freddy arrived, so long ago now, and they’d put his things in her room.
She had slept very late the day after the games, but of course, so had everyone else. There was some balm in knowing she hadn’t been the only one frolicking about until sunrise. She had awakened long enough to decline breakfast and dismiss the disappointingly unscandalized staff, and collapsed right back into sleep.
When she did finally rouse, well after noon, it was to the patter of fat, warm raindrops at her window and the conspicuous absence of Freddy Hightower.
She had paced through the cottage in her wrinkled dressing gown, yawning and stretching and looking for her son and husband, only to find neither.
Only the governess was about, indulging in one of those cherry hand pies in the kitchen. She, at least, looked viciously startled to be discovered with pastry flakes on her fingers in the empty, rain-dappled light of the kitchen.
“They went on a walk,” she explained, “an hour past.”
And Claire had nodded, shrugged, taken her own pie, and gone back to find some clothes for the day. She decided in that moment that she would not suffer another rain-logged trip back to Bourton, twice as long as it needed to be and thrice as treacherous.
They could wait for dryness. They could outlast the storm.
They could … well, Claire amended, they should probably inform the others and allow them to make that decision on their own. That would give her something to do besides.
She braided her own hair down her back, something she hadn’t done with her own fingers in many years, and strapped herself into the padded gown Freddy had joked about yesterday morning. Only yesterday!
She had never known days to be as dense as these.
She gartered her own stockings, laced her own boots, and threw open her own curtains, allowing an oddly sunny sky to shine in through the raindrops. She sat at her vanity table to eat her pie, marveling at how short a time it had truly been here, in this place.
It felt like a lifetime.
When she stepped onto the drive, holding a shawl over her head and aiming at the cottage Dot and Silas had chosen, she crossed paths with Freddy and Oliver, returning from wherever they had been, mud-specked and soaked to the bone. Their identical cow-licked hair was burnished bronze by the rainwater, matching in a swirl against their scalps.
“Oh, for the love of goodness, Freddy!” she chided, eyes wide and locked on their muddy, ecstatic child. “What have you done?”
“We had a walk,” Freddy provided, grinning proudly at her. “Down Fosse Way.”
“Look, Mama!” Oliver said, holding up two hideous, curling rocks, one in either hand. “They are the devil’s toenails! From the devil! From his toes!”
“I can see that,” she replied, cutting her eyes back to her idiot husband, who seemed just as overjoyed by the heretical toenails and his son’s grip on them. “Bath. Now.”
“Oh, but Mama,” Oliver protested as she shook her head, pulled Freddy near to drop a kiss on his cheek, and continued about her business, leaving them to argue it out behind her.
Behind her, she heard the satisfying gasp of at least one scandalized observer. Her son. Whispering in horrified observation, “Shekissed you!”
She smiled to herself, pulling the shawl tighter around her head, and sped up a little, her boots splatting in the mud as she reached the steps leading to Dot’s cottage. She hesitated at the door, looking from the bell to the doorknob to the door knocker and deciding on the last option, lifting and dropping it so delicately, she rolled her eyes at herself.
It was Silas who answered, much more rumpled than she’d ever seen him, a shadow of stubble over his face and shaving cream speckling his fingers where he had obviously been mixing it, one thing to address the other. He stared at her rather than greeting her.
“May I come in?” she asked, making him startle and step aside, clearly deeply disturbed to have been caught without a full jacket and a folded cravat. “I’m sorry to have surprised you.”
“No, it is … shall I fetch Dot?” he asked, blinking at her with those dark cobalt eyes, just like Tommy’s. “She is just having tea.”
“Wait a moment, if you would,” she said, reaching out to touch his arm, to stop him, wincing at how puzzled he looked by the gesture. “I … I have … Silas, I’ve reconciled with Freddy.”
“Oh,” he said, stopping and turning to fully face her. “I am …” He trailed off, grimacing.
“You are not surprised,” she suggested, winning a blink and a slight flush from him.
