She’d taken the sling off yesterday, a full week earlier than the doctor had instructed, and she wasn’t going to think about how badly her wrist ached, nor was she going to put that dratted sling back on. She wanted to move about freely.
When she looked at how Millicent and Jane and Freya moved about town, the liberties her father allowed her seemed ridiculously small.
But if she wanted even that much freedom, she couldn’t bear any proof of his outbursts. She’d learned that after her mother died, when her father had suffered his first fit of violence toward her.
A bruised cheek, a sprained wrist, a turned ankle, or anything else another person might notice would confine her to the house for weeks at a time, and sometimes even to her room, if her father thought the servants might gossip.
So yesterday she’d taken off her sling, simply to prove to her father that she could visit Millicent today.
And she had. It had been a pleasant visit, filled with the goings-on about town. People were still talking about the Amos-Wetherby wedding, and apparently Mikhail Amos had been seen traipsing up Castle Hill holding his new wife’s hand. Not allowing his wife to grip his forearm as he escorted her up the hill like a gentleman, mind you. And not even with one palm clasped firmly in the other. No, their fingers had been laced together in public, no less. Mrs. Traverton had seen it herself and was scandalized.
Millie had claimed Mikhail Amos’s actions were improper, but something about the way he’d held Bryony’s hand in public made Rosalind’s heart hurt.
She wanted to marry a man who would lace his fingers with hers and not care who saw it or what they said. Someone who would lean down and swipe a strand of hair away from her eyes when the wind was blowing. Someone who would look at her with tenderness and not mind waiting if it took her longer than expected to ready herself for church.
Something told her that the man her father would eventually marry her off to would do none of those things. He probably wouldn’t even notice if she were alive. He’d have multiple houses, and he’d stuff her in one of them and then go about his business as usual—which would probably include visiting his mistress on a regular basis.
Or maybe he’d have more than one mistress.
Her father had never been like that, not while her mother was alive, but after she died...
Rosalind shifted on the wet log. She wasn’t sure how to describe what had changed in her father after her mother’s death. She only knew that he was no longer the man she’d grown up with as a girl.
Another gust of wind tore over the water, rattling the tree branches above her and sending a fresh spray of rain across her face.
She should leave. This was foolish. The damp was seeping into her bones, and she didn’t want to spend another week confined to the house if she came home with a cough.
She wasn’t even sure why she’d come in the first place.
The simple explanation was that she came on this little excursion every month when she visited Millicent. Millicent didn’t know where she went or why, only that she left. It took a good thirty-five minutes to walk to this abandoned little cove, and another thirty-five minutes to walk back, and that gave her about fifteen minutes each month to exchange letters with Yuri.
If she suddenly stopped visiting Millicent while Yuri was out of town, someone might be able to piece together whom she was meeting, and she couldn’t afford to have rumors about her and Yuri floating around.
She tried to tell herself that was the reason she was sitting there, getting wetter and wetter while the letters she typically exchanged with Yuri every month weighed heavily in her pocket. That everything about their monthly meetings was practical and transactional. That Yuri Amos was nothing more than a means to an end.
Come to San Francisco.She could still recall the sound of his voice, still feel the snowflakes landing on her cheeks and see the way the warm light from the warehouse window had almost illuminated Yuri’s face, but not quite.
She’d wanted to say yes. For a fraction of a second, that had been all she could think about.
But then she remembered the letters and the money and how she couldn’t possibly leave Sitka without also leaving the money her mother had left her. Leaving meant the charities thatshe donated to every month would suddenly stop receiving her donations, and some of them were quite generous.
Her mother’s solicitor had left her a small inheritance in a separate investment trust until Rosalind turned eighteen. Her father had always dismissed it as trivial—a small lady’s fund earning interest—so he’d never bothered to put his name on it. But unfortunately the account was at the same bank in Washington, DC, where her father, her uncle, and the Alaska Commercial Company held all their other accounts. They moved large amounts of money through the bank every year, and she had no doubt that if her father really wanted to get access to her money, he could.
The key was allowing him to believe the money in her trust was too trivial to matter.
Her solicitor reported to her directly, meaning that as long as she limited her correspondence with him so it wasn’t frequent enough to be alarming, her father would leave her and her money alone.
She’d thought of trying to change banks and solicitors several times, but that would be hard to do without traveling back to Washington, DC, and she hadn’t had an occasion to go—at least not one that wouldn’t alarm her father.
Even if she did change banks, her father might still find a way to get his hands on her money. Her current solicitor, Mr. Holloway, had served her mother faithfully. He probably feared her father, but he didn’t go out of his way to curry her father’s favor. That made him more reliable than most men in Washington, DC—solicitors, bankers, and politicians alike.
But if she up and disappeared from Sitka? The first way her father would try to track her would be through her money. The bank Mr. Holloway worked for would likely force him to turn over all of her Finnancial information within hours. Even if her father couldn’t put his name on her account—and she wouldn’tput it past him to bribe the bank to do exactly that—he’d still be able to see what city and bank Mr. Holloway sent her money to, and she’d have little choice other than to ask her solicitor to send money.
What else would she use to pay for an apartment and food?
Having her father track her down would be so much worse than staying in Sitka, doing what she was already doing and dreaming that one day a man with kind brown eyes, a constant smile on his lips, and a thatch of hair that was always falling over his brow might?—
A rustling sounded in the woods behind her.
