Chapter Twenty-Nine
The settee complained every time Winston shifted his weight. He kept still to spare it and to keep the ache in his ribs to a low grumble rather than a shout. The parlor had gone quiet after midnight. The vicar’s clock marked the hours with a brisk little cough and then remembered itself and fell silent again. Coals settled. The cat snored under the chair as if it owned the hearth.
He had left the candle burning low. It made a small lake of light that caught the edge of the map he had folded and the blanket he had pulled over his boots. The great weight of the storm had passed; rain tapped the panes like an afterthought. Somewhere above him, floorboards gave the soft, infrequent sounds of a house taking breath.
He did not sleep. He had tried. Each time he closed his eyes he saw the same things. Adeline was on the doorstep, white with shock as her father spoke her name. The way she ran. The way the storm made a wall, and she went into it anyway. He was still wet from chasing her when they came back in,both of them dripping rain and the last of their fear onto the vicar’s clean floor. The vicar’s wife had wrapped Adeline in a blanket and chivvied her upstairs. Winston had taken the settle without argument because the alternative was either the floor or standing guard all night with his hand on the latch.
He flexed his fingers to loosen a cramp and set them flat again on the blanket. He had a list of facts. He put them in a row and forced himself to look at each.
Adeline lied about her name. DeBrett’s confirmed that she lied. She is Harston’s daughter.
He flexed his fingers.
She never had a fiancé. Never thought she would get married or have children.
His brows furrowed when he thought of a future where Adeline’s maternal instincts were not put to good use. It was unsettling.
Harston accused her of theft. Pike sniffed around it like a dog, believing it and prepared to throw the authority of Bow Street Magistrates behind it.
Winston rolled onto his side, wincing as his ribs protested against this small movement.
I have no proof to defend her with. I have nothing but my heart and my instinct. She lied, but no more than that.
What he did have was the woman herself. He had seen how she behaved when no one watched her. How she spoke to Louisa when the child quaked, guided Cordelia through that long night. He had the steadiness of her hands when his knee caught, the quiet sense that never showed itself as pride. He had her fear, not theatrical but practical. He had the memory of her body warming under his blanket at the inn, the way she’d saidI’m hereand made it true.
He did not want to believe all the stories that circulated around Adeline’s presence. He wanted to believe the opposite, that Adeline had fled because her father made the world dangerous, that Harston had killed his wife and scrubbed his conscience with titles. He put another fact in the row.
I do not want to be without her.
He could not yet give that want a name. Love was a word that came with obligations and ghosts. He could not lift it without waking something else. But the word stood there anyway, behind the others, not asked to speak, not dismissed.
His eye drifted to the dark corner of the room. The candle threw no light there. He had the sudden, foolish certainty that someone stood in it. A pale figure, hands folded at the waist, head bowed. It vanished when he looked straight at it, as such things always do. He breathed out through his nose and let his head press back against the settle’s worn top rail.
“Enough,” he said softly, to the corner, to himself, to a house full of old promises. “Louisa loves her. She loves Louisa. You can go. Louisa is safe.”
Saying it loosened something that had lived just under his breastbone for years. He had told the truth to a ghost and discovered he could still breathe. He heard a floorboard whisper above. A soft step. The faint click of a latch. Bare feet on stairs made no sound at all. The hem of a dressing gown made a soft rush. Adeline paused in the doorway, the borrowed flannel swallowing her to the ankles, her hair braided and coiled up in a simple knot that told him she had tried to sleep and failed.
They looked at one another for a heartbeat, then two. She crossed the floor quickly and without formality, and he rose to meet her, catching a sharp pull from his ribs and refusing to wince. She went into his arms as if the argument had already been had and lost. He wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and drew her close, feeling the plain relief of another human pulse answering his.
“I should be asleep,” she whispered against his coat. “I can’t.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry for before.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” he said. “You did what any of us would have done. You ran. Now you’re here.”
She smiled without lifting her head. “You chased me.”
“Poorly,” he said. “I’ll never make a hero of a novel.”
Her hands had worked their way around his waist into the warm fold of the blanket. He rested his chin lightly on her hair and let the room be small and ordinary for a moment. Table, chair, settle, two cups on the hearthstone where the vicar had left them for any night-thirst.
“I’ve been deciding things,” he said, when breath came easy again.
“That sounds dangerous.”
“It usually is.” He eased back enough to see her face. “We must confront Harston. Not here in a vicar’s parlor with rain in our boots. Somewhere that suits us. With witnesses, and time, and a door we can close behind him. But we must do it.”
