On Wednesday she sat in the morning room with embroidery she had no intention of finishing, each stab of the needle growing sharper. The butler’s step in the corridor made her head lift every time. Then each time he passed with no missive in hand, the stitch in her chest pulled tighter.
Thursday. No letter. No cramped hand, no seal she knew. By Friday her patience snapped.
“If Alistair has been buried under a fallen beam,” she muttered to Edith as the maid helped her to dress. “I’ll dae bloody murder tae him when he rises.”
Edith hid a smile. “Her Grace means, she is worried,” she translated.
“Her Grace means exactly what she said,” Isla replied. “If he is well enough to drink, he is well enough to write.”
She said it briskly, but the truth gnawed. She saw his face as it had been in Portman Square: colorless with shock, bravado laid over guilt like a poor coat over thin shoulders. He had sworn to return to Strathmore, to assess the damage, to write. He had done the first. Not the second. In the absence of news, Isla did what she had always done when the world seemed too tight. She went to the horses.
The breeding project filled her hours. It was a relief to think of something with bones and muscle instead of columns and scandals. She walked the paddocks with Godwin, argued pleasantly over the merits of different crosses, made lists in her neat hand, her mind filled with conformation and tempers rather than gossip. What surprised her most was how often Edward appeared in those conversations.
I thought he was avoiding me. Seeking any work he could find as a barrier to put between us. Now, he seems to be doing the opposite.
Within the week he had pulled a stool up beside the paddock fence, coat off, shirtsleeves rolled, watching as she and Godwin trotted a mare up and down for his inspection.
“Look at the near hind,” Isla said. “You see how she dips when she puts weight on it? There’s an old strain there. Breed that into your hunters and you’ll be pulling up lame halfway through every meet.”
Edward narrowed his eyes. “I see it. I think.”
“You will,” she said. “Stand here.” She took his arm, placed him where the angle was clean, close to the fence. “Now watch again.”
He obeyed, and when the mare turned he made a soft sound of recognition. “Yes. There. Like a man favoring an old wound.”
“Exactly.” She smiled. “Welcome to the conspirators’ club.”
He smiled back, small but real. Moments like that accumulated quietly. A shared laugh over a colt’s antics. His hand steadying her elbow as she stepped over a muddy patch. An evening at the writing table when he bent over the same sheet of paper with her to sketch out which mares would be put to which stallions next spring.
It set her heart to racing every time. Made her skin tingle and her stomach clench. His proximity, the sound of his breath. The smell of him. All of it was like a heady wine. She wanted to drown in those sensations. To faint dead away if it meant waking in his arms.
But the mistrust between them did not vanish. It shifted. Changed shape. She could feel it sometimes in the way his gaze flicked from her face to some fixed point just beyond her, as if hewere remembering something that did not match what he saw. Yet he no longer held himself quite so far away.
Just make yer bloody mind up, man!
In those moments of frustration she raged at his drawing close but holding back. Bringing her close enough to touch and then closing the door. She told herself it was friendship, nothing more. That friendship was safe. That friendship could survive what love could not. Sometimes she nearly believed it.
It was in just such a mood that she took the long way back from the library that afternoon. She had been reading again. Burns. She had reached for him without thinking, the familiar Scots words a balm she did not know she had been starving for. His lines tasted of home and hearth and fields. When she closed the book, the ache for Strathmore was so sharp that she could not go directly back to her rooms. She needed to walk.
The corridor that ran along the east wing of Wexford Hall was quieter than most. Fewer portraits. Fewer tables for vases. Fewer servants had cause to pass that way. At one end, a window looked out over a side lawn and a small knot of yews, at the other, the corridor turned abruptly and vanished into older parts of the house.
Halfway along, the locked door waited. The wing into which no-one was invited and which Edward alone held the key. Now, asshe turned the corner, book still in hand, she saw that the locked door was open.
It was only barely ajar, a sliver, a thin line of shadow but it was enough to show that the handle was not as firmly barred as advertised. Isla slowed. A shape moved within. Footsteps. The faint rustle of silk.
And then the door opened wider and Lady Charlotte Pembroke stepped out into the corridor. Isla hesitated, not wanting astonishment or jealousy to be evident on her face. When Lady Charlotte lifted her head and saw Isla, surprise flickered for an instant and was just as quickly smoothed away.
“Lady Isla,” she said, as if greeting someone of lower rank at a crowded assembly. “How industrious of you, roaming halls in the afternoon.”
“And how industrious of you,” Isla replied, “emerging from rooms you are not supposed to enter.”
Charlotte’s brows arched. “I beg your pardon?”
Isla nodded toward the door. “The Dowager Duchess was quite specific. That room is locked. Edward has the only key. No one may go inside. Yet here you are, coming out of it as though you own the place.”
Charlotte glanced back at the door, then raised her chin. “When His Grace invites me into a room, I do not inquire how many keys exist.”
The words landed with deliberate weight.
