It is truth. Charlotte has done nothing but attempt manipulation of me. Perhaps Isla does the same but that is yet to be proved.
She stiffened. “How dare you.”
“How dare you,” he shot back. “You speak of Charlotte as though she were a prize mare to be stabled here just in case I come to my senses. Do you know what the makes you, mother?”
Her chin lifted. “Choose your next words very carefully.”
He stopped himself, barely, from voicing the comparison that had leapt to his tongue. A brothel madam. A woman arranging assignations for profit. The thought hung between them anyway, loud in the silence.
“I will not cast off my wife to satisfy your preference for a particular pedigree,” he said instead. “Nor will I leave her to travel the length of the country with no protection but your good opinion of the roads.”
“She chose to go,” Lady Eleanor insisted. “You could remain. You could read the diary. You could finally know that your father did not despise you as much as you think. Is that nothing to you?”
It was not nothing. The longing for his father’s approval, buried under years of anger and salt water, stirred like something waking. Then another image overlaid it. Isla on the road. A carriage axle cracking, a wheel sliding in mud. Rough men at an inn, seeing only a young woman of quality and calculating what her jewelry might fetch. A fever caught from some damp, cold lodging. A letter arriving days too late.
Honor, Lieutenant Ravenscroft, is what you do in a storm when the choice is between yourself and someone who cannot swim.
Those were the words of Captain Rearden. Charlotte was safe on dry land. Isla was rowing out into dangerous waters. Honor’sdemands were clear. His mother watched his face, saw the struggle, and pressed her advantage.
“If you go,” she said quietly, “I will burn it.”
He looked up sharply. “Burn what?”
“The diary,” she said. “Your father’s words. His thoughts. The truth you have wanted all these years. If you walk out of this house now, I will see to it that by the time you return there is nothing but ash in that drawer.”
He stared at her.
“You would destroy it,” he said. “Out of spite.”
“Out of necessity,” she replied. “If you will not be guided, there is no use leaving weapons for you to turn against yourself. Better you never know than that you know and still throw your life away on that … woman.”
“That woman,” he said, very softly, “is my wife.”
Silence. He could feel the weight of the ultimatum settling over him like a damp cloak. He thought of her standing in this room, chin lifted, telling him she would not be a cow at market. Of her hands on a horse’s neck.
Of her face when she spoke of Moira and the old gardener and the children in the south courtyard. Of the way she had brushed his hair, so lightly he had almost believed he dreamed it. He thought, too, of himself. The man he had tried to be aboard the Argus. The man Rearden had expected when he said:
If there is danger to your crew and comfort to yourself, you know which side of the line you stand on, Wexford. Or you are no officer of mine.
He was not an officer now. But the line remained.
His mother’s eyes were fixed on him. “Well?” she said. “What matters more? A woman who has brought you nothing but trouble, or truth from a man whose opinion you have let rule your whole life?”
He moved. Not to the bellpull. Not to the drawer where the keys lay in their orderly box. He crossed to the writing table, opened the top drawer, and took out a small steel and flint. The same tools he had used a hundred times at sea to coax reluctant tinder into flame. He set them carefully on the desk, between himself and his mother.
“If you are determined to set something alight,” he said, “you will find these useful.”
Her lips parted. “Edward …”
“I will not leave my wife on that road alone,” he went on. “Not for the sake of a diary. Not for the sake of your schemes. Not for the sake of ghosts.”
He stepped around the desk, picked up his riding gloves from the chair back, and shrugged on his coat before striding from the room without looking back. Within minutes he was saddling a horse. Honor, once chosen, did not permit dawdling.
Chapter 21
The trap jolted over a rut, dragging Isla’s thoughts back from Scotland to the present with a wrench.
She tightened her hands on the reins and spoke softly to the mare. “Steady, Morrow. It is only the road being contrary.”
