“Perhaps. I don’t know.” She added tea to her cup but didn’t drink. Instead she used the cup to warm her hands again. “I had a room of my own in the attic. It was small but entirely comfortable. Because every room was in such demand that night, I gave mine up to a pair of lady’s maids. I was paid handsomely for the sacrifice by their employers and my own, so it was advantageous for me to go elsewhere. I agreed to make my bed in the carriage house, though that is rather too grand a name for the structure. It was more in the way of a stable but large enough to accommodate several coaches and all of the cattle.”
“And the drivers, footmen, and tigers, I imagine.”
“Well, yes. Naturally.” She required a moment to register his disapproving tenor. “It is inappropriate for you to assume they presented the least danger to me. I knew most of them, as they frequently made stops in Royston. I could have expected any one of them to come to my aid.”
“But they didn’t. Or do I misunderstand the turn your story is about to take?”
“If you think they had any opportunity to assist me, then you most definitely misunderstand the situation. I never reached the carriage house. I left by the back door carrying a wool blanket and a lantern. I recall clutching my mantle to keep it from flapping around me. A woolen scarf covered the lower half of my face. The wind was fierce, howling. I had to lean into it to remain standing. Except for my small light, the yard was dark, and by the time I realized I was not alone, I was being pushed hard to the ground. The lantern spilled out of my hand and the light went out. I had no breath to call for help, not that I believe I would have been heard. I was among the very last to retire. The likelihood of waking someone was small, and the wind was banging the shutters against the stone.”
Olivia’s eyes found Griffin’s. He was making no more judgments, simply listening instead. She could hold his gaze now, though why that should be she wasn’t sure. What she had to tell him was more difficult, not less. “You might wonder, with the lantern extinguished, how I knew it was Rawlings,” she said quietly. “But I—”
“The port,” said Griffin. “You smelled port on his breath.”
She nodded. “That is it exactly. Few others drank it that night. His height. The shape of his frame. It was not hard for me to determine that he was my attacker. He spoke very little. A few words to direct me, to tell me in most explicitly vulgar terms what he wanted me to do for him. I could not do it, Griffin. I couldn’t. I fought back. He was hampered by the blanket that was caught between us, my heavy mantle, and my strength.”
Griffin offered a gently wry smile. “I don’t suppose he considered that carrying tray after tray weighted with drink made you as strong as most dock workers.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t suppose he did.”
“You used your scarf?”
She nodded. It was easier now that he was able to draw inferences from all that she’d told him. “He was so intent on his own attack that he failed to notice mine. I managed to unwind the scarf from my throat and loop it around his. I caught him high on his neck, just under his chin, and I pulled…” She returned her cup to its saucer and stared at it. “And pulled.” The slight tremor was once again in her fingertips. The tea rippled. “I twisted the scarf and pulled for as long as I was able….” Her voice drifted off. She held herself still and found composure. “They came then…all four of them. Gin. The whiskey. Both pints of ale. I never heard them above the sound of my own breathing. I don’t know what drew them from their beds or what they saw. They tore Rawlings away from me, dragged him off into the night. He never protested, never struggled. Whiskey stayed behind long enough to make certain I could rise, then he hurried off to join the others. They went in one direction away from the inn. I went in another.”
Griffin understood then that Olivia’s dreams were not merely nightmares, but hauntings. She was visited by specters as she slept, every choice she made that evening came at her again, and she was helpless to make them any differently.
“Is it so important what I think, Olivia? Will it truly ease your doubts to know I think you acted as nature intended you should? The sort of peace you seek isn’t conferred on you by others. It seems to me that we make that peace within ourselves.” He shrugged lightly. “But even that is only my opinion.”
“Have you ever done murder?”
“No, but defending oneself is not murder.”
“Perhaps that is so among gentlemen. You have your peculiar rules. But I believe society will judge me differently.”
“Rawlings’s companions didn’t. They took him away, not you. You don’t know that he’s dead by your hand. You don’t know that he’s dead at all.”
“I know what I felt.”
“Killing such as you described is not a thing done quickly,” Griffin said. “His friends may have saved his life by coming upon you when they did.”
Olivia could sit no longer. She rose and went to stand at the window. Across the way, the front door to the brothel opened and the pair of whores she knew only by their taste in outrageously adorned bonnets emerged. Hugging herself, she stepped back so they wouldn’t see her when they looked up. “No better than I ought to be,” she said softly. “No better at all.”
Griffin turned in his chair. Olivia’s back had a steel rod where most people had a spine. Nothing would come of taking the opposing view. He chose a different tack. “What happened afterward? Where did you go?”
“I fled. It seemed all that was possible for me to do, though running away surely damned me. I had a bit of money saved that I was able to take, and I made my way from one town to the next, found work now and again. I eventually took a coach to Cambridge. I knew my brother was there. Alastair set up a house for me there while he finished his studies.”
As an explanation, it left much out. Griffin was far from satisfied. He continued to regard her stiffly set shoulders and spine. A few moments of silence was all that was required to prompt her to turn. Her chin was thrust a fraction forward as though she meant to challenge him. The slight quiver warned him she didn’t have the strength for an interrogation. It was not what he wanted in any event.
“Alastair doesn’t know,” she said quietly. “I could never bring myself to tell him. Whatever you might think of him, you must know that he took a great deal upon himself when he offered me a place to stay. He did it knowing that our father would not look kindly upon him for it. Indeed, in the first round of sparring Sir Hadrien threatened to cut him out of his inheritance. He settled for reducing his quarterly allowance instead. Because I was at the source of the conflict, even his mother could not be prevailed upon to make up the difference.”
Griffin’s gaze remained on hers. “Do you blame yourself, Olivia, for Alastair’s gaming? Come, be honest. Is there yet some part of you that holds yourself responsible? After all, if you had not sought him out, he would have his full allowance and no need to seek some manner of supplementing it. You were a financial burden to him, there’s no denying the truth of that.”
Olivia was reminded that Griffin understood too well the sharp turns her mind took. “My presence caused him difficulties,” she said carefully. “And he made decisions as to how he would deal with them.”
“So he did. You would do well to remember it. Far from being a burden, you were a convenience to him. Your presence gave him an easy excuse for gaming. In all likelihood, he would have taken it up regardless of his financial circumstances and lost sums in excess of whatever his father gave him. Many young men do; most survive the experience and come out wiser for it on the other end. I imagine your brother will too. What is required is time.”
Olivia remained silent for a long moment. She was conscious of Griffin’s study, the way his head tilted as he waited her out, but he advanced no pressure, only patience, and the ache she carried when she thought of her brother was eased because of it.
“I think you must be right,” she said finally, softly. Her shoulders rose and fell on a small sigh as her breath came without any accompanying tightness. “I don’t know when I should have come upon the truth of it myself.”
