“So who was he?” she asked, her indifference clearly feigned.
“No one,” I insisted. I could not bear the idea of her thinking I held an ounce of affection for Mr. Honeyfield, not even for a second. “I knew him as a child, but truly, I barely remember him.”
“I see,” Kitty said, worrying her lower lip between her teeth. Her expression was hard to read in the dim light, and she quickly shook it away. “Come on. Show me the gardens.”
She’d seen the gardens before, walked miles around them on plenty of occasions, but I didn’t dare mention it, or the fact it was too dark to see much of anything. I was terrified to break the spell of the moment by letting too much of reality in. It would be dangerous to call attention to the way my arms prickled in the cold or how close candle wax was dripping to Kitty’s gloves. Instead I led her farther into the gardens, keen to put more distance between us and the house.
If I had been walking with anyone else I knew as well, I would have taken their arm. Elizabeth and I had covered all of Pemberley’s grounds in such a fashion multiple times over. With Kitty, it all felt too perilous. Rather than stroll at her side, I kept a cautious distance, walking just ahead. Out of the reach of the glow of Kitty’s candle. The moon was bright enough to guide my feet but showed me only so much of the ground in front of me. When I turned back to steal a look at Kitty, the safe footing ran out before I could draw my attention away and I felt myself plummet.
Chapter Seven
For one moment of fear, I was in free fall, my front foot having nowhere to land. I tried to grab for the wall but succeeded only in driving my knee into the sharp edge of the bricks and scraping it against them as I fell.
“George!” Kitty screamed, scrambling to the edge of the wall. “How do I get down?”
The pain of the hip that had broken my fall and the knee staining my dress red made it difficult to think. I was worried if I stopped biting my tongue long enough to speak, all I would let forth would be sobs. Blinking through the haze of pain, I looked around to register where I’d landed. Noting the orderly rows of planted vegetables, I realised I’d tripped over the edge of the walled kitchen gardens, dug into the side of a slope to hide it from view of the house.
I gestured shakily farther down the wall where I knew there were steps. Kitty’s frantic reassurances faded for a moment before she reappeared at my side, crouching beside me.
“How bad is it?” she asked, before taking one look at my knee and going pale. “Can you stand?”
I still couldn’t talk, pressing my lips together as tightly as I could, but I tried to get to my feet. The second I put any weight on my wounded side, a bolt of agony ran up my leg and I collapsed against Kitty with a cry of pain.
“We need to get you back to the house. Send for a doctor,” Kitty said, fussing over me. She pushed my hair back from my face, her gloved fingers ghosting over my cheeks.
I wasn’t sure I could walk as far as the house, but Kitty’s touch took away some of the pain, and coherent thought began to make its return. If we were in the kitchen gardens, then we weren’t far from my mother’s grotto. It had a bench and a roof and would be as safe a place as any to wait alone for Kitty to fetch help.
Leaning myself heavily against Kitty’s side, I climbed to unsteady feet and gritted my teeth to stave off the pain. She supported my weight as I limped a little way down the wall and under an arch that took us close to the grotto’s entrance.
“The house, George,” Kitty tried to insist.
I shook my head, dragging aside the bushes that concealed the grotto. Kitty was close enough that I heard her tiny inhale of surprise, but she didn’t hesitate to help me inside.
The moon shone down through the well in the ceiling, glinting off the glass tiles embedded in the floor and theshiniest chips of mother-of-pearl. I rarely saw the space at night, and it looked almost ethereal, impossibly beautiful in its intricacy. Kitty must have thought so, too, but her focus was solely on me as she settled me onto the bench and knelt in front of me.
“Hold this,” she said gently, handing me the candle and pulling off her gloves. She tugged at the hem of my gown. “Is this all right?”
I would have said yes to anything she asked, nodding almost embarrassingly quickly. With the candle flame so close, I looked down to survey the worst of the damage. The outer layer of my gown was shredded from my thigh down to the hem, with the pink silk underneath torn at my knee. The petticoat had fared no better, baring my ripped stocking. Every layer was stained with blood, sticking to the gash in my flesh.
Kitty carefully peeled away the layers of my dress, tucking them up above my knees. I couldn’t focus on the pain anymore, not when I felt my heartbeat pounding just under my skin. Under any other circumstance, the intimacy of the situation would have overwhelmed me. I wanted Kitty so close there was barely any room between us to breathe, but her touch was almost clinical. She reached for my petticoat, and I expected her to similarly push it out of the way, but instead she gripped the hem ruffle between her hands and pulled until the stitches ripped and the strip of fabric came free. I startled, but Kitty seemed to know exactly what she was doing as she separated the ruffle and smoothed it out.
“I have four sisters,” she reminded me, guiding me to move my leg up so it lay flat along the bench. “One of us invariably ended up in a scrape at least once a week. Not so often Jane or Mary, but Lizzy, Lydia, or I could be relied on to make up the shortfall.”
She wrapped the fabric tightly around my knee, stemming the bleeding. It didn’t seem to bother her that her hands were stained crimson or her dress was newly embellished with smudges of blood and dirt. I felt myself, against my better judgement, fall even further. Fresh tears sprung up in my eyes, following the tracks of their predecessors. Seconds later, soft thumbs brushed them gently away.
“Does it hurt that badly?” Kitty asked, concern heavy in her eyes as she took the candle from my shaking hand and propped it up in an upturned shell set into the wall beside us.
I considered lying, but I didn’t have the energy left in me. My knee was throbbing, and there was blood soaking through the ripped ruffle of my petticoat. I wanted to sink into Kitty, to hide away. To erase the terrible turn the evening had taken.
“My pride is more wounded than anything. I went to all this trouble with the hair and the rouge and a dress I am not even sure I really like and all because…” There was no going back if I said it. But if I didn’t say it, it was going to kill me, taking up all the space in my chest until there was none left for my lungs. “I wanted you to look at me. It was a childish folly,” I admitted, unable to meet her eye if I wanted my cheeks to remain unflushed. Instead, I focused on poking myfingers through the holes in my skirts, but when Kitty’s hand rested on mine to still my fidgeting, I had no choice but to pay her my full attention.
“All I have done all night is look at you,” she said. “You cannot take my breath away anymore, George, because you took it the first time I saw you, and you have never given it back.” She tugged my hand to her lips and kissed the back of my gloved fingers with a tenderness I felt through the fabric and down to my bones. “I am in a constant state of breathless awe around you.”
The pain in my knee was a forgotten inconvenience, my mind too focused on the overwhelming joy flooding in. I had never hated my gloves more for getting in the way, and Ishook off Kitty’s grip to strip them off, tugging at each fingertip before letting them fall to the floor. I wanted to lace my fingers with hers, but I caught myself the second before I did, unsure exactly what she wanted from this.
As if she could sense my hesitation, Kitty reached out and took my hand, her skin soft and cool as it ghosted over mine. It was a featherlight touch, until I met her eyes and she tightened her grip. Emboldened, I traced circles over her knuckles with my thumb.
Neither of us said anything as we sat there, bathed in moonlight, clinging to each other. I could not entirely believe my luck, that I got to look at her so freely. Her hair was escaping its confines, and I could see the traces of exhaustion collecting in her eyes, but she was still the most beautiful person I’d ever seen.
