“Yes. Though I’ve been in Kent since May. I go up to town when they need me to. Things are going well. I suppose your aunt keeps you informed?”
She nodded, wrapping her fingers tighter into the shawl she held around her shoulders. “She told me she was in Kent. Near your father.”
There was a pause at the end of the sentence. One which he filled. “But she did not mention me.”
No. Not one word. Her dear aunt, trying to save her pain.
“I moved to Kent when my father did. I’ve spent the summer with them. And Tom.”
“My aunt says he has a tutor.”
“Yes. Some young man of mechanical genius.”
She couldn’t help her smile. Or the wave or something that felt almost like homesickness. “My aunt says they talk of contraptions and machines all day long and no one understands them at all.”
“The pair of them make me fear for the future.”
“And…and your father? Is he well?” She risked a glance. He was looking ahead, his face in profile, but she saw the tightening of his jaw, the crease of worry at the corner of his eye.
“He’s as well as can be expected. This divorce case…having to give evidence…” He shook his head. He would’ve had to make a statement too. Allow solicitors to question him, to pry through his family’s private business, question the servants, talk openly of all the sordid details of his stepmother’s infidelities. “It has not been easy. But my father is…strong.”
The word he settled on seemed to surprise him. She watched him frown in thought.
“I never thought so.” His voice was quiet, as though talking to himself. “I thought it was weakness. But I realise now…there are some pains too great to bear.”
He looked at her, and she could not tell if he was sorry for her, or his father, or for everything, including himself.
Hadhebeen hurting? She’d made herself believe he couldn’t be. It was easier that way. But he was thinner than she remembered, quieter, stiller. It was the way working men went about their day after injury, in great pain, moving carefully but unable to lie abed with a houseful depending on them. They wouldn’t rest anyway, even if they could. They were too proud. They were too scared to stop.
Alfred had been like that, smiling through twisted ankles and sliced thumbs and wracking coughs, claiming it was nothing, no, he was never sick.
She was like that.
Lord Cotereigh was too. He’d glower through it. He’d wither a head cold with a snub. On the inside, she smiled at the thought.
“And your uncle?” she asked. “My aunt said he had left London.”
“Yes.”
“She said you cut him. At Lady Weeton’s ball. And Sir Handley, Mr Beckford, Lord Pembroke, Lord Leighton…you all turned your backs, and then it went around the room. The whole room turned its back.” Her aunt had written two full sides to describe it. Madelaine had reread the pages until they smudged.He stood alone in the centre of that vast room, the whole ton giving him a cut of such breathtaking severity I could scarce believe it. He was red as beets, jaw opening and closing, floundering like a fish. Forgive me if I seem to be describing the scene with too much glee, I wouldn’t normally take satisfaction in anyone’s distress, but Maddie, if you’d been there…
“Yes. I cut him. My friends were good enough to follow suit.”
“I wish I’d seen it.”
His smile was grim. Whatever he felt, it was too complicated to be pleasure. “A surgery long overdue. If he has any sense, he’ll go to the Continent and take his sister with him. Perhaps the Americas.”
“Well done.” The insistent pattering of the rain was as loud as her words. Drops clung to the brim of his hat. “I am glad.”
His step paused, his eyes on her. She was frightened he would take hold of her hand.
She increased her pace, bending her head as the wind decided to drive the rain horizontal. “Come on. We’re still a mile away.”
Even the hardy shepherds had retreated. There were normally a handful, dotted around the marsh on their ponies. Now they’d taken refuge in their huts and cottages. She could have taken shelter at one of those—she’d done it before—but she had a different destination in mind, and it wasn’t the tavern at the harbour or the cottage of anyone she knew.
She did not want company. She did not want to stand dripping before some poor housewife’s fire, making polite apologies, sipping tea, all her neighbours assessing the man at her side.
Out here she was free—yes, exactly as he’d said. Free and wild. A woman alone—she could walk these lands alone. No one questioned it. She’d done it since she was a girl. She did it as a widow. Everyone was used to it.
