“Lifeis a surprise, Ian,” Timothea said. “It’s one long series of unrelenting surprises. My advice to you is to accept this between now and when you locate her. And then consider how love may be acknowledged and demonstrated on a daily basis. Beginning now. In abundance. It should be a love that is independent of the girls and me, separate from the ‘duke and duchess’ bit. And rise above your fear of being unprepared. For God’s sake. Love is having someone at your side when you are taken by surprise. Between the two of you, you’ll work together and sort it out.”
Ian narrowed his eyes, squinting up at her, and then turned on his heel and ran.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Drewsmina Trelayne’s Rule of Style and Comportment #11: A lady has absolutely no business alone outside after dark.
Drew had lost her way. She was despondent, unsettled, angry, confused,andlost, but she was barreling ahead.
And that is merely my emotional state, she thought, reining her horse down another unknown street,it says nothing about the fact that I’m lost in an unknown quarter of London in a bloody maelstrom.
Tonight represented the closest she’d flung herself to theold way, the volatile and selfish manner in which she formerly conducted her life. Before she’d transformed; before she’d stopped flinging.
It felt wretched. She’d wondered in these last years what a regression might mean for her. Would it feel like freedom? Like a tightly laced corset come undone? Would it spoil all the progress she’d made?
No, it would not and it did not. The way it felt (beyond wretched) was foolish and irresponsible.
And surely it had not spoiled... well, anything.
Ian had said Pollen Street was not a prison. She was permitted to ride out if she experienced a fit of . . . of anger. Athim. For leaving. Again. For leaving ten minutes after they made love.Every time.For experiencing frustration at his inability to croak out the wordsI love you. In actual words. No assumptions? At the very least, she was allowed to experience frustration over her having said the words and Ian not acknowledging them.
It was reasonable, she thought, to want these things. Perhaps it was too soon for him and perhaps it wasn’t, but no amount of editing herself was making these desires go away. They needed to discuss it. She was angry that they hadn’t, and she’d jumped on a horse to find him and tell him so.
You deserve to be heard, whispered a voice in her head and it made her smile. Despite the rain. Despite the cold. Despite the fact that she had no idea where she was going or how she might find her way home. She smiled.
When she found her way back to him, he would hear all of this. She would not beg, she would not threaten; she would not even wheedle him with a pretty table and a hot bath and the timid request for an evening alone.
Her refusal to be a clingy, petulant harpy needn’t translate to never telling him how she truly felt or what she wanted and needed. She had been given a voice at birth, she had abused it for a time, then she hadn’t, and now she must fine some balance. She could do it. It could be done.
But first she had to find her way home.
Thoom!Another clap of thunder rattled the windows on the unfamiliar houses around her.
The mare Drew had chosen, Ivy’s favorite, did not appear to be spooked by the rain so much as invigorated by it. She galloped along, splashing through puddles and bounding over washed-out places in the road, moving into the unknown at a faster clip than Drew would have preferred.
Half of the harrowing journey to Blackwall had been devoted to remembering the route and the other half had been simply holding on.
Had she borne eastward in Aldgate, or did she ride north? Drew couldn’t say for sure.
When she’d set out, before the light drizzle had birthed this torrent, Drew had thought if she could only make it to Charing Cross, she could pick up the river and follow it east, riding parallel from the safe distance of two or three blocks. But then she’d run up against the Tower of London. The rain had increased, and she couldn’t find a clear way around the tower wall. She turned northward, which she knew should put her in the correct general direction, but she also knew she must eventually correct her route back toward the water, all the while keeping clear of Bluegate Fields and Cable Street, with their storied dens of gambling and crime.
With every new block, her vow to find Lachlan—to say it all and be done with it—had grown a little less pressing. The rain was unrelenting. She was soaked through and steam rose from her laboring mare.
She’d set out in a tumult of frustration, so very fed up with his avoidance, that she’d not even thought to put on more sensible shoes.
The streets were empty—only a fool would be out on a night like this—with no one to ask which way to the river. Was Aldgate behind her or below her? She came to the end of the street and realized she had absolutely no idea which way to turn.
She could knock on someone’s door, ask to be taken in, but she’d wandered into a particularly bleak, rickety row of houses, no windows, only the faintest candlelight seeping beneath doors. Would she be safer lost in the rain or pulled inside one of these dark, crouched dwellings? She didn’t know. If she could only find the river.
She turned the corner onto an unnamed street, only because she’d seen the distant glow of a faint light at the far end. It could be a public house, it could be an inn.
It could be a prison on fire, she thought glumly, squinting into the rain.
The light, Drew discovered, came from two lanterns, their flames pushing away the night, despite the wind and rain. They were posted outside of what appeared to be a little antiquities shop.
“But could they be open for business in this storm? So late at night?” Drew marveled, approaching cautiously from the far side of the street. Through the falling rain and gloom, she read the sign posted above the window. “Godfrey’s Treasure Trove. Fripperies, Oddities, Baubles, and Relics.”
Drew blinked, wiping the rain from her eyes, and read it again. A gift shop? Here? In East London (or what she assumed was East London)?
