The change in the lady was visible at once. Her eyes were ringed with shadow, the skin beneath them faintly bruised, and her pallor had a greyish cast that no careful dressing could conceal. She had pinned her hair more tightly than usual, and her bonnet was still on, as if she intended to leave again the moment the conversation became difficult.
“Frederica.” Nora rose and extended both hands.
“I am glad you came.”
Frederica took her hands, but her grip was loose, uncertain. She let herself be guided to the settee and sat at its edge, perching rather than settling, her reticule clutched in her lap like an anchor.
For a moment, neither of them spoke. The clock on the mantelpiece filled the quiet with its steady, unhurried ticking. Outside, a carriage passed, its wheels crunching on the gravel.
“I was not honest with you,” Frederica said it without preamble, the words coming out in a rush, as if she had been holding them behind her teeth for the entire journey. She did not meet Nora’s eyes. Her gaze was directed at her own hands, at the clasp of her reticule, which she was turning over and over with her thumb. “In the park. When you — when you came to walk with me. There was a reason I was distressed, and it was not a headache.”
“I know,” Nora said, gently.
Frederica’s thumb stilled on the clasp. “You know?”
“I saw him.” Nora kept her voice low, her posture open — leaned slightly toward Frederica, her hands resting in herown lap where they could be seen, offered. “The man who approached you. He held your arm.”
A sound escaped Frederica — not quite a word, not quite a cry. It was the sound of something giving way, a dam developing a crack before the flood. Her gloves, Nora noticed, had been twisted into knots at the fingers, the kidskin rumpled and stretched.
“He is —” Frederica stopped. Her jaw worked, the muscles at the hinge flexing, and she closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they were damp but steady. “He is a man who knew my father. He was… in my father’s employ, for a time. As a solicitor.”
She said the word solicitor with a weight that made it mean something else entirely.
“And he frightens you,” Nora said. Not a question.
Frederica’s chin dropped. The gesture was minute but devastating — a single, small nod that contained everything she could not yet say aloud. “Yes.”
Nora waited. She could feel the temptation to push — to ask questions, to demand names, to insist on the full truth — and she held it at bay with both hands. Frederica was not ready. The cracks in the dam were showing, but the flood had not come, and Nora understood, with a clarity born of her own year of silent suffering, that some truths can only be released when the person holding them feels safe enough to let go.
“You do not have to tell me everything,” she said, finally. “Not today.”
Frederica’s eyes came up to hers, and in them Nora saw something she had not expected: gratitude. Not the bright, effusive gratitude of a favour returned, but the deep, quiet kind — the gratitude of a drowning woman who has been told that the shore exists, even if she cannot see it yet.
“Thank you,” Frederica whispered.
They sat in silence for a moment. Then the front door opened somewhere in the house and footsteps crossed the hall — a visitor arriving — and Frederica’s head turned toward the parlour window, her posture stiffening.
But the footsteps passed. The visitor was for someone else.
And then — small, almost imperceptible — Frederica’s hand crept sideways on the settee, and her fingers found Nora’s. They held there, lightly, barely touching, a bridge built from nothing but trust and need.
Nora curled her fingers around Frederica’s and held on.
15
Frederica had not gone home directly.
She had not been able to face her own house — its silence, its locked doors, the particular dread that had taken up residence in its rooms — and had asked the coachman to set her down at the back garden gate, wanting only a few minutes alone in the cool evening air before stepping back behind those walls. It was a foolish thing. She knew it was foolish even as she did it, but the relief of having spoken aloud at last — of having been heard, and believed, and not turned away — had given her a courage she had not felt in weeks. She walked the gravel path slowly, her hand brushing the leaves of the box hedge, breathing as if breathing itself were a thing newly permitted.
He came from behind the wall.
A hand closed over her mouth before she could draw breath. An arm went round her waist and lifted her clean off her feet — not roughly, but with a calm, practised efficiency that was somehow worse than violence — and the smell of him reached her, pipe smoke and stale wool, before her mind caught up to what was happening.
“Quietly now, Miss Longleat.” Rathbone’s voice, close to her ear. “We have a long way to go.”
She tried to struggle. She kicked once, weakly; her fist found the rough wool of his coat and accomplished nothing. His grip was that of a man who had calculated her exact strength and accounted for it, and the alley behind her own garden gate was empty, and the closed carriage waiting there had its lamps unlit. He bundled her inside and pulled the door shut behind them. The wheels began to move.
Through the small window, she watched the lit windows of her own house dwindle behind her.
