He understood the dance and delicacies of diplomacy, but he’d never been able to indulge in the luxury of a formal courtship. Its intricacies and graces, its etiquette and implications. Its vulnerabilities and uncertainties. He wasn’t even certain he knew how to do it.
From the time he’d bought his first commission he’d been caught up in a spiral of ambition and reward. Fueled by success and admiration. Exhilarated, intoxicated, by danger and challenge. Until his work comprised a sort of whirlpool from which he couldn’t escape. It had only stopped when he’d been imprisoned.
In prison, remaining present had been a form of survival, and longing to be elsewhere was a form of torture. He’d been unable to imagine what might be next for him; moreover, he’d refused to do it. He wasn’t a fantasist by nature.
But he seemed powerless against the one that crept in now, as stealthily as a London mist: evening after evening like the one he’d just had. Meandering, congenial, familial, warm, homely. Loud singing, fine playing, amusing company. All in a room containing a woman who made him feel as though he were not subject to the laws of time when she was near. As though he was weightless and entirely new. That nothing wasof consequence apart from the fact that he was alive and so was she, at the same time. He was the world’s most brutally pragmatic man, but it felt as though he finally understood what the word “destiny” meant. And destiny, ironically, felt not like a misty fantasy but like a cold hard fact:
She was meant for him. And that was why he was here.
But bloody hell. Why now? Why like this?
In frustration, he abruptly turned away from the window.
Then froze, heart lurching.
Something was under his bed.
And it was moving.
Breath held, heart hammering, he inched toward it. Then craned his head to peer beneath.
For God’s sake. It was just a scrap of dark cloth trapped against the wall next to the bed leg, set in motion by that vigorous breeze he’d let in. He might never have seen it at all if he hadn’t opened a window, and he supposed The Grand Palace on the Thames’s maids could be forgiven for missing it. And as it ruffled in the breeze, he noted it had a white corner.
He realized he was looking at a once-white bloody rag.
He angled his foot behind the bed leg and dragged it out with the toe of his boot.
As no doubt it was his own blood and he wasn’t squeamish on the whole, he retrieved the fireplace poker and slid it beneath so he wouldn’t have to bend to pick it up.
Its delicate weight revealed it was a handkerchief, not a rag.
Soaked in blood.
Someone had likely pressed it to his wound as areflex before bandaging him. Captain Hardy, or Lord Bolt, most likely.
It was sobering to see. He stared at it a moment, thoughtfully.
He ought to buy the owner a new one for their trouble, regardless.
As he plucked it from the poker his fingertips brushed the raised silk thread of embroidery. Initials or a design of some sort were stitched into it. He brought it over to the lamp to read.
He exhaled, stunned.
Aurelie, Lady Capet
He wasn’t certain why he was so moved to see her entire name. Likely, in fact, stitched with her own hands.
But his throat felt strangely tight.
Had she been right next to him when he fell into the foyer? How else had her handkerchief become soaked in blood?
She’d disguised herself in her maid’s clothes, but she’d forgotten about handkerchiefs. She’d told everyone at The Grand Palace on the Thames she was going to visit her brother in Boston, which was where her brother Edouard allegedly did, in fact, live.
And her impulse to help him had revealed her definitively to him. He held the proof of that in his hands.
Hawkes knew he would never have forgotten about details like the handkerchief. That was how corrupthissoul was, he thought darkly amused. He made a thorough job of being a liar when he was obliged to be one.
And he felt again a simmering fury that something had altered her life so completely that she’d felt theneed to learn how to lie. It was a skill that took years to perfect, he could have told her. And then you wear your lies and your disguises around like a carapace, and it hinders your soul from expanding and your heart from feeling until life strips you down to your essence. Until you’re humbled completely.
