Hawkes lowered himself to the bed and stretched out along the length of it, surrendering his head to the splendid pillow, and set his thoughts loose on his predicament.
I suspect she hoped to find something of a real family with Lord Brundage.That was how her lady’s maid had put it. She’d been raised by a guardian who was frequentlyaway. One brother was dead, the other across the ocean. With some grave discomfort to himself, he could well imagine the joy she must have taken in her engagement. Her face lighting the moment she’d said yes to his proposal. The hopes she must have had for the future.
She had meant to be a good wife, she’d said. She would have done her best.
And he felt again a tightness in his throat and a pressure in his chest as though something were slowly crushing it. It was how he imagined she must have felt the moment her illusions had been brutally shattered.
Because of a certainty, they had been.
He laid an arm over his eyes and drew in a long, slow breath.
He’d never before articulated aloud his thoughts about being married. He realized he felt, in fact, a little raw and unsettled in the wake doing it. But he’d told Aurelie the truth, a truth that amounted to a revelation even to him even as his words emerged. He found that he hadn’t a taste for lying to her. He didn’t want to maneuver her; he didn’t want her to be astrategy. When he was with her, all he wanted was to experience the lightness of being only his truest self. When was the last time he’d felt that way? Was he even capable of it anymore?
He now understood that marriage was a frontier about which he knew nothing at all, his previous cynical assumptions about it notwithstanding. It felt like a lifetime since he’d undertaken anything at which he wasn’t, through practice, aggressively competent.
He realized he hadn’t thought about it because no other woman had ever before felt like “forever” to him.
He wanted to fix everything for Aurelie, and that meant, once and for all, settling old business with Brundage.
Thenhe could tell her the truth. Only then.
He absently ran his fingers beneath his arm, over the tattoo of the dagger. Imagining her eyes upon it. Remembering her questions about it. As though she sought solutions to her own pain.
What hurt or frightened Aurelie so badly that she presently could find no surcease from it?
He thought of proud Madame Aubert, her rouge failing to disguise her bruise, and to something she’d said that troubled him still. What had she said? Aurelie had waited four weeks to leave Paris.
Why that long?
Why,specifically, that long? Channel crossings from Calais to Dover occurred every day, weather permitting.
It was the soonest she felt she could leave, Mr. Hawkes.
A corrosive, ugly suspicion was suddenly metallic in his throat.
He realized the droplet of suspicion had been born the moment Madame Aubert had said those words. The horror of it had merely taken this long to sink in fully.
Like blood soaking a fine silk handkerchief.
Aurelie had begun to worry that the single-minded determination that had propelled her across the Channel was actually nothing more than a very energizing terror, of the sort which mice use to flee cats.
And which stops being useful when there is nowhere left to run.
She’d careened between hope and mortification and gratitude today, but the net result was that she felt as though she were in a maze, rather than moving forward. She had no idea what to do now that she’d discovered Mr. Erasmus Monroe had apparently moved away. It felt horribly like any thread connecting her toher brother had been snapped, even though she knew it wasn’t the case. Edouard was still in Boston. Probably even now worrying about her.
She could almost feel the doubt and uncertainty sucking at her ankles, like quicksand that Mr. Miles Redmond wrote about in his book about the South Seas.
And yet.
For the rest of the afternoon, Aurelie was uncomfortably suspended between a vague sense of unease and a probably ill-advised, breathless joy that Mr. Hawkes had actually followed her because he could not get her out of his mind any more than she could get him out of hers.
Today, he’d been precisely what she’d needed at the precise moment she’d needed it. He’d also been an anodyne of sorts. The attraction, the flirtation, the intimacy, the intrigue: it had been, for a few moments, as good as—and dangerous as—laudanum in making her forget her turmoil.
But he could be only that, and nothing more: a respite.
Couldn’t he?
He seemed an unnecessary complication in a life that had contained so little of complication until one month ago. Not evenThe Ghost in the Atticwould have dared introduce such a twist in the plot as the appearance of Mr. Hawkes.
