Another blessing to count: her mother would never know she’d shared the family’s bloodstain removal receipts with a husband stabber at Newgate.
She could think of no reason yet to leave this almost outlandishly comfortable bed. She wasn’t certain how long she’d been asleep, but neither her meal nor her bath had yet arrived, so she propped herself up on the bosomy soft pillows and had a look around the room.
Despite the little thundercloud of dread hovering on the horizon, dawning pleasure was difficult to suppress. Everything about the room seemed designed to soothe and comfort.
Alongside the bed, a rag rug braided in soft shades of pink and gray and green invited her toes to test it.
Neatly lined right in the middle of it were the satin slippers she’d kicked at her husband.
The gloves she’d peeled off and flung at him rested on the corner of a little writing desk, next to a vase from which sprang a tiny riot of wildflowers.
Most of the men she knew would never have dreamed of picking a woman’s shoes up off the floor, let alone ones she’d hurled at them. A woman’s shoes on the floor would have, in fact, been all but invisible to a man raised with servants.
She was tempted to ascribe significance to the neatly arrayed slippers.
It was an odd sensation, to know he must have seen her sleeping. She’d never spent a single night alone with him.
Feeling only a trifle guilty, she slipped her hands into his coat pockets again, and inspected the artifacts she found in there.
A folded ticket, in Spanish—he’d gone to an opera in Spain. This, for some reason, surprised her. He’d lived a whole life in Spain for the past nearly five years, just as she’d lived her life in London, and apparently this included amusements. And why shouldn’t it? He didn’t seem the sort who would have much patience with opera.
She thumbed open the tiny silver box, wondering if she would find lavender pastilles, or tobacco, or rolled cheroots.
Inside was a gleaming little scrap of pink satin.
She stared at it, frowning faintly. Puzzled.
And then her breath left her in a gust.
Goose bumps spangled her arms.
She touched it gently, remembering.
A week into the fateful house party, she’d risen very early, ruthlessly secured her bonnet with pins against a morning wind that was already bending the tops of trees, and took her sketchbook out deep in the grounds, near the gate where she met Paul for her chats at twilight, when he went home to his lodgings.
Paul Carson was her brother’s tutor. They were in love. It was the perfect secret affair: forbidden and star-crossed but chaste and sensible, conducted primarily at twilight with the back garden gate between them. He lodged with their neighbor, and a small wooded area separated the properties. He was homesick for his family in Northumberland, her life felt threateningly shambolic, and though neither one of them had stated this in those terms, they had found in each other an oasis. They talked about poetry and mythology and birds and art. They both knew not a thing could or would come from their romance, in large part because he was nearly destitute, and would be leaving for a teaching position in Africa soon. Neither one of them made a fuss about this, but it was a poignant undertone in all their conversations.
She loved the way Paul looked at her with his soulful dark eyes. He was slim and sensitive; hisprofile would not look amiss etched on a coin. He’d touched her hand only once; this was the limit of the physical affection he dared express. She supposed she was lucky he was so thoroughly a gentleman, but then, she had never been drawn to rakish types. They struck her as exhausting, and her life was complicated enough as it was.
Meanwhile, a few other handsome, titled young men had been orbiting her with caution-tempered ardor, as her depleted dowry and unruly family were as well-known as her charms. She expected she would eventually marry one of them, but on this particular morning that day seemed remote and she’d rather hoped it was. She could not yet imagine falling in love with someone else.
Her favorite part of their vast garden was nearest the little gate; it was semi-wild, and growing wilder and shaggier now that they could only afford an occasional gardener. The signs of decay made her increasingly nervous.
She’d just paused to swiftly sketch a robin posing charmingly high up on the fine twigs of a poplar when the red crayon she was gripping slipped her grip. She scrabbled to catch it, but it fell and promptly rolled into the ivy beneath a wild and tangly cluster of shrubs and twiggy trees.
“Blast,” she muttered. Money for things like little luxuries like pastel crayons was increasingly scarce, and the red was so useful.
She ventured into the thicket to fish around in the ivy. She was vaguely aware that her bonnet ribbons had come undone; they softly lashed herface and danced about her head in the stiff wind as she futilely scrabbled in the ivy, dodging the grabby twigs of the trees.
Conceding defeat, she finally stood. And that’s when she discovered the wind had whipped her bonnet ribbons up into the twiggy branches of a young tree, where they were almost picturesquely entwined.
She stepped backward in an attempt to tug free of it.
And somehow managed to pull the ribbon into knots.
And since her bonnet was firmly pinned to her head, she was essentially snared in the bushes like a hare.
It was a patently ridiculous and entirely novel predicament.
