“He let a boy named William beat him in a race. And he told Ruth that mothers always come back.”
“That is a kind thing to say to a child.”
“It is a kind thing to say to anyone.” She paused. “He did not have to play. He was standing on the terrace, watching. He could have stayed there. But Ruth asked him to reach a branch, and he came down. After that, he just… joined. As though it were natural. As though he had always known how to be gentle and simply needed someone to remind him.”
“That sounds like a man worth marrying, Your Grace,” Mary said.
“I know. That is what worries me.”
“You are worried about marrying a kind man?”
“"I am worried about trusting a kind man. Gordon never pretended to be kind, and I still could not stop him.” Valeria looked at the water. The steam had thinned. Her fingers were pruning. “Edwardiskind, and that terrifies me more. Because if he changes after we marry, I will not have seen it coming. At least with Gordon, I knew what he was from the start."
“If you truly believed that about the Duke of Welford, you would not have agreed to marry him,” Mary pointed out.
Valeria looked at her hands in the water. The dry skin, the cracks from three winters without hand cream, had been healed. She used hand cream every night now. Not because she needed it anymore, but because she could.
“No,” she acknowledged. “I suppose you are right. But I still plan to keep my distance.”
“Sure,” Mary uttered, in the tone of a woman who had watched Valeria blush every time the Hound walked into a room and who had absolutely no intention of arguing about the concept of distance.
The water was getting cold. Valeria rose and wrapped the towel around herself.
“The ivory silk dress with the gold thread, for the wedding,” Mary said. “It was your mother’s. I had it pressed this morning.”
Valeria looked at her. “You already decided.”
“I always decide, Your Grace. You simply agree afterward.”
That was true. It had been true for three years. Mary chose the dresses, the shawls, the ribbons, the soap, and the lavender oil. She chose them because Gordon had taken choice away from both of them, and this was how they had fought back: small decisions made in the margins of a life that was not their own.
“Thank you, Mary,” Valeria murmured.
“For what, Your Grace?”
“For everything. For three years of everything.”
Mary’s expression did not change, but the look in her eyes did. Just for a moment. “That is what I am here for, Your Grace.” Then she went to lay out the nightclothes.
Valeria watched her go. Three years of warm milk and hidden rags and choices made in the margins. She thought about the woman who had washed her evidence, kept her secrets, and brought her laudanum, which she never drank.
“Mary,” she called.
Mary stopped at the door. “Your Grace?”
“When we are married, you will come with me. To his house in the north. I will not go without you.”
Mary turned. Her expression was steady, but her eyes were not. Not at all. “I would not let you, Your Grace,” she said, before closing the door.
Valeria stared at the closed door for a long time.
Images of Gordon’s house flashed through her mind unbidden. The cold corridors, the marble floors, the portrait above the fireplace, the room where she had been locked, the meals that had been measured, the letters that had been read, and the laughter that had been punished. Three years of silence, small rooms, and the careful woman she had become in order to survive them.
Then Edward’s house. The one in the north, near the Scottish border, which he had mentioned in the garden. A roof that leaked in three places. Land and tenants. Rooms that needed filling. A house that was waiting for someone to make it a home.
She could do that. She had spent three years making a prison livable. She could make a house a home. She could open the windows, fill the rooms, plant a garden, borrow books for Ruth, cut biscuits for Thomas, and let William run races across the lawn. She could eat breakfast without counting bites, walk wherever she pleased, and laugh as loud as she wanted, and nobody would punish her for any of it.
She could be Valeria again. The real Valeria.
