The rest of the visit passed in small humiliations. A question was offered, then withdrawn. A lady turned to speak across Clara as if she had not answered. There was a pause after Aurelia’s name. Charlotte’s eyes were returning again and again to them, measuring the damage.
They stayed only as long as propriety demanded.
By the time they returned home, Clara had not spoken for nearly the whole carriage ride. Inside the house, she removed her gloves with stiff, shaking fingers. Aurelia reached for her.
“Clara—”
“No.” Clara’s voice broke. “Please. I want to be alone.”
Then she turned and ran upstairs. Aurelia stood in the hall until the sound of Clara’s door closing above her seemed to pass through the whole house. Only then did she go to her own room.She shut the door quietly. She removed her bonnet, her gloves, her shawl. She did each thing with great care, as if carefulness could prevent collapse.
It could not.
The tears came suddenly, and once they began, she could not stop them. She was sitting on the edge of the bed and covered her face with both hands.
She wasn’t crying just for herself, but for Clara, who had entered London believing in music and admiration and first love, and had been taught instead that cruelty could be delivered on good paper in a stranger’s hand. She was also crying for her mother, whose old pain had reached forward to bruise another innocent girl, and for every hopeful thing Aurelia had allowed herself to feel despite knowing better.
At last, when the violence of it had eased, she rose and went to the small drawer where she kept Owen’s letters. She took them out one by one. The pages had already begun to soften from being unfolded and read too often. She sat by the window and read them again, nestling into the steadiness of his words, the restraint, the honesty, and the promise that she was not alone. She read until his voice seemed near enough to hurt.
He had been wonderful. That was the worst of it. He had been kind, intelligent, brave in ways that had nothing to do with war. He believed her. He stood beside her before she had anyright to ask it. Somewhere between the first letter and the last, between guarded conversation and dangerous truth, he became necessary to her in a way she could neither permit nor undo.
And it was useless, because at the end of the season, she would return to France. Owen would remain what he was: a marquess, a man with a future, a place, a name that opened doors instead of closing them. She was Aurelia Finch, and her presence had already begun to poison Clara’s chances.
She folded the last letter against her chest and bowed her head over it.
For a little while, she let herself weep some more.
Chapter 31
Owen had been in his study for more than an hour and had accomplished almost nothing.
The papers before him ought to have commanded his attention. Carter’s refusal had left them with a truth spoken aloud and yet still unusable. He had gone over every report again, every discrepancy, every erased observation, as if repetition might produce the witness courage had failed to provide. But his thoughts would not remain obediently upon the documents.
They returned, again and again, to Aurelia.
He had told himself that concern for her was natural, even honorable, given all she had suffered and all she risked now. Yet, the lie had grown too thin to serve him. What he felt was not merely concern. It was not admiration alone, nor sympathy, nor the protective anger any decent man might feel on behalf of an injured woman. It was something more personal, more dangerous, and far less easily governed.
He thought of her hand closing around his for that one unguarded instant when he told her Carter had been found. That touch had lasted no more than a breath, and yet it had undone days of restraint. It had been hope, gratitude, fear, and trust all at once, and he had felt, with a force that still unsettled him, how much he wanted to be worthy of it.
But what had he given her in return? Promises. Letters. Fragments of proof. A frightened witness who would not speak.
Owen leaned back in his chair and pressed his fingers briefly to his eyes. He had faced battle with less uncertainty than he faced the thought of failing her. Worse still was the suspicion that while he pursued the truth in old papers and reluctant men, danger might already be finding her in drawing rooms, in whispers, in the slow, polished cruelty of society.
It was then that Harcourt knocked.
“Come in,” Owen called out.
“My lord,” Harcourt greeted him upon entering, “there is a gentleman asking to see you.”
Owen looked up from the papers spread across his desk. “Who?”
“He gave the name Carter, my lord.”
For a moment, Owen did not move. The name seemed to strike the room into stillness. The altered reports, the cottage in Greenwich, Carter’s pale frightened face, his refusal, all of it returned so sharply that Owen’s hand tightened around the pen before he realized he held it.
“Show him into the drawing room,” he ordered hastily.
Harcourt bowed and withdrew. Owen rose at once, though he stood for half a breath beside the desk before following. He did not allow himself to hope. Carter had refused once already. Men ruled by fear did not often return from it in a single night.
