How very strange to realize that had that come to pass, she would quite likely have been in France—Paris, even—at the same time that Nathaniel was conducting some of his work there.
Their paths would never have crossed, even overlapping in place and time.
She couldn’t breathe for a moment, dizzy, a little sick. This realization felt, in its way, like having to choose between Jamie and Nathaniel. She’d not be having this conversation, had Jamie lived, because she’d not have met Nathaniel.
Unfathomable, that she should not have met Nathaniel. Andyet for it to have come to pass, it meant having lost Jamie, an outcome she’d never, ever wished for.
“You were not close to his family?” Nathaniel asked.
She reined in the emotion that threatened to strangle her. “No. Not before and certainly not after or since his death. He married well beneath himself in choosing me, or so they believed. He was the grandson and nephew of a baron from Yorkshire. I was a Scottish bookseller’s daughter, half French to boot.” She snorted a laugh. “Jamie always told me he married up.”
She glanced sideways and caught the way Nathaniel’s lips lifted, the quicksilver smile there and gone.
“Almost certainly he did.” His tiger’s-eye gaze snared her.
Her breath caught. “He... Jamie wanted me to be happy,” she said in a rush, “when he knew he might die on Flemish soil. Did I speak of this before?”
“A little.”
“I believe Jamie anticipated... He had a soldier’s premonition, perhaps. That happens, I know.”
“Aye. I saw it bear out more than once in the Rifles.”
“He wanted me to go on with my life, he told me. To find happiness.”
“He loved you very much.” Nathaniel’s voice was still soft.
She’d never met another person so self-possessed. She herself was not, of a sudden, undone by the gentleness in his voice and his grace for her memories of Jamie. “Yes. Jamie was a good man. A good husband. And I loved him.”
But I am truly ready to find that happiness. She bit back the impulse to say the words aloud because the realization was too fresh, too raw yet. But for the first time, she truly believed it was possible, finding happiness again. And Nathaniel having remained this past month was one of the reasons. The largest, perhaps. Another realization, so gutting she missed a step: She was quite possibly halfway in love with Nathaniel.
Did he feel the same? He had kissed her only once, without the passion of some of their prior embraces. Memories of some ofthosestill had the power to immediately cause hot cheeks even all these months later.
But it had felt significant, that kiss after they discussed Compton’s death, except he’d initiated no others since. Although neither had she, and in France most everything had happened at her invitation. Was he waiting for another?
She’d spent far more time than she ought in recent days, recalling those scenes out of time from France. She’d felt herself someone else there, but she’d come back to herself now. She was grounded again in the life and future that were hers.
But she was not unchanged by that week. Far from it, in fact.
Did Nathaniel have a place in her future? Did he want one? Was that why he’d asked about Jamie? Why he’d held off on kissing her again?
Or was he planning to leave? He was dutiful; he’d see through the work he’d agreed upon. But beyond that?
Truly, she would drive herself to distraction. And yet... How could she not think of him? Of how’d they’d been and how they might yet be?
She’d known since France, in particular since the night they’d come together after Le Repaire, that she would someday need to make a reckoning. She’d deferred it as long as she was able, but it had finally come due.
Lucy, too, had thoughts about Isobel’s future.
“He’s courting you, Issy,” Lucy remarked a week or so after she and Nathaniel had spoken of Jamie. “In his own reserved way.”
They were working together on mending. She looked upsharply at Lucy, but her sister’s face was still bent towards her hands. She still was not entirely used to Lucy’s new mode of speaking, at times abrupt and nearly always uncomfortably incisive.
“I do not think—” But she stopped.Wasit courtship? It did not feel so. Then again, she’d not been courted in many years, and she’d been younger then and Jamie a different sort of man than Nathaniel. “Perhaps,” she allowed.
“He’d not have come all this way only to tell us about—France. Nor even only to assure himself that we are settled. Howdidhe find us, incidentally? Has he said?”
“I think Mr. Quinn must have told him after escorting us to London.” She hadn’t told Mr. Quinn their destination for him to pass the information along to Nathaniel... or had she? At the time she’d told herself it was only because Mr. Quinn was ensuring that she and Lucy had no further needs before he discharged his duty to them. She had assured him that she had plans well in hand for the future.
