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Lady Astley.
Her heart clenched before her gaze fell to the lines of sharp, slanting script. With each sentence, the blood drained from her face. Her worst fears were no longer speculation. They were confirmed in ink.
“That … that … that interfering shrew!” she exclaimed, her voice rising as she hurled the letter onto the table as if it burned her fingers.
Julius turned at once, his expression sharpening into alarm.
Audrey stood, breath ragged, her body trembling with disbelief and fury. She could scarcely control the torrent of emotion swelling inside her—terror, humiliation, despair.
“What is it?” he asked urgently, abandoning his plate and striding toward her.
“That noxious old biddy, Lady Astley,” she gasped, “has written to the vicar in Stirling. She has informed him of my disgrace. He will think—everyone will think—that I am a fallen woman!”
The words echoed in the stillness of the room like the tolling of a death knell.
Audrey could not breathe. The walls of the breakfast room closed in, the scent of eggs and roses turning cloying. She had clung to a fragile hope of returning home and resuming her quiet life, her misadventure in London kept private. That hope was now ash.
She covered her face with both hands, a strangled laugh escaping her lips, sharp and trembling. It was not mirthful. It was hysterical. Her carefully guarded future had been reduced to ruin, shredded by Lady Astley’s sanctimonious quill.
“What am I to do?” she whispered, more to herself than to Julius. “I cannot remain in London. But I cannot return to Stirling either. Not now. Not ever.”
Her eyes stung as a fresh wave of panic crested in her chest.
Would Edinburgh offer refuge? Or must she cross the seas to the Americas?
How far must she run to escape the shadows cast by her own name?
Her laughter, brittle and broken, collapsed into weeping. Hot tears gushed down her cheeks as great sobs wracked her slender frame, each one pulled from a place of horror deep within.
She was vaguely aware of Julius snatching up the letter and unfolding it, but her own body had given way. She slumped back into her chair, pressing her face into her arms. The words scrawled by Lady Astley had destroyed what remained of her tenuous future. There was nowhere for her now. No refuge. No identity. The past lay in ruins, and the path forward was charred beyond recognition.
Her mind scrambled for escape routes, the words tumbling like dominoes.
Cornwall?
Would Cornwall be far enough?
The borderlands? The north? Wales?
Each suggestion brought its own limitations, its own judgments, its own whispers behind her back.
“Audrey!” Julius’s voice cut through her panicked spiraling, but she could not answer him.
No one respectable would permit a woman like her to tend to their children, to set foot in their parlors. Women would cross the street to avoid her, and husbands would leer with assumptions that turned her stomach. She would not be a physician, but rather a cautionary tale.
She could not breathe.
Her shoulders shook, her lungs working desperately as her tears fell unchecked. The ache in her chest—the ache of exile, grief, humiliation—threatened to break her in two.
“Audrey!”
Still, she could not respond.
“Audrey!” Julius’s grip tightened on her arm. He gave her a small shake. “You must calm yourself! I have a solution, I swear it!”
It was the word solution that sliced through the haze. A fragile strand of reason tethered her. Slowly, she drew a shuddering breath, her weeping softening into tremulous sniffs. The heaving of her chest stilled as she tried to gain control.
She lifted her head with the care of a wounded animal.
