The sun was fully up now, and it beat hot on Ruby’s unbound hair as Eugénie tied them off at the docks. Ruby’s wrapper was still damp from sea spray, her hem four inches wet, and she and Alice followed Eugénie all the way up the street and into the cool shade of a half-ruined church.
“This is it,” Eugénie said. “He’s inside.”
Ruby blinked. “He’s—what?”
Eugénie yanked open the heavy door and nudged Ruby and Alice through. “He’s inside. He’ll explain.” She gave Ruby a small, rueful smile. “He’ll try to explain. He may require some sorting out.”
Carefully, Eugénie closed the door between them.
The dusty air was cool on Ruby’s face as she peered into the tumbledown nave. Her eyes were slow to adjust to the dim interior. Little bars of sunlight spilled through the cracked entablature, and everything else was dark and quiet.
And then, suddenly, he was there, emerging into a shaft of golden light like a desperate, disheveled prince.
“Ruby.” His voice sounded rough; his face was shadowed with whiskers and lack of sleep. “I thought you weren’t coming. I thought—bloody Christ, what took you so long? It’s been—” He glanced at the window behind him as if for confirmation of the time.
A bass voice at the front of the church, emanating from a sun-splashed set of crimson robes, interrupted. “If you mean for me to marry you in the House of God, my son, I suggest you recall the sanctity of His name.”
Ruby’s lips parted. No sound emerged.
At her side, Alice’s eyes went very wide. She swallowed hard. And then she waved them off and headed for the nave. “I’ll handle this part. You two...” She waved her hand again. “Talk. Quickly.”
“Shit,” Malcolm said. And then, “Sorry. So sorry. Let me just—” He grabbed Ruby’s arm, towed her into a shadowed corner, and dropped his voice. “Shit.”
Ruby thought her ears might be ringing. Perhaps she’d gone deaf. “Malcolm,” she hissed, “what’s going on? Who is that man?”
“That’s the Bishop of Winchester.”
Her lips parted. “What?”
“Oh God.” Malcolm pushed her hair back from her face, cupping her cheek, brushing her mouth with his thumb. “God,” he said again, lower. “Ruby. I don’t—I can’t—I wanted to do this all differently. I had a whole scheme—I was going to go to the Archbishop of Canterbury after we rescued the princess. I sold the deed to theDelphiniumbefore we even left St. Petroc’s so I could afford the special license—”
“Youwhat?”
“Because you can marry anywhere with a special license—I thought maybe—at Pomeroy House—after we returned I could...” He trailed off. His palm was against her neck, and his thumb seemed to search out the thundering beat of her pulse. “But after what Lamentation said on the deck, I realized I couldn’t wait any longer. Only—Jesus, Ruby, did you know you have to wait seven days for a bishop’s license? And it must be in the parish where you reside? I spent three times the cost of a special license bribing this fellow to falsify the register.”
“I don’t—Malcolm, I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
His eyes were hot sapphires in the shards of sunlight. “What if—God. Ruby. I keep thinking—what if you’re with child? What if I bloody welldiedon this journey and left you alone? What if”—his voice cracked—“I got thrown back in jail, and you didn’t even have the protection of my name?”
“Malcolm—”
“Marry me,” he said. “Now. Today. This minute.”
From this proximity, she could see the dark sweep of his lashes, the tiny shadows they cast along the cut-glass precision of his cheekbones. She could see the individual motes of dust in the air between them, floating in impossible refutation of gravity’s pull.
He wanted to marry her? He had sold theDelphinium—for her?
She felt as if she were somewhere near the ceiling, nothing beneath her feet but empty space. “I don’t—understand,” she said jerkily.
“I wanted to wait,” he said hoarsely. “I wanted to prove to you that I could be”—he gestured, a wide, familiar arc that took in the dilapidated church and the usurious bishop and a parish register spotted with falsehoods—“better. But it turns out I’m exactly the same as I’ve always been.”
Somehow, from inside his coat, he produced a pair of rings—plain gold, unadorned.
Worth, perhaps, the price of his ownDelphinium.
“I know it isn’t much,” he said. “But I will give you everything I have. Everything I am. I will never let you go.”
She reached out and closed her fingers over his, clasping the rings between their hands. She felt the press of his callused palm, the small endless circles hard against her skin.
