He sat. He did not take off his coat or his gloves. He pressed his hat between his palms and looked at the fire and thought, not for the first time in the last hour, that he was going to be sick.
“Tell me,” she said.
So he did. All of it. Carmichael’s careful voice, the open folder on the desk, the language of the petition that made fourteen years of captivity sound like an act of charity. The injunction. The three days. He told her in the same clipped, factual way he’d learned to report in the army, because if he kept to the facts he didn’t have to feel them, and if he didn’t feel them, he could keep his voice level and his hands still.
When he finished, the room was quiet.
Dorothea looked at the fire.
“Charitable protection,” she said.
“Yes.”
“That man.” Her voice was not raised. It was very quiet, which was considerably more frightening. “That filthy, contemptible man.”
Oliver said nothing. He’d thought worse on the carriage ride home and none of it had helped.
“The injunction,” she said. “By Friday.”
“If he moves quickly. Carmichael believes he will.”
She was quiet again, the thinking kind of quiet, the kind she went into when she was doing something with a problem that he couldn’t follow. He had spent his childhood watching that particular quality of silence and learning to wait it out.
“She can’t find out,” he said, and then stopped, because he was not actually sure that was what he meant. He tried again. “She will find out. She has to find out. But I don’t…” He pressed his thumb against the brim of his hat, hard, until the pressure was something he could concentrate on. “She spent fourteen years with that man holding every door. Every choice. Every moment of her life in his hands. She got free. She fought her way free and she…”
He stopped.
“And now he’s reached through the law itself,” Dorothea said quietly.
“He doesn’t need to win. That’s the thing. Carmichael said it and he’s right. Penharrow doesn’t need the court to rule in his favor. He just needs the injunction. He just needs a legal basis to detain her long enough to get her back under his roof and after that it won’t matter what the courts say because there won’t be anything left to fight for.”
The words sat in the room. Oliver felt them in his throat. He’d thought them a dozen times in the last hour and they hadn’t gotten any easier to say.
“I promised her,” he said. “In Wales. I told her that she was safe. I told her she could trust me.” He exhaled. “I promised to keep her safe.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know how to tell her that the man she spent fourteen years running from has found a mechanism through the English legal system to drag her back. I don’t know how she’ll take it or what she’ll do. I think she’d rather die than go back.” He stopped again. Looked at the fire. “She’ll try to run. She’ll decide that she has to go, that staying here puts everyone at risk, that the only solution is to disappear somewhere he can’t reach her, and she’ll do it quietly and without telling anyone because that’s what she does when she’s frightened. She removes herself. She’s done it her entire life.”
“Yes,” Dorothea said. “She has.” A pause. “She’s also done something else her entire life, which you might consider before you decide you know what she’ll do.”
He looked at her.
“She’s been surviving.” His grandmother’s voice was dry andabsolutely certain. “Often with nothing. Often alone. You might give her the information before you decide what she’ll do with it.”
“I’m not…” He stopped. He was, a little. “I don’t want her to run.”
“No,” said Dorothea. “You don’t want to lose her.”
The fire breathed and settled. Oliver said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would make that statement less true or less exposed.
“Now,” his grandmother said, and she picked up her spectacles from the table beside her with the air of a woman settling in to address a practical problem. “Tell me something. How old is Megan?”
He blinked. “Twenty-one.”
“You are certain.”
“She told me herself.” He paused. “Twenty-fifth of December in the year 1792. She told me it’s the one thing she’s never forgotten from her past. Christmas Day was a day her mother loved—opening presents. It’s the only memory of her mother she has.”
