The last time she had trusted someone with something precious, he had been a twenty-year-old groom named Daniel, and Penharrow had hanged him in the stable yard.
She closed her eyes.
She knew the argument. She had been making it at herself all afternoon since Oliver’s proposal, in various forms, since Oliver had stood in the garden turning his hat and said I am in love with you in that direct plain voice of his, like a man who has decided and is not interested in ornamentation. She knew every version of you shouldn’t, you can’t, think of the risk, think of what you are.
And she knew, with equal precision, that it was all of it cowardice.
Not the sensible kind. Not the earned kind, the kind that had kept her alive for fourteen years. This was a different kind of cowardice entirely, the kind that disguised itself as pragmatism. The kind that said I am protecting myself and meant I am too frightened to reach for something real.
She thought about Dorothea’s words. The whole of them, and not just the parts she had taken in fully.
Not because of what you’ve endured. Because of whom you are underneath it.
She had known she was more than Penharrow said she was. She had kept the knowledge of it like a candle in a locked room, small and stubborn, refusing to go out.
If a man like Oliver could love her. If a man who had seen her at her worst and her most frightened and her most complicated could stand in a garden with his hat in his hands and say it plainly?—
Then perhaps the candle had been right all along.
Perhaps she was not what Penharrow had made her.
Perhaps she was what she had always suspected, in the locked room, in the dark.
Something worth loving.
The lawn had gone from gold to gray. The light was almost gone. Somewhere in the house she could hear the distant rhythm of the household preparing for the evening, the soft percussion of doors and footsteps and the muffled instructions of the housekeeper on the floor below.
She thought about tomorrow. She had told him she needed until tomorrow.
She thought about the morning, and the visit, and the Duchess of Newbury and whatever was waiting at the end of it. She thought about the practical things, the injunction and the solicitor and the archbishop’s special license and the Duke, who would apparently be managed by Dorothea with or without his cooperation.
She thought about Oliver asking her tomorrow, and the day after if she needed, however long she needed.
And she thought about never seeing him again. About the version of things where she said no, or where she disappeared, or where the careful pragmatic part of her won, and she spent the rest of her life having chosen safety over this.
The thought hit her somewhere she hadn’t been expecting.
It was not the large romantic terror of it. It was smaller than that, and therefore worse. It was the specific, mundane, unbearable image of the empty chair across from her at breakfast. The absent sideways look. The room without his particular quality of presence in it, that warm, solid, complicated thing that she had apparently made herself entirely dependent on without noticing she was doing it.
It made her feel hollow in a way that fourteen years of captivity hadn’t managed.
Captivity had been awful. Captivity had been a specific, endurable kind of terrible, because it had asked nothing of herbut survival. This—the absence of Oliver—asked something she did not have a word for. It was the absence of something that had made her understand what it meant to be alive rather than just continuing to exist.
She was in love with him.
She had been in love with him, she suspected, since somewhere on a Welsh mountainside in the rain, when he had handed her his coat without asking and then pretended he wasn’t cold so she wouldn’t have to feel guilty. She had not known it was love then because she hadn’t known what love felt like, the chosen kind, the kind that had nothing to do with fear or dependency or the captive’s complicated attachment to the only warmth available.
This was nothing like that. This was entirely the opposite of that. This was a thing she was choosing with her whole self, with the full knowledge of who she was and what she was and exactly how frightened she was and precisely how much it mattered, and she was choosing it anyway.
She stepped back from the window.
She smoothed her gown, which was one of the ones Dorothea had organized the dressmaker to make for her, a soft gray with dark blue trim that she had learned was better for her coloring than she’d expected. She looked at her hands. The garden dirt was gone. They were steady.
She knew where his room was. The end of the north corridor, the door with the slightly worn brass handle, the room that looked out over the mazed garden.
She walked up the stairs and along the north corridor, and knocked.
He openedthe door in his shirtsleeves. He had the particular look of a man who has been sitting with something difficult and not making much progress with it, a quality of containedunsettlement that she had come to recognize as his version of strain. It smoothed out slightly when he saw her. And then became something else.
