The light outside was subdued but the sun was poking through the grey cloud. December in London was inconsistent in its generosity, but today had elected to behave itself, and the sun was warm on Megan’s face as they came down the steps of St George’s to the waiting carriage and the crowd of curious onlookers who had gathered to observe the occasion even on this frosty day.
Oliver handed her in and followed, and the door closed behind them, and they were alone for the first time all day.
“Lady Astor,” he said.
It landed differently than she had expected. She looked at her hands for a moment, at the ring on her left hand now, at the pale silk of her dress. Then she looked at him.
“Is it strange?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Or rather, yes, but not in the way I anticipated. I thought it would feel like an ending of something. It feels rather more like a beginning.”
Oliver took her hand, which he had a habit of doing incarriages, she had noticed, as though the motion of the vehicle excused it. She had never once discouraged him.
“Are you tired?” he asked.
“A little.” She leaned her head back against the seat. “But it is a good kind of tired. The kind that means something was worth the effort.”
The breakfast reception at Newbury House was everything it needed to be and lasted three hours, which Megan felt was roughly two and a half hours longer than it needed to be, but she managed it with the grace. She drank champagne and spoke to people she had only just met and thanked the ones who wished her well and responded with polite vagueness to the ones who were more interested in examining her than celebrating with her, and at no point in any of it did she forget, not for a single moment, that Oliver was in the room.
He appeared at her elbow at intervals. He did not hover. He was simply, reliably, there when she needed him, with a glass precisely when she was thinking about wanting one, or a quiet word that gave her something to smile genuinely at when she had been managing smiles for too long. Thirty years old and he had already learned to read her with a precision that she found more extraordinary the more she considered it.
The carriage left at six o’clock.
They would stay overnight at a posting inn north of London and continue through the following days at whatever pace was comfortable given the weather, which Oliver had decreed with the same matter-of-fact authority he applied to most arrangements, and which Megan had not argued with because she had looked at the distance on the map and thought, it’s a long way to Scotland. She thought it the way she had thought it during her years of captivity, which was as a word that meant somewhere else. Somewhere vast and indifferent and wild, where the sky was enormous and the land did not care who you were or what had been done to you. Somewhere she could hide.
She didn’t need to hide now.
She had put it in her mind at sixteen, when Penharrow had first begun to make her understand what the shape of her life would be. She had taken it out and examined it in the very darkest times. She had never quite been able to kill it.
Scotland. The place she thought would mean safety for her.
They cleared London’s edges as the light began to dim, the city giving way gradually to roads flanked with hedgerows, farms, the wider sky of country. Megan pressed her fingers to the carriage window and watched it happen.
“You’re thinking,” Oliver said.
“I’m always thinking.”
“You’re thinking about something specific.” He had been watching her, she knew, in the comfortable way of a man who had stopped pretending he wasn’t. “You have a particular expression.”
“And what expression is that?”
“The one where you are somewhere else and also entirely here.” He paused. “You had it occasionally in Wales. Usually before you said something that upended one of my assumptions.”
Megan turned from the window and looked at him properly. The light caught the edge of him, his profile, the line of his jaw and the scar at his temple and the particular quality of patience in how he sat, waiting for her to say whatever she was going to say. He was so handsome that she couldn’t reply for a moment.
“I used to think about Scotland,” she said.
“Tell me.”
“When things were very bad.” She returned her gaze to the window, not because she couldn’t look at him, but because it was easier to say certain things to the middle distance. “I used to imagine escaping north. Not to anywhere specific. Just north, and then north again, until the land ran out of obligation.Where no one knew me. Where there was nothing but sky and rock and weather that didn’t care what I’d survived.”
The carriage moved. The golden light was fading now to the soft blue of early evening, and they would soon reach their first coaching inn.
“I knew I couldn’t go there,” she continued. “I knew that even if I managed to escape, which I never did for long, I had nowhere to go and no money and no identity anyone would believe. But I could think about it. Imagine what being free in Scotland would be like. Penharrow couldn’t take that.” A pause. “He took rather a lot. But not that.”
Oliver was quiet. He was always quiet when she said things like this, not the quiet of a man who had nothing to say, but the quiet of one who understood that there were moments when the most valuable response was simply to be present in them.
“So we’re going,” she said. “That’s what I was thinking. We’re actually going.”
