“He bought a pony?”
“Well, a foal. It will grow with our baby he said. He’s calling it an investment. I’m calling it Webb being Webb.” Oliver looked at her with that expression she had learned to read, the unguarded one. “We will be all right,” he said quietly. “I cannot promise you that nothing will ever frighten you again. But I can promise you that you won’t meet it without me beside you.”
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then she moved across the carriage, and he made room for her without a word, and she settled against his shoulder, and his arm came around her, and the countryside continued to go past in the soft evening way of things that required nothing of you.
“How long until we reach the inn?” she asked.
“An hour, perhaps a little less. It’s getting dark.”
“Good.” She closed her eyes. The motion of the carriage wassteady and warm. Beneath her ear she could feel the solid, reliable fact of him, the particular quality of a person who is where they intend to be.
She thought about Scotland. About what it would look like from a carriage window as they crossed into it, the particular shift in the land that the map promised and that she had imagined for so long she had a private version of it that bore no necessary resemblance to the truth. She was looking forward to finding out how wrong she had been. She found, to her own quiet surprise, that she was looking forward to a great many things.
Oliver pressed a kiss to the top of her head.
“You can sleep if you want,” he said. “I’ll watch the road.”
“You always watch the road,” she said.
“Someone has to.”
She smiled against his shoulder. Outside the window the last of the light was going, and full moon and the stars were coming out one by one over the dark English fields, and ahead of them was a long road and an enormous sky and all the time she intended to take in the living of a life that was, at last, entirely her own.
“Oliver,” she said.
“Yes.”
She turned her face up. He looked at her.
“Thank you for coming to Wales,” she said.
Something moved in his face. He looked at her for a long moment, and then he leaned down and kissed her, slowly and very thoroughly, and when he lifted his head the stars outside the window had multiplied considerably.
“Thank you,” he said, quiet against her hair, “for letting me.”
The carriage rolled on into the dark, north and north and north, toward Scotland.
She was finally free and, in her freedom, she’d chosen Oliver.
What a life they would have.
EPILOGUE
October 1814 –ten months later
The coaching inn at Kidderminster smelled of tallow candles and yesterday’s mutton, and the fire in the common room had been laid with green wood that produced more smoke than heat. Harry Fairfax, Duke of Newbury, had spent worse nights. He’d also spent considerably better ones, and he was aware that his mother, the Duchess, had retired to her room an hour ago with the particular expression she wore when she was making allowances for him.
He didn’t blame her. He’d been poor company since they’d left London.
It wasn’t Megan. That was the good part. Megan, who was the thing he’d spent years not quite believing he would ever find, had given birth to a son three weeks ago at Saxton Castle, and every mile that brought them closer to Shrewsbury felt like a correction of something that had been wrong for a very long time. A son. His nephew. Oliver’s boy. Harry intended to be insufferably proud about it.
No, it wasn’t Megan.
He was on his second glass of the inn’s indifferent claret when he heard his name.
“Newbury.”
