Violet stood where they had left her.
“You have gone white,” Henry said. His hand found the small of her back. “Come. You have done your duty to this house and more. We are leaving.”
He took her the shortest way to the hall, called for her cloak himself, and had her out the door into the cold wet air before the footmen had quite caught them up.
The rain had thinned to a mist. He stopped her at the top of the steps, out of the light, and turned her to face him, his hand still at her back.
“Breathe,” he said. “You are all right. Breathe.”
He shielded her from the door and let her have a moment of it, saying nothing. Then he handed her down the wet steps to the carriage himself.
The carriage shut them into the dark, and the wheels found the cobbles, and for a while neither spoke.
Henry broke it himself. He did not wait to be asked.
“I know what they told you.” He looked at the rain on the glass. “They told you that I killed her.”
Violet said nothing. She watched the raindrops on the window.
“There was no hunting accident.” A calm had settled in his timbre. “She had not been well since the child quickened. It began with her insisting she had lost it. She had not. Every physician I brought had agreed. The child was sound and so was she. She would not believe them. She said she could feel that it was dead in her. She stopped eating. She kept to her bed and to the dark and turned her face from me.”
A hush landed. Words seemed to evaporate. Henry raked his fingers through his hair before continuing. “Her family never knew. She begged me to keep it close. She was ashamed.”
Another pause. He dropped his head and exhaled deeply. “The day she died, I made her get up. I begged her to walk out with me. I said I would carry her if her legs would not serve. She would not walk, so we rode. She had the kitchen put up a basket and that gave me hope. I thought, she is coming back. We rode to the high field. I was tying the horses. I heard the shot.”
His breaths came out shallow. “My pistol. She had taken my pistol.”
He buried his face in his hands. “I rode for the doctor with her before me the whole way, and she was breathing when we reached him. She died a little after, with me holding her.”
Violet’s hand had come up over her mouth.
She sat with the horror filling the dark. And underneath the horror, shameful and undeniable, relief.
The carriage rocked and she looked at his face and saw bone-deep grief etched there. A pang of sharp pain took root in her chest and bloomed. She ached for the grieving man and ached for herself for having shared a bed with him..It is alright, she told herself. She had not married for love. She had married forsurvival, and survival was what she had. That was enough. It had to be.
Something compelled her to slide across the seat.
He did not look at her. She put her arms around him. She felt him go rigid, but she held on through the carriage swaying, gravel threatening to toss her off the seat.
Then his arm came around her: slow and indecisive but pulling her against him. He turned his face into her hair. She felt the long exhale of him. It was a long breath, the kind that comes when something held too long is finally let go.
His arm came all the way around her waist and stayed. The weight of it settled her in a way she had not been settled since she left Thornwick. She heard her own breath leave her.
“I am sorry,” he said into her hair.
She held him tighter and said nothing.
Chapter twenty
She Walks In
Henry
Henry sat in the chair by the window with the glass balanced on his knee and watched the clouds drift past the moon. He had dismissed his valet. He had no patience tonight for the performance of being attended to.
Too much had gone wrong. And too much, inexplicably, had gone right. He was not certain which unsettled him more.
He thought back to the dinner with Edmund. He had been in good spirits, as Edmund always was. Easy in his skin, light on his feet, genuinely amused by the world and expecting it to continue obliging him. Henry had nothing against him for it. The carelessness was not cruelty, only character. Edmund would not hurt a living soul. He was also constitutionally incapable of keeping his mouth shut past his fourth glass, which made him a liability of a very particular kind.
