Not borrowed. Not conditional. Not dependent upon whether she chose Kazrian or did not choose Kazrian, whether she stayed or left, whether society approved or condemned.
Hers.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Elmrow Lane wasquiet in the low gold of early evening, and Lucie walked down the middle of it with the strangest, most improbable fact in the whole of Bloomhaven turning over and over in her mind and refusing to lie still.
The Honeycomb was hers.
She kept trying to hold the thought at arm’s length, to examine it soberly, the way one might examine a piece of news too large to be trusted, and it kept slipping loose and blooming warm through her chest all over again.
Not borrowed.Hers, and apparently hers for some time now. Since the day the two of them had first stood inside that empty dusty shell of a building and Lady Rivenna had said, “Well, it is ours now,” and Lucie had thought she meant it in the manner of a captain sayingourship to a trusted first mate. And every time Lady Rivenna had asked for her opinion on something, and Lucie had been quietly pleased that the older woman had taken her seriously, she’d had not the faintest idea that she was furnishing her own future.
She found she was grinning again. Idiotically. Enormously. She pressed her lips together and made her face behave and had gone perhaps four steps before it crept back, wider than before.
Anyone who saw her would think her quite mad. A young woman walking home alone down Elmrow Lane, grinning at nothing like a person who had recently taken leave of her senses. She composed herself with an effort that lasted, this time, nearly a full ten paces.
And somewhere in the middle of all that helpless, fizzing joy, a second thought arrived—one she had never in her life permitted herself to think.
Perhaps it might truly be possible.
She stopped walking.
Not the dreaming sort of possible. Not the imagining she filed away with all the other imaginings she had no intention of examining. Something else. Anactual possibility, sitting there in the real and ordinary world, wearing a real and ordinary shape—that she and Kazrian might be permitted, somehow, to?—
She did not even finish it. She could not. The whole of her simply flooded warm and golden at the unfinished edge of it, and she started walking again before the feeling could knock her clean off her feet, and the two things together—The Honeycomb is mine, andperhaps, perhaps—carried her nearly the length of the lane on a tide of glowing, disbelieving happiness.
She was almost home when she saw Mrs Dunbar.
The older woman was out at the front of her house, gathering in a small row of linens she had pinned to dry along the low fence. The last of the day’s washing, taken in before the evening damp could settle. And she glanced up and down the lane as she did it, a quick, checking sort of glance, the look of a person confirming who might be about.
Lucie’s spirits, which had been floating somewhere up among the chimney pots, sank a careful inch.
There it was. The reminder she had been walking without for the whole golden length of the lane. That loving Kazrian was not a warm private glow to be carried home in the last of the light. It was a thing with consequences, and the consequences had faces, and the faces belonged to people she had known the whole of her life. People who now looked up and down the lane before they were seen speaking to her.
She kept her eyes ahead and her step even. She would simply pass by. She would not make anyone choose.
But Mrs Dunbar set down her armful of linen on the fence rail and came out to the edge of the lane, directly into Lucie’s path, and stopped.
“Miss Lucie.”
Lucie halted. “Mrs Dunbar.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “Good evening.”
“I have been hoping to catch you.” Mrs Dunbar folded her hands at her waist, and her face, when Lucie made herself look at it, was fixed on her with something that looked a great deal like concern. “I am sorry, my dear, to hear how that Mr Stratton behaved. Laying hands on you, on a young woman who had done nothing but tell him no. I ask you.” She shook her head, and a real spark of anger came into it. “What has the world come to, when a girl cannot refuse a man’s attentions without fearing for her own safety? When I think of my own daughter, of some fellow taking it into his head to—” She stopped, pressed her lips together, and made a small disgusted sound. “It turns my stomach.”
“Oh. I … thank you for saying so, Mrs Dunbar.”
“And it is not the first I’ve heard of that one’s temper.” Another shake of the head, disapproving now. “No indeed. You are well rid of him, and I shall say so to anyone who cares to ask me. And I heard about the young lord as well. How he stepped in for you.” Her eyes softened. “Mrs Moorfield had a great deal to say about propriety, and standing, and I’m sure I don’t know what else, with her nose so high in the air I wonder she did not drown in the next rainfall. But I told her plainly—it was the most romantic thing I had heard all Season. You the poor beset damsel, and him the hero of the piece.” A small, pleased nod. “My daughter thought so too.”
Lucie opened her mouth. Closed it.
It was, on the face of it, an account of events so wildly at odds with the truth that she scarcely knew where to begin correcting it. She might have pointed out, for instance, that the actual hero of the encounter with Henry had four legs and gray fur with strange markings, having been the one to lay a decisive claw across Henry’s cheek, and that his co-conspirator in the affair had been Lucie herself, who had slammed the door in Henry’s face with considerable force. Between the two of them, she rather thought, she and Balthazar had the heroism of that particular evening well in hand, and had required no rescuing whatsoever.
She chose not to say any of this. Because what she was actually hearing,underneath the muddled romantic embroidery of it, was something she had not dared hope for at all.
Mrs Dunbar was on her side.
The glance up and down the lane had not been the wary calculation of a woman making certain she was not seen consorting with the disgraced. It had been the ordinary caution of a neighbor with something private to say, waiting for the moment to say it. She had come out into the lane on purpose. She had planted herself in Lucie’s path on purpose. To tell her that she did not believe the worst, and that she was sorry, and that she was glad the young lord had stood up for her.
