Page 88 of Duke of Sapphire

He was grateful for it, and he was too tired to say so, but she seemed to already know that too.

“You almost had it,” Charlotte said.

Henry looked out of the window. The track gave way to road. The hills beyond were the particular grey green of late afternoon in Scotland, the kind of color that made everything look both beautiful and entirely bland.

“I had nothing,” he said.

“You had a woman in fine clothes walking away from the carriage before it went over.”

“From a drunk shepherd who may have imagined her.”

“He may have imagined the details. He did not imagine her.” Charlotte folded her hands in her lap. “He said so himself.”

“He said a great many things. Several of them contradicted each other.”

“Henry.”

He turned from the window.

“I know what it looks like when a man is telling the truth about the part he is certain of,” she said. “He was certain about the woman. Everything else shifted, but not that.”

Henry held her gaze for a moment. Then he looked back at the hills.

“It contradicts the accident report,” he said. “If Eleanor was out of the carriage before it went over—if she walked away—then she may not have been in the gorge at all.”

“Which means she may still be alive.”

“Which means the search has been looking in entirely the wrong place for two months.” His jaw was set. “Which means I should have found this shepherd six weeks ago.”

“You found him now.”

“With a story I cannot use.”

Charlotte said nothing for a moment. The carriage hit a rut and steadied.

“When I was seventeen,” she said, “I asked my father for my mother’s jewelry. Just one piece. A ring she used to wear on her right hand. He told me it wasn’t appropriate for the occasion, and I said, what occasion, and he said, any occasion, and I—” She stopped. “I said nothing. I accepted it. I went upstairs and sat at my writing desk for an hour and did absolutely nothing about it.” She looked at her hands. “That is not the only time I did that. I did it at sixteen, and eighteen, and twenty-one, and approximately forty times in between. Every time I tried to push back, I found a reason to stop. A reason that felt sensible at the time.”

Henry listened.

“I am telling you this,” Charlotte said, “because failure is not proof that the thing was not worth trying. I failed to stand up to my father for thirteen years and I was not wrong to eventually try. I was only wrong to stop before I had.”

He turned to look at her.

She was not offering comfort. She was offering something more useful than comfort, the plain accounting of a person who had been through a real thing and had come out the other side knowing what it had cost. He recognized it. He had heard it from her before. He thought he would probably keep hearing it for the rest of his life and it would not get less true with repetition.

“The western road,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You want to pursue it.”

“I want to send men down it who know what to look for now.” She shifted to face him more directly. “Not the accident site. The woman. Where she went, after. If she was Eleanor—if she walked away from that carriage—someone saw her. A crofter, an innkeeper, a farmer. Someone.”

“That could take weeks.”

“Yes.”

“Ian needs us back.”