Page 71 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

“You know,” Leo said at last, and there was no anger in his voice, which was worse, “the saddest part is that you believe it. That there is no version of you left over once the vengeance is spent. She would have shown you there was. She nearly had.” A pause, and the scrape of a chair. “I’ll leave you to it. But I’ll say one thing, and then I’ll go, and you can throw it after me if you like.”

Magnus only stared at him.

“Your father asked you to guard what was yours. You promised him you would, and you have kept it for years by guarding a grave,” Leo continued. “You have let them whittle a whole man down to a single purpose until there is no room left in you for the one good thing that ever walked in of its own accord. She is upstairs, Magnus. She is what is yours now, and you are about to ride north and leave her unguarded to settle accounts with dead men. That is not honor, Magnus. That is exactly the last thing they did to your father.”

The door closed softly behind him.

Magnus stood at the window for a long time. Below, a groom walked a horse in slow circles in the cold, and somewhere above him, a floorboard creaked under a step he would have known anywhere, moving away—now always moving away.

He reached for the decanter and found that Leo had taken it with him. He laughed once, short and ugly, at the empty desk. Then he sat back down in the cold with nothing at all to hold, and stared at the maps of the road north.

He did not go up the stairs, because he no longer knew if he had the right.

CHAPTER 33

“You’ve not touched the cake, you haven’t insulted my new curtains, and you have agreed with everything I have said for a full half hour, which I know for a fact that you have never done during our entire acquaintance.” Abigail set down the teapot and looked at her friend across the little table. “So you will forgive me, Rosaline, but something is very wrong, and I have been waiting most patiently for you to tell me what.”

“Nothing is wrong.” Rosaline made herself lift the teacup and keep her hand steady on the way to her mouth. “I am only tired. His Grace keeps late hours over his correspondence, and I keep them with him. It has simply caught up with me. Your curtains are lovely. I should have said so.”

“My curtains are a crime, and you know it.” But Abigail did not smile, and her eyes did not leave Rosaline’s face.

On the mantel behind her, gleaming in the pale afternoon light, the little golden fox sat in pride of place among the good porcelain, exactly where a person would set a thing they treasured. Rosaline had to look away from it, because the sight of it undid something in her she was holding together with both hands.

She had chosen this. That was the part she could not say aloud, not even here, to the one friend who might have understood. She had walked out of that room. She had lifted her chin and said, I’ll leave you to your purpose, and walked out with the last of her pride intact.

She would not, could not, be the one to unbend.

She had spent her whole life bending. She had bent to a father who closed like a fist and a brother who owned her by the hour, and she had promised herself, standing in the warm light on the steps of Greythorne Hall, that she would never make herself small for anyone again.

She was keeping that promise. It was costing her everything she had, and she was keeping it anyway.

“Rosaline.” Abigail’s voice had softened. “You gave me the golden fox because I laughed at you in a maze. You are the least tired person I’ve ever known. You could sew a hem in the middle of a house fire and apologize for the stitches.” She reached across the table and placed her hand over Rosaline’s, and the kindness of it was nearly unbearable. “Whatever it is, you do not have to say it prettily. You do not have to say it at all. But you do not have to sit there being brave for me either. Not with me.”

For one terrible moment, all of it rose in Rosaline’s throat—the fight, the four cold days, the horse in the drive, and the awful careful bow he had given her in the hall like a stranger. She felt how easy it would be to set it down here, in this warm room, with Abigail’s kind, warm hand over her own.

She swallowed it back.

“He is going away,” she said instead. It was as near the truth as she could come. “For his work. It may be dangerous, and it may be long. I did not want him to go, and we quarreled about it. That is all. Married couples quarrel. I am being foolish.”

“Are you frightened for him or angry with him?”

“Yes,” Rosaline said, and the small broken honesty of it was the closest she came to weeping during the whole visit.

Mercifully, Abigail did not press her on it. She refilled the cups that did not need refilling, talked about small nothings like her dreadful curtains, her aunt’s gout, a scandal involving a curate and a pineapple, and let Rosaline sit in the warmth and be quiet. She asked nothing more of her than to stay awhile.

Rosaline stayed and was grateful. She understood, while sitting there safe in her friend’s bright drawing room, that this was precisely the thing she wanted her whole life and never had.

A friend who saw her. A door she had walked through of her own accord. An afternoon that belonged to no one but herself, with no brother’s hand on her elbow and no one’s future to guard but her own.

She was free. She was, for the first time in her life, entirely free.

And it was ashes. Every bright safe hour of it was ashes because Magnus was not in it. She was only now beginning to understand that a life she had won at such cost could be handed to her whole and still mean nothing, with the most important person carved out of its center.

She did not stay for supper. She went back to the great warm house that had gone cold and did not weep in the carriage, and counted that a victory too.

The direction had come from Deane, in the end, in a second note passed through Rivercourt, as though the man in the Southwark garret had decided that if he was to be a source at all he might as well spend himself completely.

There is one more you will want, it read, in a cramped, careful hand. I only filed the papers. He made them. He kept back proof of his own work, against the day the men who hired him found it convenient to see him dead. One of the things he kept is the letter itself, in your father’s forged hand. He will not give you a name, and you must not ask for one. Go alone. Go armed. Go with a heavy purse. And when it is done, forget you ever heard of me.