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Papa grumbled under his breath, but rose, shuffling to the doors. He threw back the bolts, not even bothering to ring the bellpull. Two members of the oft-absent staff were already outside, doubtless enjoying the night’s entertainment.

“May we be of service, your lordship?”

“Yes. Send for Mr. Price. Posthaste.”

Sophie laughed. She heard her mother’s voice pitching forward, hitting notes that would surely make a warbler jealous, but she didn’t digest a word that was said. Responsibility had lifted, and it had done so without guilt. She could feel Edmund’s smile, imagined it warming her face, as if even now he were in the room.

She was the wild, reckless Sophie of girlhood, tempered only by the strength of a woman.

Rafe should be returning any hour. They might attend the directors’ meeting at the hospital as husband and wife. They might leave with Barnard. Life might be just beginning all over again.

She hadn’t held faith in her heart for so long, she had nearly misplaced the feeling entirely.

No longer.

thirty-one

The following morning

Hampshire, England

Chenoweth had been gone too damn long. Time slowed to an infernal pace—Rafe sensed it had been well into the morning before Russ appeared to unbind Chenoweth, and the poor old fellow had taken an age to descend the stairs with his ankles still bound. If calculation served, his work about the stables would progress at a similarly abysmal rate. Still—

Chenoweth had been gone too damn long.

It occurred to Rafe for the first time that he might have asked too much of the old coachman. They were counting on their captor’s being ill after so much drink, but Chenoweth had confided that Russ suffered from intemperance. He might handle last night’s wine with ease. He might catch Chenoweth in the act of searching the coach for that pistol. He might—

A shrill whinny split the air. It reached through the stout stone walls and into Rafe’s darkened loft. Oh, God. A chill snapped down his spine, kicking his pulse into motion. There was yelling outside. A vicious, man’s yell. That much was clear even with the words left indiscernible. Russ.

Rafe strained fruitlessly against the bonds digging into his skin. Every joint ached, searing, bloodless muscles too long deprived of movement and nourishment. A growl left his throat. He thrashed and thrashed, until he felt the flesh of his thighs cut open against the leather straps. The bed gave a few dull creaks and pops, but when he stilled, he was just as immobilized as before.

“Bloody curst confounded shite in hell!” He panted for breath. If he could just work his fingers to the edge of these enormous straitjacket sleeves, perhaps he could locate the fastenings. Just imagining how it would feel to move his arms, to roll his shoulders forward, to sit upright, to bend his knees—

It was the sweetest, cruelest fantasy.

It might have been minutes that he clawed at the insides of the jacket sleeves. He did so until his fingertips burned from chafing the fabric and the tendons in his wrists stung in protest. Any other outcome would have been surprising. He had tried the same tactic hour after hour ever since he’d regained consciousness.

There were no sounds to follow up his torturer’s yell. It was doubtless worth something that Rafe hadn’t heard a gunshot, but the silence was a scream of blankness, of worry, of desolation.

Never again, he vowed.

He had spent his life immobilized by fear. Great surges of bravery, of Rafe, occasionally broke through: when he hit his father in this room, when he rescued his mother from Locks Heath, when he sidestepped sense to continue seeing Sophie. But the overwhelming impression of his years was dismal, tangled up in obedience to a man who did not—perhaps could not—care anything for him.

Below, the door of the cottage shuddered open. Bile threatened at the back of Rafe’s throat. If he died today, now, it would not be in fear. And by God, if by some miracle he did not, he would claim his own freedom, money, and lodgings, expectations be damned. The things he always wanted, that he was so sure could not be his, well, he would make them so.

Boots scuffed on the stairs in heavy, masculine footfalls. The world hung in the balance.

Flashes of boyhood played at the backs of Rafe’s eyes. His retreat to this dark loft. The pillow that he’d pressed against his ears, here in this very bed, which still hadn’t covered the sound of his parents’ quarreling. The way the mornings would turn the floorboards cold, and he’d scramble to cram on his little brown boots with the worn-out laces, and go join his mother at the stables. What that boy would have given for some goddamned courage.

“Rafe?”

The familiar rasp of Chenoweth’s voice struck him like a crop.

“Chenoweth? It’s you?” The bed screeched in response to his wild movements. “You’re all right? You’re well?”

There was banging and cursing against the outside of the door before Rafe heard the bolt slide free. “God man,” he said, laughing, “I’ve never been as glad to see anyone in the whole of my life.”

“Now, don’t be glad yet,” the old man grumbled, shuffling awkwardly into the room. His lower face was shrouded in wiry white whiskers, but the set of his eyes indicated a scowl. He used the chair to soften his descent to the floor, but still, his knees dropped with a crash.