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Chapter 12: The Dawn
Diane did not rememberhitting the ground, but the bruises on her hip did. It was soft, damp earth at least, and she had tumbled further than the carriage did.
Something touched her shoulder, and she jerked away, but when she heard the goat’s familiar half-scream-half-bleat, she relaxed.
Diane sat up. With every inch of movement her head spun. She put a hand over a tender spot, hissing at the pain and squinting around. The dear little goat had found her, but it seemed that her jilted fiancé had not, thankfully.
When she slowly blinked the world back into focus, it was darker that it had been this morning. A sheet of clouds had covered the sky in a dim grey. She stirred and sat up, looking at the sky.
Diane took in several breaths, while the goat alternated between chewing on her sleeve and head butting her shoulder with all the force a baby goat could muster. When it no longer made her dizzy to move, she scooped the goat up into her lap, clutching it to her chest and kissing the back of its head, much to its displeasure. It kicked its legs futilely a few moments before it resigned itself to chewing on her hair.
“I missed you too,” she hiccupped, tears welling up over her vision. “You deft, clever thing.”
Martin couldn’t be right. He wasn’t allowed to have accurately predicted that she’d fainted into a ditch. He didn’t know her, he wasn’t allowed to be right.
He knew less about her from an entire courtship than Liam did from one day with her.
Oh, Liam. She’d been such a fool to refuse him, over and over. So stubborn that she couldn’t be truly happy if the choice she made had come from being cornered into it. Of course she would have been happy— he had done nothing but try to make her happy. She’d just been too scared of the thought of returning to being unhappy that she wasn’t willing to see that.
Diane pushed herself from the ground, noting the mud that had soaked into her dress. The goat continued to follow her loyally as she stumbled back onto the main road.
The carriage was overturned, the horse run off. Its harness must have come loose in the fall. There would be no more driving for her without it, even if she’d had the ability to turn the carriage back on its wheels.
Well. This was the road. That was the signpost, signaling that the town of Gretna Green was only a few miles out.
If she set off for Gretna Green, would Liam know to meet her there? Could he have known how deeply she had fallen in love with him, when she had been too fretful to see it herself?
Diane sighed and looked to the goat. That would be the weight of her choices mattering, wouldn’t it?
She started down the road in the direction of Gretna Green, the goat following at her heel.
Diane had imagined herself panting and drenched with sweat a number of times throughout her life, truly too many times to count. But none of those scenarios involved the sensation of her muslin dress sticking heinously to her skin, or the ache in the arches of her feet and lower back, the crunch of the gravelly road with every step.
At least those sensations provided some amount of respite from the ever turning worry that followed her.
Liam had said he would return with her sketches, but what would happen when he found her gone? What if he thought she returned to the church to marry Martin, or met Martin himself and was talked into bringing Diane back home?
Or perhaps worst of all, what if Liam had decided he'd had enough of her silly whims, her strange hobby, and most of all, her? What if he got back to the church and decided it wasn't worth dallying around the Scottish border to try to stop Diane from her impulsive carriage jacking career? And equally pointless to keep trying to save her reputation and ask the question he'd already asked too many times now.
If that was true, she was just running away even more aimlessly than she had the first time. And here there was no one to try to stop her, to argue and needle her harebrained intentions into a well felted plan?
If Diane lingered in one spot too long those worries would catch up with her, and tears would raise up against her eyelashes.
She marched on, shaking her head against such thoughts.
They knew each other better than that by now. He had to know where her heart was, even if she'd been too wrapped up in her new freedoms to see it herself.
Diane paused a moment to fish a pebble out of her shoe, and another worry caught up to her.
