AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“And you listened to him? That’s the first time you’ve ever done as you’re told.”
Jack flinched again. Downed another drink.
Aidan dragged on his cheroot. Slumped into a chair, his face drawn as if he’d not slept in days, his hands jumpy as he stubbed out the butt. She knew just how he felt. The muscles strung rack-tight, the jittery, scratchy-eyed, stomach-rolling exhaustion when sleep was the last thing you wanted to do.
“I want to go home, Aidan. Will you take me?”
He turned to her as if he’d forgotten she remained in the room, his gaze flicking down to the wedding band gleaming on her finger. “Of course. Cat will be delighted to have you.”
“No, not Belfoyle. My home. Dun Eyre. I need to leave. Now.”
“But surely, your things, you’ll want to—”
“Now. I can’t stay here another minute.” Her throat burned with unshed tears. “Please.”
“Go, Aidan,” Jack said. “I’ll explain things.”
Aidan clapped a hand upon his cousin’s shoulder, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Ever hopeful you can charm the uncharmable Miss Roseingrave?”
Jack waggled his eyebrows. “Let’s say returning from the dead has its advantages.”
The door was shut upon the Duke Street town house, leaving Elisabeth and Aidan standing beneath a high blue spring sky. A letter carrier ambled up the street with a bag upon his shoulder. Two ladies gossiped as they strolled. A hackney drew up, a man in starched shirt points and a tall beaver hat emerging with a glancing nod in their direction. The world turning in the usual way as if nothing had happened.
None knew how close they’d come to a devastating otherworldly war. None knew what they owed one man who’d traded his life so that they might continue to live in ignorance.
“Look at me, Elisabeth.” No reassuring smile graced the Earl of Kilronan’s face. Instead his brows drew low, a savage darkness invading his gaze. “My brother’s risen from the ashes once. If he’s able, he’ll find a way back.”
“You believe that?”
“Don’t you?”
She smiled through watery eyes. “I wish I could.”
Dun Eyre
Eighteen Months Later
Elisabeth rested her hands upon the keys of the pianoforte. Ventured a few unlikely notes. She’d unearthed the sheet music from a drawer where it had lain dusty and forgotten. Her proficiency at the instrument yielded nothing like the flood of long-buried emotion Brendan’s skill could evoke. Music had flowed from his fingers until listeners felt it in their bones and their blood, a brilliant ferocious gift. It picked them up and carried them with it. Lit him up inside like a lamp, shone from his eyes.
Her chords flowed one after the other. The tune identifiable, but there was no magic. No beauty. No brutal magnificence to stir her soul. It was just music.
She lifted her hands from the keys, leaving Aunt Pheeney’s words dangling overloud in the sudden silence. “. . . too thin and too quiet. It’s unhealthy.”
Not the first time she’d interrupted her aunts discussing her as if she weren’t there or as if grief made one deaf as a post. She’d not cared at first, but after months of sneaking glances and gallons of warm milk, their concern began to grate. Couldn’t
they see she was perfectly, absolutely fine? So she didn’t choose to leave Dun Eyre as often as she used to. She enjoyed the sense of peace she felt in simply being home. Taking long rambling walks through the park. Riding across the high fields. Spending hours with Mr. Adams going over the accounts. Reviewing articles. Visiting with the tenants.
She’d even begun organizing her grandmother’s old greenhouses, spending long hours with seedlings and cuttings, peppering the gardeners with questions on soil improvement and irrigation, and reading Repton’s views on landscape design late into the night.
She found she enjoyed the peace and satisfaction of dirty nails and muddy skirts and a face even more freckled from sun. And if it tired her enough to bring sleep at night, all the better, though she wouldn’t tell Aunt Fitz or Aunt Pheeney. They already treated her as if she were a convalescing invalid—or a prime candidate for the asylum.
“You should have asked her first,” Aunt Fitz muttered.
“She’d never have agreed if I’d asked,” Aunt Pheeney’s stage whisper carried the length of the salon.
“Still, you might have—”
“You know, I can hear the two of you,” Elisabeth called out.
