Edwin chirped for attention; Victor drained his wineglass. Lizzie stared at her diamond ring like she was debating hurling it into the fire. She was dramatic enough for such a gesture.
Angelika decided her brother was quite dim for such a smart man. “The roads are teeming with criminals, so perhaps you ought to stay, Christopher. The room across the hall from mine is still empty.”
When Victor looked at her, she mouthed, Pick up the baby.
Victor blinked, rechecked his calculations, and realized he’d made a grave error.
“What is it, my good man? You wish to speak to me? Very well.” Victor picked up the lad, seating him on his knee like a sack of flour. Experimentally, he bounced him. Edwin screamed with joy, and Lizzie laughed. The diamond ring remained firmly in situ.
It was Angelika’s last good deed for the day before she went to bed.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It felt strange, knowing Christopher was in the room opposite her own. Angelika had locked her door before she got into bed. She could not say she liked his presence, because she still thought of it as Will’s room. Now Christopher was using that tub, sleeping in that bed, and erasing the last traces of his rival’s presence. Male cats rubbed against things to mark them as property. She could picture it now.
She’d slept soundly for around two hours, but was now awake, tossing and turning. It felt like a waste of time to be asleep when the house and grounds were so full of interesting guests and Mary was out there somewhere. Thunder cracked in the distance. Would she be kept dry? Did the big man have enough sense to keep her warm, and somewhat comfortable?
Angelika could not see Will’s cottage from her window, but she was absolutely sure that he would be awake. She could feel a pull from him. He must be so hungry after not touching his meal. She pulled on a robe in the dark and put on her boots. In the kitchen, she found some leftover cheese and bread, and lit a lantern. She needed to see Will’s face one more time, to ask for a hug, and to decide if the name Arlo suited him.
It was only a quick shortcut through the orchard.
During the day, she could agree to the men’s terms, and they seemed reasonable. Stay close to someone, and be guarded by them. But what were the chances that in the next three minutes she would intersect with the huge man’s path? She hardly flattered herself that he was so taken with her that he was waiting right now. She preferred the more likely outcome: she would soon be lying in Will’s arms on his narrow bed, in his monastery-white room, listening to the storm rolling in.
Taking a calculated risk was typical Angelika.
The air outside was perfumed by approaching rain clouds, and something else strange that turned her stomach and made her hungry. She swung her lantern and walked through the first rows of apples, past the Conqueror variety, picking one out of habit. Biting it, she found it to be the same flavor as always: sour and sweet, the taste of childhood. It made her think of her brother and that day with the spade, and how Will had asked if she had planted her own tree. “I should have,” she said out loud to herself to cover her nerves. All this talk of monsters and kidnapping couldn’t help but affect her. “I am going to start creating things on my own, without Victor, no matter what he says.”
She could hear a crackle. Was it rain?
“I’m going to get married in the Notre-Dame in Paris,” she said, breaking into a jog.
In the far distance, up on the hill, there was a light glowing in Will’s cottage. Perhaps it was a candle on the sill, burning for her like the star of Bethlehem. “I’m going to wear a dress that will employ ten seamstresses for a year, and I am going to have to increase my fitness to walk down that long aisle—”
She burst through a row of trees, and what she saw and smelled had her heart sinking into the earth.
It wasn’t Victor’s big man. But it was men. Men from the village, four, five, huddled around a campfire, and they were not the regular gardeners. They had sacks of apples around them. It was theft, but no matter. She saw liquor bottles, and a rabbit cooking on a spit. In the heartbeat that they all stared, she saw them look at her nightgown, her loose hair, and the fact that no protector stepped out behind her.
“Hello, luvvie,” one said, and his smile and tone were all the warning she needed.
Mary had drummed the following into her during her adolescent years:
No hesitation, no politeness, run.
Angelika swung her arm in a full circle, throwing the lantern into the middle of the group, and she began to run through the rows, faster than their rabbit. Behind her, she heard the roar of confused outrage. Her head start would last only as long as it took drunk men to get to their feet.