There was another long pause.
Then Will’s voice, grimly. ‘All right. Get your things together. We leave at dawn. We travel light and we stay on the move.’
‘I’ll tell the others,’ said Violet.
What about me? thought Katherine. And my sister? Where do we go? Are you just going to leave us? What do we do?
But just as Katherine was about to hurry back to make sure she wasn’t seen, she heard Will speak Violet’s name, holding her back.
‘What is it?’ Violet said.
‘The sisters.’ Katherine stayed very still, fixed in place and straining to hear.
‘What about them?’
‘I want you to give me your word you’ll protect them,’ said Will as Katherine’s heart beat oddly. ‘You’re the strongest one here. I want you to keep them safe.’
‘I might not like her fiancé,’ said Violet slowly. ‘But that girl risked a lot to come here. For you.’
For you. Katherine flushed, the heat scalding her cold cheeks, feeling painfully exposed.
‘Thank you, Violet,’ said Will. ‘I couldn’t do this without you.’
‘But where do I sleep?’ said Katherine, looking at the small room with its five pallets on the floor.
‘This is it,’ said Violet, shoving a roll of blankets into Katherine’s hands.
Will had told her as soon as he returned to the gatekeep what he and his friends planned to do. He’d told her it would be dangerous. He’d told her his friends would help her whatever she decided. And she’d said yes when he’d asked her if she wanted to come with them.
‘You can have my bed,’ said Will, pointing to one of the meagre pallet beds in the corner. Will was going to sleep on the cold stone floor. ‘I know it’s not much. We’ll find better lodgings for you when we’re far enough away, on the road.’
She saw in her mind’s eye her own bed’s soft downy coverings and silver bed warmer. ‘Thank you. I’m very grateful. Elizabeth, let’s settle in here.’
There was nowhere to wash or undress, so she asked the two janissaries to hold up a blanket while she stood behind it and Elizabeth helped unlace her corset. She went to bed in her underdress and shawl. Cyprian and Will had gone downstairs and only came back when it was dark and she was under the blankets. She tried not to think about the morning.
She thought Will would go immediately to sleep like Cyprian, but instead he came to sit beside her pallet. She flushed, warming at his presence, at the thought that he wanted to see her before bed.
‘I came to say goodnight,’ he said softly.
There was something wrong. She could see it in him. She was the one who clasped his hand and stopped him from standing up. She looked up into his eyes. ‘What is it?’
She didn’t think he was going to answer. The others were already asleep or too far away to hear. The silence seemed to stretch out for a long time.
He spoke the words quietly. ‘My mother spent her whole life running.’ He rubbed his thumb along the silver scar on his hand. Simon killed my mother, he’d said to her, that night in her garden. She’d thought Will a dashing young man of means, until that moment, when the ground had felt like it was scrolling out from under her feet.
‘I wish you could have known her,’ he said. ‘She was a good person, brave, strong. Sometimes she could seem harsh or distracted, but everything she did – she had a reason. She sacrificed a lot for her child.’
It was easier to speak in the dark, words that might not have found their way out in daylight. He’d given her something true, she could feel it. She owed him something true in return, words that could only be spoken in the dark.
‘I thought there was a life that I wanted,’ she heard herself saying. ‘It was jewels, and gowns, and pretty fashionable things. Lord Crenshaw would have given me that. But I couldn’t be with him. Not once I knew what he was.’
‘No, of course not,’ said Will, with a strange half smile. ‘Once you knew what he was – what he really was – you couldn’t bear it.’
He said it as though he believed in her. As though he had always known that she would do the right thing. But she hadn’t, not at first. She had run from the truth he had told her right back to her world of safety and ease. There was something else she owed him, words that were harder to say since the night she had forced him out of her garden.
‘You were right about him,’ she said. ‘What you told me that night.’ She drew in a breath. ‘All of it.’