“This is not about you,” he said. “You don’t understand. For now, just trust me that he has done things to my community and my family—”
“Trust you?” she said, her disbelief plain. “I did trust you, and look how it ended. But of course,” she added, an odd gleam in her eyes, “I don’t understand, I can’t, I’m just a brat. I still believe you could have chosen us, and your future, over your past.”
“Oh Christ,” he said, “do you even hear yourself?”
Her face turned ashen, and the newspaper slipped from her fingers. He watched as she paced, and he began to feel sick. “Harriet,” he said.
She turned to him. “Do you regret it?” she whispered. “Do you at least regret what you have done?”
“I regret disappointing you,” he managed.
“But do you regret causing the death of Lord Rutland?”
Bodies, lined up, tallest to smallest … wet blond hair spread out in the mud …
“I can’t,” he said thickly. “I can’t regret it.”
A shiver visibly ran through her, and for a moment, she looked afraid. He was irretrievably crushing whatever knightly version she had constructed of him, and knowing he couldn’t stop it from happening jammed his throat with lumps of ice.
Harriet straightened, and she faced him with her chin put high. “I trusted you,” she said. “When you showed me exactly what you were when you tricked me into marrying you. And then struck a deal with my father. And pretended to be doing the honorable thing in my parents’ parlor while I was so afraid, I could barely think straight. All that I knew, and yet I resolved to trust you—more fool me. I have no choice: I must return to London.”
The words reached him muffled, as if from underwater.
“I don’t want you to leave,” he said.
“How could I stay?” she said, her gaze already bouncing around the room, locating her belongings.
“It is unsafe for you, on your own.”
She looked him dead in the eye then. “The truth is,” she said, “I feel even less safe with you.”
Her words sliced at something vital in the very fiber of his being. For a moment, he couldn’t breathe.
Later. He would approach her later, when they were both in possession of all their senses.
“If that is how you feel about me,” he said, “it would indeed be best if you left for now.”
He walked out the door, because watching her pack made him want to howl.
Chapter 32
At first her thoughts had raced along the same old tracks: Silly, stupid, silly, stupid, in rhythm with the speeding train wheels. She had felt grubby, in need of a thorough scrubbing, for every hour she had spent in lustful intimacy with Lucian had itched like a blemish on her body. Had he laughed about her gullibility, about her na?ve attempts at testing him, behind her back?
To round it off, a man was dead.
He did not hinder me from leaving, she thought when she boarded the early sleeper train in Edinburgh. She would have resisted any attempts on his part to keep her at the inn, and yet, recalling his apathetic face during her departure made fresh tears spring to her eyes. Was there a greater loneliness than to lie in a dark, flimsily locked sleeper compartment with only a carpetbag for company? As she drifted between fitful sleep and waking, guilt crept into her sorrow. A whole mining community had begun looking forward to their photographs, which now would never come. At least not from her camera. I shall send someone, she thought, I shall send them someone who actually masters the craft.
She climbed the stairs to her Belgravia home with her knees buckling beneath the weighty burden of three sleepless nights and days spent in emotional terror over men lost underground. Her chest ached, as if all vital organs inside were inflamed. Perhaps it had all been too much. Perhaps her exhausted brain had played tricks on her, mixing acute worries and old grievances and wholly unrelated matters, and the result had been a harsh attack on her husband and a mindless flight … A woman opened the door, slender, sharp-eyed, with mousy hair curling around her ears. Aoife Byrne.
Hattie squinted at her. She considered reaching out to see whether her hand would go straight through the woman. “Are you a mirage?”
“Good Gad,” said Miss Byrne. “What’s he done now?”
Twenty minutes later, Hattie sat on the drawing room settee, clutching her hot teacup as if it were a buoy on the high seas. The roles of hostess and guest had clean reversed: Miss Byrne had taken her coat and carpetbag; Miss Byrne had told her to rest in the drawing room while she fixed some tea in the kitchen. Miss Byrne looked very much at ease, sprawled on the divan opposite, as though she had a habit of sprawling on it. Hattie was still glad for her presence. The woman was Lucian’s age, and she was Lucian’s friend. It was like having a small part of Lucian near without all that was horribly aggravating, hurtful, and confusing about him.