Chapter One

 

 

“My aunt is terribly ill,” Molly Granger lied to the mail-coach driver, who had asked her absolutely nothing. “Consumption, I believe. Or a fever upon the lungs. The physician’s letter was most alarming, which is precisely the sort of circumstance that demands an immediate journey at midnight, in the rain, alone. You understand.”

The driver, a broad man weathered into patience by years of bad roads and worse passengers, looked her over.

She was soaked through, her hair escaping its pins in copper-dark rivulets that clung to her neck and jaw. One ankle was plainly swollen beneath the muddied hem of her gown. She clutched a travelling-bag against her chest as though it contained something far more precious than what appeared, from the split seam, to be the heel of a pale blue shoe that matched nothing she wore.

She was also, despite looking like something a river had lately spat out, smiling at him with such determined cheer that he almost believed her.

Almost.

“Where’s this aunt, then?” he asked.

“West.” Molly said this with tremendous confidence, because west was the only direction she had actually planned. Everything before west had been panic, and everything beyond it remained, as yet, a void. “Quite far west. As far west as you are going, really.”

“Bath.”

“Bath! Yes. My aunt lives in Bath. My terribly ill aunt. In Bath. Where she is ill. Terribly.”

She was a catastrophic liar. Other women could construct elegant falsehoods with serene composure; Molly built hers out of wet sand and sheer volume. Her father had once told her she possessed her mother’s gift for filling a room, and her complete inability to deceive a single soul in it.

Her father.

She pushed the thought away, and it came back as it always did, patient and unhurried.

“You running from something, miss?”

“Certainly not. I am visiting my aunt.”

“Right.” The driver glanced again at the travelling-bag, at the absurd shoe heel, at the way her eyes kept darting towards the dark road from which she had emerged, searching for something she was desperate to outrun. He had daughters, perhaps. Or sisters. Or some woman in his life who had taught him to recognise that particular species of terror which dressed itself in cheerfulness and hoped no one would look too closely.

“Coach leaves in ten minutes,” he said. “Ride up top if you can manage the rain.”

“I adore rain,” Molly said wistfully, climbing onto the box before he could change his mind.

Within thirty seconds of the full force of an April night bearing down upon her already-ruined hair, she regretted every word.

She gripped the edge of the seat and pressed her mother’s locket against her collarbone beneath her soaked gown. The locket was the one thing she had packed deliberately. Everything else in the travelling-bag was evidence of panic: two dresses snatched from the nearest hooks, a hairbrush, a novel she had read twice, and a single evening shoe in pale blue silk, which served no practical function whatsoever but had been the first thing her hand had closed around in the dark.

It had taken her nearly three miles to discover she had forgotten money. By then, she had been standing at a crossroads in the pitch-black night, her ankle throbbing, her palms stinging from thorn-scratches, her entire worldly strategy consisting of the word west.

And going back was no longer an option.

Going back meant the dress hanging in her wardrobe, and the morning that came with it.

It meant Lord Vyne.

The coach lurched forward into the darkness. Molly let her breath out in a rush, tipped her head back against the luggage rack, and watched the stars reel overhead between the clouds.

I have done the most reckless thing I shall ever do in my life, she thought. I am either brave or catastrophically stupid, and there is truly very little way of knowing which until morning.

The memory found her before she was ready for it. They always did, the bad ones, waiting for a quiet moment, a gap in the noise, before sliding in like water through a crack.

Three weeks ago. Lord Vyne had sat in her father’s drawing room. He was one-and-sixty, silver-haired, impeccably dressed, and possessed of the sort of authority that made servants step backwards when he entered. He had arrived with his solicitor, his valet, and the air of a man inspecting a purchase. He had smiled at Sir Gerald Granger, complimented the claret, and then turned his attention to Molly.

His eyes were pale. That had been her first impression—how pale they were, how flat, how patient. They had travelled over her face, her throat, her hands folded in her lap, with the slow deliberation of a man examining a horse at market. He had studied her while speaking to her father, as if she were a painting being discussed in a gallery rather than a living woman sitting three feet away.

“A spirited girl,” he had said. “I admire spirit in a wife. I look forward to settling her.”

Settling.

He had said the word as one might say taming, or breaking, or corking a bottle of something that had been left to breathe too long. Her father had smiled, nodded, poured more claret. And Molly had sat there in her best afternoon dress, her fingernails pressed into her palms, the ground falling away beneath her with a clarity that left no room for misunderstanding what she was being sold into.

Reasoning had not worked. Papa, the man is forty years my elder.

Tears had not worked either—real ones, loud ones, the sort that left her red-faced and gasping, and should have moved a stone.

Bargaining had failed as well. Give me one Season. Only one. I will find someone suitable, someone young, someone who does not make me feel like a mouse in a trap.

Sir Gerald had listened to all of it. He had held her hands. He had met her with those kind, helpless eyes she had loved all her life.

“This is the only way, Molly. The estate. The tenants. Your mother’s grave is on that land.”

Then he had left her room.

Molly had lain in bed for two hours afterwards, staring at the wedding dress hanging from the wardrobe door like a white ghost, all silk and seed pearls and someone else’s idea of her future. And an eerie calm had come over her, soft and cold as snowfall.

I shall simply die in that house if I marry him.

The thought was melodramatic. Of course it was. But she had seen what lived in Vyne’s eyes when he said settling, and it was the same thing the housekeeper had whispered about Lady Catherine, Lord Vyne’s first wife, who had died at four-and-twenty of a fall, officially, and of something else entirely if one listened to the kitchen talk that ceased whenever Molly entered the room.

She did listen.

People assumed that because she talked so much, she heard very little. The opposite was nearer the truth. Molly talked because she heard everything: every undercurrent, every hesitation, every silence that said more than the words surrounding it.

And the silence around Lady Catherine’s name had been deafening.

So, she had packed, badly and in the dark. She had climbed out the window because the front door creaked and the servants would hear, dropped into the garden, landed squarely in the rose bush, and bitten her own hand to keep from screaming as thorns raked her palms and her ankle turned beneath her at an angle that was, medically speaking, inadvisable.

Then she had limped down the lane in the dark, hitched a ride on a passing cart as far as the coaching inn, and now she was sitting atop a mail coach in the rain, bound for Bath.

Free.

Or near enough to it, once she discovered what came next.

The driver, apparently under the impression that silence was an option in Molly’s company, attempted it and failed.

“The novel in my bag,” Molly said, raising her voice above the rain and the rattle of the wheels, “is about a woman who escapes a Turkish prison by disguising herself as a merchant. She steals a horse, rides to Constantinople, and falls in love with a diplomat, who proves to be the very man who imprisoned her in the first place—which is, I must say, a most questionable foundation for romance, though the horsemanship is excellent.”

“Is that so?”

“It is. I have read it twice. The first time I thought the escape unrealistic, but now, having climbed out of a window and fallen into a rose bush, I think the author may have underestimated how willing a person becomes to tolerate physical pain when the alternative is spending the rest of one’s life trapped.”

The driver glanced sideways at her.

Molly noticed, belatedly, that she had abandoned the aunt fiction entirely, and pressed on regardless, because pressing on regardless was, she was beginning to suspect, the defining philosophy of her life.

“My mother used to say that the secret to a good life was knowing which things not to apologise for. She said everyone apologises for being too loud, but hardly anyone apologises for being too quiet when it matters.”

“Your mother sounds like she was a sensible woman.”

“She was extraordinary.” Molly’s voice softened, and for a moment the rain seemed louder, filling the space between them. “She died when I was fourteen. She could walk into a room full of strangers and have every one of them laughing within five minutes. My father says I inherited her talent for filling a silence, and none of her talent for reading one.”

“I believe him.”

“That was unkind,” she said, shooting him a playful glare.

“Miss,” he sighed, “you’ve been talking since we left the inn. I know your views on French novelists, the name of your childhood pony, and the fact that your ankle is worse than you are admitting.”

“Buttercup,” Molly supplied. “She was a very good pony.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

Molly fell quiet.

It lasted an uncomfortable number of seconds, which she counted, and was, she suspected, a personal record.

In the gap, the thoughts she had been outrunning since she dropped from the window ledge rushed in like floodwater through an open door.

Words were a wall. So long as she kept building it, the fear stayed on the other side, and she could pretend she was a girl on an adventure rather than one in the midst of a catastrophe.

Without the wall, the catastrophe became terribly concrete.

She was one-and-twenty, unmarried, unchaperoned, carrying a travelling-bag packed in panic, and travelling towards a city where she knew no one, with an ankle swelling steadily towards the dimensions of a small melon and a plan consisting, in its entirety, of I will think of something.

Her father would find her room empty by morning.

He would be frantic.

He would be devastated.

Lord Vyne would be furious.

She thought of Vyne’s hands. She had noticed them at dinner: large, manicured, perfectly still. He was a man who kept his hands very still while his eyes did all the work, and something about that combination—the stillness and the watching—had sent ice down her spine three weeks ago and sent it again now, here, atop a mail coach in the rain, miles from anywhere he could reach her.

She began talking again.

About the weather. About the relative merits of Bath and Brighton. About whether a woman of one-and-twenty, with no money and no connections, could build an entirely new life in a city she had never seen.

“Possible,” the driver said, after a silence that suggested he was choosing his words with the care of a man defusing a cannon. “Wouldn’t recommend it, though.”

“No,” Molly said. “I suppose not. Though I fear my life has reached a point at which sensible recommendations are more ornamental than useful.”

The driver made a sound that might have been agreement, disapproval, or merely resignation. Molly chose the most encouraging interpretation.

The rain stopped just before dawn. The clouds drew apart like curtains, the sky turned from black to grey to the pale, washed gold of early morning, and the city appeared below them as the coach crested the final hill.

Molly had never seen Bath. She had, in fact, never been farther from home than Taunton, where she had visited a cousin at sixteen and accidentally knocked a platter of sandwiches into a fountain, an incident which had brought the visit to a somewhat earlier conclusion than planned.

Bath was larger than Taunton.

It had crescents and terraces and the Abbey rising above it, its tower catching the first light; rows of pale stone climbing the hillside; the river threading silver through the valley; and streets broad enough for the sort of life that happened in places where people had choices.

She took in the city and felt something press against her ribs, a sensation she could only call possibility.

Hope, touched with early gold.

“Bath,” the driver announced.

“Bath,” Molly repeated, because saying it made it real.

The coach descended into the city and stopped in the coaching yard near the Abbey. Other passengers disembarked with purpose, greeting drivers, collecting trunks, and setting off towards inns and houses and lives that had structure and direction and, presumably, money.

Molly climbed down from the box, winced as her ankle met the cobbles, and stood in the middle of the yard clutching her travelling-bag with both hands.

She looked exactly like what she was: a girl who had jumped out of a window in the dark and was trying to pass off terror as a plan.

The driver climbed down after her. He stood for a moment, studying her like a man about to do something he would tell himself was foolish and do anyway.

“Thank you,” Molly said. “Truly. For the ride, and for letting me talk about Buttercup.”

He reached into his coat and held out a sixpence.

Molly’s hand started forward, then jerked back as though the coin had bitten her.

“I absolutely cannot take that.”

“It’s sixpence, miss. Buy yourself breakfast.”

“You have been extraordinarily kind already, and I refuse to compound your charity with further expenditure on my behalf.”

It was the most refined sentence Molly had spoken all night. She was rather proud of it.

She also desperately wanted the sixpence.

“Take it.”

He pressed the coin into her palm. It was warm from his pocket, and the kindness of it—this ordinary human decency from a man who owed her nothing and had endured hours of relentless conversation without complaint—struck somewhere behind her eyes in a way that the rain and cold and fear had somehow failed to do all night.

“I shall pay you back,” she whispered. “One day. I will find you, and I shall pay you back.”

“Just don’t go home to whatever you’re running from,” he grumbled.

Then he climbed back onto his box.

The coach pulled away, the sound of the wheels faded, and Molly Granger stood alone in a coaching yard in a city she had never visited, holding one sixpence, one splitting travelling-bag, one throbbing ankle, and the knowledge that somewhere behind her, the house would soon begin to wake.

She ought to have been terrified.

She was alone, broke, injured, and in possession of no plan beyond a sixpence and the general conviction that, if she kept moving forward, something would emerge to meet her.

But the sun was rising.

The pale stone of Bath was turning gold in the early light. Somewhere nearby, a baker was drawing bread from an oven, because the smell of it drifted across the yard like a warm hand on her shoulder. A bird was singing from a church spire. The city was waking around her, all footsteps and opening shutters and a cart rattling past with milk churns.

It was the most alive she had felt in a very long time.

She had been only half herself since the moment Lord Vyne walked into her father’s drawing room and turned those flat, patient eyes upon her. She had been shrinking ever since, drawing herself inward, becoming smaller and quieter and less, in the slow, foolish hope that smallness might make him lose interest and look elsewhere.

She was done being small.

Molly Granger straightened her spine, adjusted her grip on the travelling-bag, tested her ankle with a cautious step—painful, swollen, entirely capable of carrying her—and faced the city spread golden and possible before her.

“Well,” she said, to nobody at all, because Molly Granger had never required an audience. “This will do.”

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 

“You are up before the sun again, my lord.”

“The sun is late, Jennings. I am precisely on time.” The man shot his trusted friend and employee a stern glare.

“As you say, my lord.” Jennings set the polished boots beside the bed and studied his employer carefully, and without appearing to do so, with the practised sidelong attention a valet learns through years of close service.

The Earl of Harrowden was already dressed, or nearly so: shirt tucked, waistcoat buttoned, cravat tied plainly, like a man who regarded neckcloths as logistics rather than art. He stood at the window of his bedchamber, looking out across the grounds in the grey half-light before dawn. The carpet beneath his boots had begun to flatten, and Jennings knew he had been standing there for some time.

Five o’clock, then.

An army habit, like lacing his left boot first and checking the locks on every door before retiring, and sleeping—when he slept at all—on the side of the bed nearest the door, with a knife in the drawer beside him.

Jennings had served with Captain Cillian Swifton in the Peninsula for three years before a French musket ball put a permanent hitch in his left shoulder and sent him home as the most overqualified valet in Somerset. He knew the sounds the Earl made in his sleep, which were bad, and the silence he kept during the day, which was worse.

“Will you take breakfast, my lord?”

“In the study.”

“Alone?”

Cillian turned from the window. He had a face that gave very little away: dark brows, a jaw made for clenching, and a mouth that had once, in another life, been described as prone to laughter. Jennings remembered Captain Swifton at four-and-twenty, cracking jokes in camp, wrestling with the younger officers, writing letters home that were three pages of wit and one line of weather.

That man had come back from the Peninsula with the same face and none of the contents.

“Is there someone else here, Jennings?”

“There could be, my lord. Your brother has written from Bath, and the vicar has extended yet another invitation to dine.”

“Then no.”

Jennings collected the previous night’s untouched brandy glass and withdrew.

Cillian walked the grounds in the dark, as he did every morning. He had mapped Harrowden Park with the precision he had once applied to enemy terrain: every fence line, every gate, every ditch memorised until the estate was less a home than a tactical position. The grass was wet beneath his boots. A thrush sang from the oak at the south boundary. He walked the perimeter in silence, hands clasped behind his back, and felt precisely nothing.

This was the problem, and he was aware of it in the same distant way a man might be aware that a clock on the mantel had stopped.

The war had ended. He had come home. His elder brother, James, who should have been the earl, who had been brilliant and warm and everything Cillian was merely competent at, had died of a fever while Cillian was in Spain. And so, the title had landed on Cillian’s shoulders like a coat made for someone else.

He wore it. He discharged its duties. He read the reports, signed the documents, approved the expenditures, and managed the tenants with brisk efficiency.

He had cared about things, once. That was the part he tried not to look at directly: the man who had argued politics over brandy, who had laughed at his own bad jokes, who had loved his brother with the easy warmth of a younger sibling who never imagined the older one might fail to outlive him.

That man had been buried somewhere in the long, blood-soaked months at Badajoz, where Cillian had watched men he loved die in ways that still woke him at three in the morning with the taste of smoke in his mouth. He had come away certain that something fundamental inside him had been cauterised shut, and was unlikely ever to open again.

He completed his circuit of the grounds with the thrush still calling from its oak, returned to the house, and sat down in his study to the breakfast Jennings had laid out: toast, eggs, coffee, all of it precisely arranged, all of it consumed mechanically, with the same attention he might have given to loading a musket.

His estate manager, Dalton, arrived at eight with the morning’s reports. South field drainage: approved. East cottage roof: approved and budgeted. Boundary dispute with Henley Farm: resolved in favour of maintaining the existing fence line.

Dalton, who had managed Harrowden for James and found the transition to Cillian somewhat like exchanging a golden retriever for a particularly silent hawk, delivered his reports with admirable brevity and retreated.

There were papers to sign, and Cillian signed them, working through the morning’s correspondence with the same unhurried precision he gave to everything. Three letters, all of them models of clarity and economy, none of them containing a single word that could be mistaken for warmth.

He was, by any reasonable measure, an excellent earl. His tenants were well managed. His accounts were in order. His staff were paid on time and treated fairly. He ran Harrowden Park as he had run his company in the field: with competence, discipline, and the total absence of personal investment.

Jennings, passing the study with a tray he had invented as a pretext, observed the Earl sitting at his desk in a pool of morning light and thought, as he thought most mornings, He is disappearing. Slowly, politely, without fuss. And if something does not change soon, there will be very little left of him beyond duty, paper, and signature.

The change arrived at half past ten, on horseback, in the form of Sir Gerald Granger, who looked as though he had been trampled by his own horse and then forced to ride it anyway.

“Swifton.”

Gerald was off his horse before the groom could reach him, striding towards the front door with his hat askew, his coat buttoned wrong, and an expression on his face that Cillian, watching from the study window, recognised with the flat precision of a soldier’s assessment.

Panic. Badly concealed. Roughly twelve hours old, judging by the shadows beneath his eyes and the state of his cravat, which appeared to have been tied in the dark by shaking hands.

Cillian rose, unhurried, and walked to the entrance hall.

Jennings had already admitted Gerald, who was pacing the black-and-white marble floor like a man in a cell, running one hand through hair that had clearly been subjected to the same treatment several times that morning.

“Gerald.”

“Swifton. Thank goodness.” Gerald stopped pacing and faced him, and Cillian saw the full scope of the damage: red-rimmed eyes, unshaven jaw, waistcoat buttoned one hole off its proper alignment. This was a man who had slept either very little or very badly, and was holding himself together by that particular sort of pride which prevents gentlemen from weeping in other gentlemen’s entrance halls.

“Sit down. Jennings, coffee.”

Gerald did not sit. He stood in the middle of the hall and said, “My daughter has gone.”

“Gone where?”

“If I knew where, Swifton, I would be there, not standing in your hall looking like a man who has lost his wits.”

Cillian absorbed this, waiting for feeling, some echo of concern, as one presses a bruise to see if it hurts.

Nothing.

The information registered as data: Granger’s daughter missing; probable departure overnight; relevant context, the girl was engaged to Lord Vyne and the wedding was scheduled for today.

“When did you discover she was gone?”

“This morning. Six o’clock. Her maid went to wake her, and the room was empty. The window was open. She climbed out the window, Cillian, like a character in one of those dreadful novels young ladies are forever reading.”

Gerald pressed both hands against his face and dragged them down, a gesture of such comprehensive exhaustion that Cillian almost felt something.

Almost.

“Some of her things are missing. A travelling-bag. A gown or two—what else, I have no notion. The girl has never been farther than Taunton. She has no money, no useful connections outside Somerset, and Vyne is expected before noon.”

“Have you searched the immediate area?”

“The lanes, the village, the coaching inn at Bridgwater. The innkeeper remembers a girl boarding a westbound mail coach just after midnight. Alone. Talking a great deal, he said, which narrows the field of suspects considerably.”

Cillian filed the information away.

Westbound by mail coach after midnight. A head start of several hours, but not yet beyond remedy. West from Bridgwater meant Bristol or Bath. A girl alone with a travelling-bag at midnight would be conspicuous. A girl who talked to everyone she met, as Cillian vaguely recalled Molly Granger doing, would be impossible to hide for long.

He had met her twice.

The first occasion had been a harvest supper at Gerald’s estate, roughly two years ago, just after Cillian had returned from the war and inherited the earldom, and was attending social functions in mechanical obedience to orders no one had actually given. The girl had been nineteen, slight, copper-haired, and in possession of a voice that carried across rooms like cavalry charges across open fields. She had talked to him for what had felt like the better part of a quarter-hour about the migratory habits of swallows.

The second time had been at a Michaelmas fair, on a bright, cold afternoon, during an argument over who had upset whose bowl of punch—an argument she had pursued with flushed indignation, convinced she was right and entirely unwilling to let him forget it.

He had found himself, for approximately three seconds, on the verge of smiling.

That was the sum of his knowledge of Molly Granger: an immature, chaotic girl who talked too much, and who was, apparently, resourceful enough to climb out of a window and vanish into the night when circumstances demanded it.

“I need your help, Swifton.” Gerald had finally accepted the coffee Jennings pressed into his hands and now stood by the fireplace, gripping the cup as though it were the last stable object in a collapsing world. “You are the only man I trust to find her and bring her back without a scandal. If word reaches Vyne before I can produce her…”

“Why should I involve myself in your family’s affairs, Gerald?”

“Because I helped your brother out of a debt scandal last year. Because we have been neighbours for decades. Because I am standing in your hall at half past ten in the morning looking like a man who has been dragged behind a horse, and I am begging.”

Cillian studied him.

Gerald Granger was a decent man: too soft for his circumstances, too proud, too desperate. His estate had been haemorrhaging money for a decade, and Lord Vyne’s offer to marry Molly in exchange for settling the family debts had arrived like a rope thrown to a drowning man. Gerald had seized it, as any drowning father might.

Cillian should refuse. He had no obligation to Gerald beyond neighbourly courtesy and no interest whatsoever in chasing a runaway girl across the countryside.

He waited for the refusal to form. It should have been easy.

I am sorry, Gerald. This is your concern, and yours alone.

“Where do you think she has gone?” he said instead.

Gerald’s shoulders dropped three inches with relief. “I have no idea. The girl has a gift for the unpredictable. She once released a goat into my drawing room because she felt it looked lonely in the garden.”

“A girl of decided methods, then.”

Cillian turned to Jennings, who had been standing in the doorway looking like a man who was hearing the most interesting thing that had happened in the house in two years.

“Pack a bag. Three days.”

“Three days, my lord?”

“She left at midnight with a travelling-bag and a gift for conversation. By now, she will have given her history to half the people between here and wherever she has come to rest. Finding her should not take long. Persuading her to return may prove the lengthier business.”

“And if she refuses, my lord?”

Cillian considered this.

The memory surfaced: Molly Granger at the Michaelmas fair, small and animated and absolutely certain that she held the moral high ground in a dispute over a bowl of punch. She had looked up at him with those wide eyes, and there had been something in her expression beyond the cheerfulness, something sharp and alive and entirely unwilling to yield. He remembered thinking, in the distant, clinical way he thought about everything now, that the girl would be difficult to move, if ever she decided to stand still.

“Then I will have wasted three days,” he said. “Which is no different from any other week.”

Gerald wrung his hand, thanked him six times, mounted his horse, and rode back towards his own estate and the approaching disaster of Lord Vyne’s noon arrival.

Cillian stood in the entrance hall and watched him go, waiting again for something to register: concern, curiosity, irritation, anything that might confirm he still possessed the internal machinery of a functioning human being.

The hall held its quiet around him, the long-case clock at the far end ticking out a measured rhythm that was somehow louder for the absence of Gerald’s voice. Somewhere in the house, Jennings was packing a bag with the brisk satisfaction of a man who had been waiting for an excuse to make his employer leave the premises.

Cillian turned back towards his study.

He had letters to finish before he left. The drainage report still required his signature. There were decisions to make about the east cottage roof, and the Henley fence, and the seventeen other small administrative tasks that filled his days like sand filling an hourglass, steadily and impersonally, one grain at a time, measuring nothing except the passage of hours he had stopped caring about.

He would find the girl, deliver her to her father, and return to Harrowden Park—to the silence and the careful, competent, utterly empty life he had built for himself out of the ruins of the man he used to be.

Three days, perhaps four, and then this peculiar interruption would be over. Everything would go back to what it had been, which was what he told himself he wanted. If the telling felt less like conviction than repetition, he chose, as he chose every morning, to let that pass without examination.

Jennings appeared in the study doorway with the packed bag, his expression carefully blank in that particular way that meant he was thinking a great deal and saying none of it.

“The horse is ready, my lord.”

Jennings shifted the bag to his other hand, and the small movement carried the weight of an opinion he was deciding whether to voice.

“My lord, if I may.”

“You will regardless.”

“The young lady you are retrieving. Miss Granger.” Jennings paused. “Be patient with her, my lord. A young lady does not climb out of a window in the middle of the night unless matters have become very bad indeed.”

Cillian met his valet’s eye.

Jennings held his gaze, the same steady look he had once given Captain Swifton across a campfire in Spain, when the night was bad and the odds were worse and neither of them had been willing to be the first to look away.

“Pack an extra shirt,” Cillian said. “I have a feeling Miss Granger is going to be exhausting.”

He took his coat from the hook by the door, swung himself onto the horse the groom had saddled, and rode west.

Towards Bristol, perhaps. Towards Bath, more likely. Towards a girl who had climbed out of a window in the middle of the night with a travelling-bag and no visible plan.

And the morning was fine and entirely wasted on a man who rode through it seeing nothing.

 

 

Chapter Three

 

 

“Those Bath buns in your window are the most magnificent things I have encountered today, and I watched the sun come up over the entire city, so the competition was considerable.”

The baker, a flour-dusted man with forearms like bread loaves and a deeply sceptical expression, considered the girl who had materialised on his doorstep at half past seven in the morning. She was damp, bright-eyed, limping slightly, and smiling at him as though his shop window contained the Crown Jewels.

“They’re yesterday’s,” he said.

“They are exquisite regardless. The glaze alone is a work of art. Is that honey? The light suggests honey, though I have been wrong before. I was wrong about the weather this morning, for instance. It did stop raining, but only after it had finished with my hair.”

Her copper hair, escaping whatever arrangement had once contained it, did indeed look as though the rain had taken liberties. She pushed a damp strand from her forehead and continued to regard the buns with reverence.

“Are you planning to buy one, miss, or only admire them?”

A flicker crossed her face. Quick, barely there, the kind of shadow that appeared when a question landed somewhere tender. She recovered within a heartbeat.

“I am presently in the process of deciding. They look absolutely worth every penny, and I intend to return when my finances are more… assembled.”

The baker considered her for a long moment. Then he reached into the case and handed her a plain roll, warm and almost the size of his fist.

“On the house.”

“Oh, I could not possibly.” Molly waved her hands in refusal, her palms still scratched from the rose bush, the gesture half batting the kindness away and half, she suspected, betraying how badly she wanted it.

“It’s a roll, miss, not a jewel. Take it before it cools.”

Molly took the roll. She held it in both hands, feeling the warmth of it against her palms, and for one terrible second, her chin trembled, because people kept being kind to her when she had done absolutely nothing to deserve it. The accumulated kindness of strangers was, she was discovering, far more devastating than cruelty.

“Thank you,” she said. “You are a gentleman and an artist, and I shall tell everyone I meet about your window display.”

“Please don’t,” the baker said.

But she was already walking away, eating the roll in large, graceless bites, while he stood shaking his head in the doorway with an expression that fell somewhere between bewilderment and the reluctant admission that the mad girl had perhaps been right about the glaze.

She ate the roll and spent the driver’s sixpence on a cup of tea at a public house near the Abbey, where she sat in a corner and tried to think strategically about her future.

This lasted roughly four minutes.

Then a woman at the next table dropped an entire basket of parcels, and Molly was on her feet before the strategic thinking had properly begun.

“Let me help, please. Those are going everywhere.”

The woman was elderly, small, dressed in lavender, and entirely overwhelmed by the number of packages she had evidently purchased that morning. Molly gathered them from the floor, stacked them in order of size, and carried the whole pile out of the public house while the woman trotted alongside her, explaining that she had a weak wrist, that her usual companion had a cold, and that modern hatboxes were far too slippery.

“Where are you headed?” Molly asked.

“Gay Street. Just past the Circus.”

“I have not the least idea where that is, but I shall carry your packages there with great enthusiasm.”

She carried the packages.

The walk took twenty minutes, during which Molly learned that the woman was Mrs Dalrymple, that Mrs Dalrymple’s cat had recently had kittens, that her daughter had married a vicar in Devonshire and visited far too seldom, and that Mrs Dalrymple believed Bath was deteriorating as a social destination and the waters tasted worse every year.

“You are very kind, dear,” Mrs Dalrymple said, when the packages had been deposited in her hall. “Do you live in Bath?”

“I do now,” Molly said, which was somewhere between a statement of fact and an act of optimism.

“Well, you must come for tea.” Mrs Dalrymple was already untying her bonnet, then paused with the strings half undone, fixing Molly with the particular intensity of a Bath widow committing a stranger to her social calendar. “Tuesdays. I am always at home on Tuesdays.”

Molly added this to her growing mental inventory of Bath assets, which currently consisted of one free roll, one cup of tea, one invitation to Tuesday tea with Mrs Dalrymple, and an increasingly detailed map of streets she had walked that morning while talking to everyone who would stand still long enough to listen.

Tom the crossing-sweeper had given her, with no prompting beyond her asking how his morning went, the entire history of his marriage, his three sons, and his views on the paving. Two women in matching bonnets had directed her to the Pump Room. A boy crying the morning paper had corrected her pronunciation of Pulteney, and seemed quite charmed when she thanked him for it.

Bath was a city full of people, and people were Molly’s medium. She moved through them instinctively, leaving a faint trail of bewildered goodwill wherever she went.

By afternoon, however, the warm wind was flagging. Her ankle had progressed from aching to actively hostile, each step sending a jolt up her shin that made her teeth ache in sympathy. Her dress, which had dried into a wrinkled approximation of respectability, was beginning to attract glances that fell on the wrong side of curious. Her sixpence was gone. Her hair had abandoned all pretence of propriety. And the question she had been outwalking all morning was catching up with her stride by stride, as relentless as a creditor.

Where are you going to sleep tonight?

She was considering this question with the first genuine flicker of dread she had permitted herself all day when she turned a corner onto a quiet side street and saw, halfway down the row, a tidy stone house with a bow window and a hand-lettered sign that read, in sensible black paint: Rooms and Board. Mrs E. Bramble, Proprietress.

There was a cat in the window. A large ginger tom sat upon the sill with the proprietary air of a creature who owned the premises and tolerated the humans out of noblesse oblige. Below the cat, through the glass, Molly could see a front parlour with a fire burning and a table set with a white cloth and, upon the table, a teapot.

She went inside.

This was a decision made entirely by her feet, which had apparently formed an alliance with her stomach and overruled her brain. Her brain was saying something along the lines of, You have no money. You cannot pay for tea. You should keep walking until you find a church, or a charitable institution, or, at minimum, a bench.

Her feet ignored all of this and carried her through the front door and into the parlour, where the warmth of the fire struck her like an embrace, and the smell of tea was so immediate and so perfect that her knees nearly gave way.

“Good afternoon,” said a voice from the kitchen doorway. “Sit down before you fall down, dear. You look as if you have been through a war.”

Mrs Bramble was a woman built for authority. She stood in the doorway like a general surveying a battlefield, shoulders square, apron immaculate, hands planted on hips that had clearly been planted upon for decades and showed no signs of yielding. She was perhaps in her sixties, with dark hair pinned beneath a cap, and she had the sort of face that communicated, simultaneously, that she had seen everything the world had to offer and that very little of it had impressed her.

Her eyes, though, were the tell.

They were quick and dark and warm beneath the briskness, the eyes of someone who had decided long ago that kindness was most efficiently delivered without sentimentality.

Her gaze fell on Molly with a surgeon’s appraisal, assessing damage, calculating remedy, already three steps ahead.

“Sit,” she repeated. “Tea?”

“Please,” Molly said, and sat down at the table so quickly that the cat on the windowsill opened one eye in disapproval.

Mrs Bramble brought tea. She brought bread. She brought butter and a small dish of jam, and set all of it down with the brisk, unhesitating competence of a woman who understood that a girl who looked as this one did required feeding before questioning.

Molly ate.

She ate as a person eats who has been running on one roll, one cup of tea, and the fumes of her own stubbornness since dawn: quickly, gracefully for approximately thirty seconds, and then with an abandon that sacrificed dignity in favour of survival. She was halfway through her second slice of bread before she remembered that she had no money, that she would have to pay for this, and that she had absolutely no means of doing so.

The bread turned to chalk in her mouth.

Mrs Bramble, who had been watching from behind the counter and had served enough desperate strangers to recognise the exact moment when reality arrived, set down the teapot and said, “How much have you got?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Money, dear. How much have you got on you?”

Molly put the bread down. She straightened her spine. She attempted to arrange her face into an expression suggestive of financial solvency, a difficult thing to do with her hair staging a rebellion and her travelling-bag leaking a mismatched shoe.

“I seem to have left my purse at home.”

“Mmm. And where is home?”

“Somerset.”

“And what are you doing in Bath, with no purse and no chaperone, and an ankle that ought to have been seen to hours ago?”

“I am visiting my aunt.”

The lie emerged by pure reflex, weak and transparent, and Molly watched Mrs Bramble receive it with the gentle contempt it deserved.

She took a breath.

The truth was easier than the fiction, actually, once she let herself reach for it.

“That is a lie. I have no aunt. I am running away from a marriage to a terrible man, and I arrived in Bath this morning with a travelling-bag full of poor decisions and a sixpence that I have since spent on tea, and I realise that I have now eaten your bread and drunk your tea and have absolutely no means of compensating you. I am genuinely, deeply sorry, and I would be very happy to wash your dishes.”

Mrs Bramble said nothing for a moment, listening to the low pop and settle of the fire, while the ginger cat yawned elaborately from the windowsill, as though this sort of confession happened at least twice weekly and he had grown weary of the drama.

She regarded Molly for a long, steady breath. She took in the damp copper hair, the bruise on her jaw, the swollen ankle, and the travelling-bag with its absurd protruding shoe. At last, her gaze settled on Molly’s eyes, which were brown and bright and brimming with a terror the girl’s smile was working very hard to keep beneath the surface.

Mrs Bramble made a decision.

It was a decision she had made before, more than once. For a kitchen maid whose husband had left bruises in places sleeves could cover. For a widow whose landlord had tried to collect rent in a currency that was not money. And, thirty years ago, for herself, when she had walked out of a bad situation with a valise and a refusal to go back, and had built this house with nothing but her own two hands.

She recognised courage.

Even when it was dressed up as chaos and eating bread it had no way of paying for.

“You may have a room for three nights,” she said, drying her hands on her apron with the brisk finality of a woman closing a ledger.

Molly stared at her. “I—thank you. I cannot—”

“You can thank me by answering plainly.” Mrs Bramble set the towel aside. “This terrible man you mentioned. Does he have a name?”

Molly’s fingers tightened around the edge of her plate.

“Lord Vyne.”

Mrs Bramble’s face did not change, but her eyes sharpened. “And your father means you to marry him, I take it?”

“He—yes,” Molly said, too quickly. “He thinks of the estate, and the tenants, and the debts, and my mother’s grave, and all the reasons that make it seem less monstrous if one says them in the proper order.”

“But monstrous it remains.”

Molly looked down. “Yes.”

A silence passed between them, brief but sufficient.

“At least we know what we are about,” Mrs Bramble said. “Three nights. After that, we shall sit down properly and discuss terms.”

“I could work.” Molly’s voice caught, just slightly, on the edge of a gratitude she was trying very hard to keep from becoming tears. “I am excellent at… well, I am certain I am excellent at something. I learn quickly. I have been told I have a pleasant manner, and I can carry a conversation, and I am moderately good at arranging things, and I am very willing to scrub anything that requires scrubbing.”

“Can you be quiet for more than a minute?”

“That is… less certain.”

Mrs Bramble made a sound that was nearly a laugh, caught it, and converted it into a pragmatic sigh.

“The room is at the top of the stairs. Second door on the left. The sheets are clean, the door locks, and breakfast is at seven. The cat’s name is Wellington. He will judge you, but he judges everyone, so you should take no personal offence.”

“I would never take offence from a cat of such obvious distinction.”

“Mercy preserve me,” Mrs Bramble muttered, and turned back towards the kitchen.

She paused in the doorway.

“What is your name, girl?”

“Molly. Molly Granger.”

“Well, Molly Granger. You have three days. Use them wisely.”

She disappeared into the kitchen, and Molly heard the sound of crockery being moved with pointed efficiency.

She sat at the table in the warm parlour with her cold tea and her empty plate and the cat regarding her from the windowsill, and thought, I am in a place I have never seen before, in a house belonging to a woman I met mere minutes ago, with a swollen ankle, no money, no plan, and not the faintest notion what I am to do tomorrow.

She caught the cat’s eye. He held hers, unblinking.

“I am going to be fine,” she told him. “I am resourceful and cheerful, and I have survived an entire day on one roll and the kindness of strangers, and I am going to figure this out.”

The cat flicked his tail once, which Molly chose to interpret as cautious agreement.

The room at the top of the stairs was small, clean, and spare, with a narrow bed, a washstand, and a window that looked out over a little garden. It was the most beautiful room she had ever seen, because it was hers, and because the door locked, and because no one in this house was going to study her as Lord Vyne had studied her across her father’s dining table. Because, for the first time in a long while, she could breathe all the way to the bottom of her lungs without the weight of someone else’s plans pressing down upon her chest.

She sat on the bed.

She opened the travelling-bag and took out the contents one by one: two dresses, wrinkled beyond social acceptability; a hairbrush; a novel she had read twice; one evening shoe in pale blue silk; and her mother’s locket, which she lifted out last and held in her palm, running her thumb over the clasp.

“I did it, Mama,” she whispered. “I jumped.”

The locket was warm from the bag. The room was quiet. Somewhere below, she could hear Mrs Bramble moving through the kitchen, and the low domestic clatter of a household easing into its evening rhythm, and it sounded like safety. Like walls built to keep things out rather than keep things in.

She unclasped the locket.

The tiny portrait inside was her mother’s face, painted in miniature, smiling as Molly remembered her smiling—with her entire self, as though joy were something she had too much of and was forever looking for places to put it down.

Molly closed the locket, fastened it around her neck, and lay back on the narrow bed. Her ankle throbbed, and every muscle in her body was registering complaints that she had been too busy to hear all day.

Three days.

Mrs Bramble had given her three days.

She was going to need every single hour.