Page 74

She shook. She had not walked this house in the open since the guests came. She had not shown her face openly in daylight to anyone but Mrs. Roskelly, Cook, and Elias in years. Out there she would meet stares and pointing fingers and whispers. She would meet the look people tried to hide and failed.

But Angelo was out there. Angelo, who had kissed the stain in the moon. Angelo, who had said bellissima and tesoro and seemed to mean them. Angelo, who was climbing into a coach at this minute and rolling away, perhaps for good.

“You are right.” The words were barely sound. “You are right. I have to go. I have to …”

She was already moving. She took the passages toward the nearest door. Her heart beat so loud it drowned the house. She found the hidden stair, then the slim run behind the kitchen, then the leaf that gave near the yard.

She came into day like something out of a cave. The leaf scraped her sleeve. She blinked at the size of the sky. Gray February, and it felt vast after the walls because there was no ceiling and no sure turn. Wind hit her face, cold and salt, and she gasped at it. Gravel of the yard pressed under her thin slippers. A hen fussed somewhere out of sight. The world was loud when a person was not in stone.

“Miss Isolde!”

From the left. She spun. Elias stood with the shears stopped over a hedge, his face slack.

Of course. Elias had known for years. He had worked the beds beside her in a quiet that asked no questions, and looked away when she took the walls. He had never seen her like this. She knew how she must look to him. She looked wild, with her hair down, running for the yard as if hunted.

“The coach,” she got out, not stopping to explain. “Mr. Scott’s coach. Where?”

“The Italian gentleman?” He lowered the shears, squint deepening. “If it’s the coach ye want, miss, the gentleman and his man have just gone.”

The words did not land at first. She stood and stared as if he had spoken another tongue.

“Gone,” she repeated. “Just now?”

“Aye, miss. Not five minutes. I watched ‘em myself.” A vague hand toward the cliff road. “Truro way, I believe. Mr. Scott had a trunk. I don’t reckon he’ll be back before he’s a mind to.”

A trunk. He had packed. This was not a turn about the lanes. Why pack a trunk if he meant to sleep here tonight?

The yard tipped. She put a hand to the stable stone and felt lichen under her palm, and made her legs hold. A pigeon clapped off the roof and she flinched as if it had been a shout. Five minutes. She had been five minutes late. A life could turn on less. She knew that. Papa had gone in an hour. Angelo had gone in five minutes she had spent finding a grate.

“Miss Isolde?” Alarm under the gravel of his voice. “Are ye well? Ye’ve gone awful pale.”

“I am …” She could not finish. She was not well. She was as far from well as a body got. She stood in day for the first time in weeks with her heart in pieces, and the man she loved was going down a cliff road because she had been too proud, too frightened, and too marked in the mind to let him near.

“It is my doing.” More to herself than to him. “All of it. I played a game. Would not answer when he called through the iron. Told myself I was owed the quiet, that he had cut me and earned the dark. He never did a true wrong. He offered a kindness and I threw it back.”

Elias stood with a face she could not read under the old cap. She knew she was spilling to a man who had not asked. She could not stop.

“I thought he would keep trying. That I would soften, and he would still be there, ready to forgive the cruelty. That is not fair. That is not how a person is kept. You cannot ask a man to keep reaching while you only push.”

Her mouth shook. She set her teeth. She would not cry in front of Elias. She had done her crying in the tower. She was done with it.

“Angelo was clean of it,” she said, bitter and without a wobble. “He could not carry the blame for every soul who turned from me. The vicar’s wife did the hurting. The boy who pointed did the hurting. Not him. And I made him pay their score.”

She laughed. It was a bad sound, and it scraped coming out.

“Perhaps I only wanted someone to pay. After years of being helpless, of watching and never striking back at a world that would not look at me … Perhaps he was near. Perhaps I made him a mark for a store of anger.”

Elias cleared his throat. “Miss,” he said, the gravel still in it, “I don’t claim to know what’s passed between ye and the young gentleman. I’ve kept these grounds near fifty years. I’ve seen a fair bit. And I’ll tell ye this.”

He paused and squinted toward the road where the coach was already lost past the bend.

“A man doesn’t take a trunk and go hunting a rare bloom unless he means to come back. And a woman doesn’t come out of the walls in open day unless she’s ready, at last, to be looked at.”

She stared. A weak spark of hope woke in her. “You think he will come?”

“I think,” Elias said, taking his time with it, “what happens next sits with ye. Ye can take the passages and the hiding and yer father’s charge. Ye can spend what’s left of yer years at a grate, wishing ye’d been brave enough to live.”

He met her eyes. The weathered face had gone grave.