Four
Gwendolyn lay on her bed, staring into the fire, the warped square of paper, folded, franked, waxed, opened, warming between her fingers. Whatever message it had once held no longer discernable. She should not fear it.
The woman she’d made herself into would not. She’d scoff and storm up to the villain and shake the letter in his face, demanding answers.
Gwendolyn had built a new life, found a purpose, shed her younger, softer self, and become someone harder, less gullible. Lady Mary would have burned it, terrified and trembling. Gwendolyn would not do that, but she could not decide what, if anything, to do with it at all. That the marquess had sent the letter to Marianne meant he did not know where Gwendolyn was. She remained safe. For now. If the runner who called himself the marquess’s man could find her nearest friend, the only person from her old life she still had contact with, then he could likely find her sooner or later. Perhaps he already had. He could have waited outside the shop until Gwendolyn stopped by. He could have followed her to the Cavendish townhome.
She rubbed her hands up and down her arms as a shiver raced down her spine. She was not safe. Neither was Marianne. What if the marquess decided to use her to gain Gwendolyn’s attention? Even when she’d married his son, she’d heard rumors of the father’s reputation for licentiousness, cruelty, and depravity. When she’d married, Daniel had sworn they would not meet, that his father was not accepted into good ton. She never had cause to find out, though, because he’d kept her in a small cottage in the country, visiting only a few times a month.
She’d only met the marquess after the scandal had broken, and she’d found herself in London as a witness in one of the most talked about trials of the decade.
She stood and strode for the fire, the bookshelf on the right-hand side where she kept her personal sketchbooks, different from the ones she handed Lord Eaden after each trip. She pulled one of the oldest from the shelf and flipped through it. The first several pages depicted, in watercolors, the bright image of a pastoral cottage, roses climbing up the sides, the sun bright above it. The cottage continued on each page, but the sky disappeared, and the roses withered, and soon a wraith of a woman appeared in a window, looking out, alone. The final pages depicted the wraith woman on crowded London streets, pressed on all sides by laughing faces, pointing fingers curled like demon claws. The very final page held the painting of a tower. Roses wrapped round it up to the very top, bloodred and with more thorns than blooms. The sky behind the tower streaked dark and starless, and the wraith woman at the only window stared out, blank and soulless.
Gwendolyn slammed the book closed. Not her. Not any longer. May Lady Mary rest in peace. She replaced it on the shelf, reached for a more recent sketchbook and flipped through it.
Another tower repeated page after page, but this one connected to a French castle. The sky behind it glittered bright with stars, dancing, laughing, sighing, and the wraith woman at the window looked down, her eyes burning with actual fire. A man climbed the tower, a grin on his lips. She waited for him and welcomed him and wanted him. She pressed her fingers to her lips, which felt swollen thinking of that night, then pressed her fingers to the man. She’d painted him so bright he almost glowed, and if one looked close enough, they would see the faint outline of wings at his shoulders, large and strong, and meant for carrying her away.
A fairy tale.
Her paintings were the only place she was able to imagine good for herself.
She snapped the book shut and paced to the window, pressed her forehead against the cold glass to cool her body from her heated memories.
Something caught her eye, though. She peered into the darkness below. A man strode across the street to the garden at the square’s center.
Jackson.
She pressed a palm to the glass and closed her eyes, losing herself, once more, in the memories of their night together, what it had felt like to be Mistress Midnight to his Lord Mischief. Hidden but more fully herself than she’d ever been before or since.
His cousins thought she hurt him just by being near him. But being near him gave herlife. They could not understand. They had always been loved. She rested her forehead against the glass. She must stop lying to herself. Theydidhave the means to understand the complications of the heart and of life. The entire time their father had been exploring the world with Jackson and Gwendolyn, they’d been home. Without him. Unsure of his love, weary and wounded. She’d recognized it in them the first time they’d met. Only they had healed their hearts now, had found their homes.
Gwendolyn had not. Could not see a future in which she would.
She raised the letter, holding the stark-white square against the dark peeking in from outside. Would he always chase her? What did he want?
Below, Jackson creaked open the gate and disappeared into the garden, a shadow of a man as he’d been the only night they’d kissed.
What was he doing? He’d not been at dinner that evening and had seemed distracted in Henry’s study. More distracted than she’d ever seen him before. Did the thought of going home so displease him, then? Why?
If he had demons like her own, he never spoke of them, never hinted at them. Did he feel about returning to Seastorm as she felt about returning to London? Did he hate it? Did it sit heavy in his gut and anxious in his feet, telling him to run as far as possible and not look back?
Not Jackson. Surely not him. Sunny, charming, teasing, and sweet. A man like that had no shadows in his soul.
Her boots somehow found their way onto her feet. She pulled her pelisse on over her shift, threw her shawl around her shoulders, and buried her letter beneath her pillow.
The clock’s hourly announcement echoed through the halls as she crept toward the door. Midnight. Appropriate that the hour would pull her to him as inexorably as time dragged the sun across the sky. The wind outside swept cold across the night sky, sinking deep past skin and muscle to chill her very bones.
He stood a silent, shadowy sentinel beneath the branches of a tree at the garden’s edge. No leaves rustled above, all stolen by winter’s skeletal hand.
She did not join him, but stood just beyond the branches, letting the curved sliver of moon spill light onto her. “Jackson,” she whispered. She could never call him Mr. Cavendish at midnight, not her Lord Mischief.
He turned, and she could not yet see his face, but the dark oval acquired fuzzy detail as he strode toward her. When he stepped into the moonlight, his face beamed joy.
“Gweny. You came to me.” A note of pleased curiosity wrapped about the warmth of the words. “I saw you in your window as I walked up to the townhouse and wondered if you saw me. If you did, whether or not you cared.”
She expected him to reach for her, but he clasped his hands behind his back.
“I care,” she snapped. “But you do not seem to care for your own well-being. Where is your coat? And why do you never remember to actually wear it?”
