“Christ.” He ran his fingers through his curls, which were a little sweaty and standing out in all directions. “That was good work. Brave and deft.”
Her face warmed at the praise. “I screamed the whole time.”
“Aye. I might be deaf in my left ear now.”
She lifted her gaze to his face. He was not smiling, but she thought there might be a hint of amusement at the corner of his mouth.
“But that doesn’t make it any less brave,” he said. “More, I think. Not less.”
She looked down at her slippers and did not respond.
She’d experienced a pure animal terror on the horse’s back,with Strathrannoch’s dirk clutched in her fist. But fear was not a new emotion for her. She felt it when she had to enter a ballroom and a hundred pairs of eyes fixed upon her as she was announced.
She’d felt it—cold and paralyzing—the first time she’d delivered a manuscript to Selina at Belvoir’s. She’d passed the argument for universal suffrage across Selina’s desk and looked down at her own neat handwriting, the product of eleven painstaking drafts.
Selina’s wide mouth had been tilted crookedly up, half a familiar smile. “Are you certain?”
Lydia’s hands had trembled, and so she’d locked them behind her back.
What hope could there be for change without universal suffrage? Why would anything ever improve in the British Empire if a handful of terrible men controlled its fate and answered to no one?
How could she expect to make a difference if she let herself be ruled by her fears?
“I’m certain,” she’d said. “Print it.”
With every manuscript she’d delivered to Belvoir’s—her arguments for divorce reform, the anti-royalist tracts that could very well land her in prison—she’d known that same throat-tightening terror. But she went on anyway, just as she had cut the leathers and saved Georgiana and the carriage from disaster.
Because some things were worth the panic and the potential for humiliation. Some things mattered more than her own personal dread.
They were almost back to the post-chaise. She licked her dusty, salt-grimed lips and thought about Strathrannoch and the invention his brother had stolen. She thought about the farmers dragged from their homes in the Clearances and the aristocratswho believed the land they lived upon was owed to them by right of nothing more than being born.
She thought about her fears and her humiliations, and then she put them aside.
“I will do it,” she told him.
He looked down. His shirt was wrinkled, and she could see the golden column of his throat. “Do what?”
“I will write to Belvoir’s and stay here until they reply. We can examine the letters together. I should not have tried to flee.”
His eyes flickered over her face, but he did not say anything. He nodded once, a quick and stark acceptance.
“By the by,” she said, “why do you possess a herd of wild zebras?”
Chapter 6
Entrap in gatehouse. Entrap in barbican.Entrap in bedchamber—enlist Fern?
—from the private notes of Bertie Palmer, hastily concealed upon the arrival of his employer
Arthur was not entirely certain what had changed in Miss Hope-Wallace between when she’d lit out from his castle like her slippers were afire and when they’d returned, perspiring and dusty and dragging two trunks between them.
Actually, he could identify several things that had changed. Her attire, for one—somehow she’d gone from something filmy and pale green to a riding habit now splotched with dirt from hem to shoulder. Her hair too—in the morning, her vivid hair had been caught in a neat coil at the base of her neck, but now it was free and straggling loose down her back, sticking in her mouth, where she swiped at it absentmindedly with a hand.
Everything about her physical person had gone disheveled and unruly, and he—
Bleeding Christ if he didn’t like it all much too much.
He’d lost his head for a moment when he’d had her in his lap on Luath’s back. He’d been half-mad with relief that he’d gotten to her in time. When he’d seen her clutching her horse’s black mane, her face white with terror, his mind had been evacuated of everything but fierce, ravaging purpose.Get to her. Keep her safe.
