“It’s them,” Jasper said. “My agents. They’ve captured the Thibodeaux.” His voice had lost the sharp air of command. His shoulders had softened, his whole body seeming to let go of some indefinable attitude of tension and responsibility. His hand, as he lowered his gun, was trembling slightly. “It’s over. It’s over, Lyddie.”
She sat down hard in the desk chair. There was plaster dust all over it—the hole in the wall was not so far above where her head had been in the seconds before she dove under the desk.
And to her surprise, the man who could only be Davis Bairdfell to his knees in front of her. He reached out and clutched her hands in his.
She stared at him in utter consternation.
He was certainly Arthur’s brother—there was no doubt of that. His hair was darker, and he was built on a smaller scale, his body lean and compact—but the curls were Arthur’s, and the cheekbones, and the arched curve of his mouth.
“Lydia,” he said hoarsely. “I’m so sorry.”
She blinked down at him. There was a tiny raw scrape across his cheek. Her dark blue dress was smeared across the knees with plaster dust. Their hands were locked together in her lap.
Six weeks ago—or else a thousand years—she had imagined that the first time she met the man with whom she’d corresponded since 1815, they would simply recognize each other and fall into the habit of conversation built by three years of letters.
And somehow, her imagination had been right.
She recognized him. Sheknewhim, Davis Baird. He had deceived her, had used her for information—but he had not meant to hurt her. He’d wanted to tell her the truth and had been prevented from doing so by forces beyond his own will or desire. She could forgive him for the secrets he’d kept, just as she could forgive her own brother.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Davis. It’s all right.”
“It’s not.” He looked up. His face was pale and fixed intently on hers, his green eyes fierce and encompassing. “I know I have no right to ask this of you,” he murmured, “but—will you marry me?”
There was a very long silence.
Her brain refused to parse the words he’d said. It seemed distantly possible that she’d forgotten how to speak English. Perhaps the gunfire at close proximity had broken something inside her ears.
“I—beg your pardon?” she choked out.
He stared up at her, his expression tender and hopeful. “Make me the happiest man in the world,” he said earnestly. “Marry me, Lydia Hope-Wallace.”
There was a long frozen moment in which she tried to think what she could possibly say to such a thing.
Then she lifted her eyes to where Arthur stood bracing the door.
But he was not at the door any longer. The threshold was empty, the door swinging slowly and crookedly on its broken hinge. She could see the long hall, the wooden stairs—the corridor silent and still as a grave.
Arthur was gone.
Chapter 28
I see now that I should have spoken. I waited too long. With my silence, I let you think that I did not love you, when love for you was the marrow of my bones. If there is one thing I regret above all others, it is that. That I let you believe, even for one instant, that you were less than everything to me.
—from the unsent papers of Arthur Baird
He had wasted a fortune in paper, Arthur reflected as he stared blearily about the downstairs drawing room at Strathrannoch Castle.
He’d started the first letter to her within hours of buying his fare on the mail coach. He’d been surrounded by letters—had watched the mailbags fill and empty and fill again as the post was delivered—and he’d thought,Yes. Write to her. Tell her how you feel.
He’d started to write on a fragment of an envelope dropped by a grandmother in the seat beside him, which seemed to him an unfortunate metaphor for the state of his suit. What a prize for the woman he loved beyond measure: a torn piece of paper, used and discarded by a stranger.
But he’d taken up the scrap and put his pencil to it right there in the coach, desperate to find the words to tell her—everything. The declaration that had frozen, time and again, upon his tongue. The words he did not know if she would welcome or spurn.
He wanted, foolishly, for her to have letters from him. Real letters—not his own words in Davis’s hand. Nothing but the truth of his heart, plain and painful and unvarnished.
He tried to summon forth the words—again and again he tried, scribbled apologies and confessions and avowals.
But everything came out wrong. With each mile the mail coach put between them, his sense of apprehension grew. He’d thought—
