Authors: Courtney Milan
The spectators broke out in laughter. And as Harcroft
realized it was directed at him, his countenance darkened. He took two steps down the aisle toward Louisa.
“What are you going to do, Harcroft? Force me?” Louisa laughed as she spoke. Kate knew exactly how hard it must have been for her to do that. “In front of all these people? No,
darling.
I’ll come home when you deliver a suitable apology. For
everything
you have done.”
The earl’s hands fisted at his sides. His jaw twitched in a murderous, violent anger. Kate saw his eyes sweep across the entire crowd.
“Well, my lord,” said the magistrate hopefully. “Shall we call this all’s well that ends well?”
Harcroft turned to look at the man. “I suppose this proceeding is over, Your Worship.” His eyes fell on Kate. “But it’s not over. Not until I’ve delivered the apology my wife deserves.”
A
FTER THE MAGISTRATE BANGED
his gavel and pronounced the court in recess again, pandemonium broke out. Ned barely managed to remain standing, buffeted as he was on all sides by the intrepid young men from the gossip rags. They dashed pell-mell through the door, nearly tripping over Ned’s feet in their haste to deliver the story.
Harcroft took one long look at Louisa, and then marched down the aisle toward her. Louisa didn’t cringe, even though he stalked up to her stiff-legged. She didn’t look away. They’d practiced that in the carriage—although, under the circumstances, Ned hadn’t managed to project even a tiny portion of the menace that Harcroft had. Oddly enough, it hadn’t been the pain that had posed
the greatest difficulty. He’d gone somewhere beyond hurt, to a world where pain no longer had any meaning. It was the problem of keeping himself firmly in the present that had proved a challenge.
And he had to be in the present now. Harcroft reached for his wife. Ned wasn’t sure what the earl intended, but Ned had promised Louisa her husband wouldn’t touch her. Before he could grab her arm, Ned interposed his own body between them in a graceless, lurching motion. He intercepted Harcroft’s outstretched arm with a handshake.
“Get out of my way, Carhart,” Harcroft said through the gritted teeth of his false smile.
“Your wife has a pistol in her reticule,” Ned responded quietly. “If you touch her, she’ll shoot you.”
Harcroft glanced behind Ned. “Death threats,” he finally said. “How quaint.” He cast his wife another, more vicious look. “Enjoy your freedom,” he hissed. “I hear there are excellent sanitariums in Switzerland.”
At those words, Ned felt an inappropriate cheer. So he
had
guessed correctly—Harcroft had filed a petition in lunacy in the courts of Chancery. Not really a cause for rejoicing, but at least they’d been correct about that much. Good thing they’d managed to confuse
that
suit, at least. But cheer was a mistake. With happiness came feeling; with feeling came the urge to beat his head against a wall until he passed out and could feel pain no more. Harcroft simply glared one last time, and then stalked out of the room.
The real reason Ned had made it all this way—the real reason he’d suffered these past hours—was coming
slowly down the aisle. Kate looked wonderful—small and delicate, and yet strong and indomitable. The sort of woman who might take on magistrates and madmen alike, and never blink in surprise when they crumpled at her feet.
She approached, and he wanted to fold her into an embrace. He would have, were it not for the certainty that if he let go of the back of the bench he was clutching, he would fall forward onto his face.
She stopped before him, smiling shyly. He could appreciate the beauty of that smile, even through the gray haze of pain that enveloped him.
“You,” she said, “look both wonderful and awful at the same time.”
“Do you like the attire? I have always dreamed of setting a new fashion in road-weary gentlemen’s attire. I call this particular knot in my cravat ‘The Incompetent.’”
She shook her head in puzzlement. “What cravat?”
“Precisely.”
She laughed. Good to know he could still make her do that, even under these circumstances. “Turn for me,” she suggested, “and let me get the full sense of the fashion.”
“Oh, no. I’m already spinning,” he informed her solemnly. And he was. The room inscribed a lazy orbit around him. He could track the path of her face, trekking across the sky like a moon on a cloudless night.
Louisa took Ned’s elbow. “Kate, there is something you need to know.”
Kate glanced at Ned again, and a hint of worry flashed
across her brow. “You look as if you’re about to fall down.”
No. Not that. He’d proven…he’d proven…he’d proven something fairly clever and intelligent, and as soon as the room stopped whirling about, he would let her know what it was.
“Here,” Kate was saying. She took his other elbow, and then she and Louisa were guiding him toward a chair. He landed in a heavy thud that jarred his leg.
“You’ve been up all night,” Kate was saying. “You’re tired. And your trousers are ripped. Did you take a spill on the road?”
“I think he must have sprained his ankle,” Louisa said. “He limps.”
They were talking about him as if he were not there. In another world, another place, that would have bothered him. But Ned felt curiously as if he were not quite present. It was quite clever of them to sense that.
Kate sat down next to him.
“Sprained your ankle?” she was saying. “What on earth were you doing standing on it just now? Was this some attempt to prove some idiotic masculine point?” Her fingers against his neck were far more gentle than her words.
He thought about explaining that he hadn’t
sprained
his
ankle,
but somehow he did not think she would find the truth more palatable.
“If I can do this,” he told her seriously, “I can do anything. And if I can do anything—”
Then he never, ever had to worry about finding himself on a little rowboat in the ocean again.
But she didn’t know the whole of that story. “Well, you can’t do
everything,
” she said, as if reason and logic mattered. “You can’t walk on a sprained ankle. Thick skull.” She was smoothing his hair against his brow. Before he could protest that he obviously
could,
she patted his head. “I won’t let you.”
She was smiling. He was supposed to smile back. He couldn’t quite make his lips do more than curl in a wretched little half grimace.
“What is it?” she asked. “Here. We need to get you home, to a physician. Blakely, you’ll have to help.”
“No,” Ned protested. “No—I don’t need any help. Not from Gareth.”
“Ned,” Jenny was saying, “do you want me to—”
“Not you,
especially
not from you, Jenny. I can do it myself.”
“He’s been this recalcitrant the entire morning,” Louisa said. “I don’t even understand how he managed to walk inside.”
“Riding boot is long and stiff enough that it makes a decent splint.” Ned shut his eyes. It didn’t make the pain any better. “And this isn’t about me and my stupid little broken leg. That will heal. We need to see to Lady Harcroft first.”
“Broken leg?” Kate’s voice was dangerous in his ears. “What do you mean,
broken leg?
I thought you had a sprain.”
“Oh,” Ned said uncomfortably. “Did I say that?”
He had.
He wasn’t sure how he got to the carriage. On the ride home, Kate fussed over him, her breath hissing in with
every turn of the carriage as if she were the one feeling the pain. As if he were some damned weakling, to cry out at every little hurt that came his way.
He was already floating on a fog of pain so pervasive, a little gentle rocking had no meaning. As they alighted, Kate went to his side. He didn’t need support. If he could do this, he could do
anything.
He was clinging to that thought, he knew, because the alternative was to faint like a girl.
If he could finish this—see Lady Harcroft safe, get Kate home, placate his cousin’s worries and solve the universal problems of poverty and war, while he was at it—well,
then
he would know he was good enough.
“Kate,” he growled as she tried to get her shoulder under his arm to offer support, “let me do it.”
“Blakely.” Kate’s voice seemed very far away. “Help.”
“I don’t need help,” Ned insisted. It seemed like a very reasonable statement as he made it. “I can do it on my own. I can stand on my own two feet.”
But there were hands on his back, arms around him, grabbing him, lifting him from his feet and threatening his last hold on consciousness.
“No,” he protested weakly, “put me down.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Ned.”
They were the last words he heard, and he wasn’t even sure who uttered them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“I
FEEL LIKE AN IDIOT.”
Kate stopped in the hallway. She stood just outside her own parlor, and yet she suddenly felt like an intruder in her own home. It wasn’t the words that arrested her; it was the fact that they’d been spoken by Lord Blakely, who had always struck her as the opposite of an idiot. Intimidatingly intelligent, in fact.
Stopping was not a good idea. In the past few hours, her duties as a hostess had carried her forward. After the relief she’d felt at the end of her trial, she could have collapsed. Instead, she’d settled Louisa in a suite of rooms with her baby and left Lord and Lady Blakely in the parlor. Ned had not been conscious when the physician had come, cut away his boot, and pronounced his diagnosis. So Kate had been there as well.
She hadn’t had time to stop. Kate had come to convey the news to Lord and Lady Blakely, who were waiting patiently for word of him. She hadn’t come to overhear their conversation. She surely hadn’t come to lean against the wall, fatigue threatening to overwhelm her. But now that she’d halted, she couldn’t quite make herself move again.
“Well. You aren’t the only one.” That wry, tired voice belonged to Lady Blakely.
Lord and Lady Blakely had always struck Kate as rather a conundrum. Lord Blakely seemed cold; he always looked to be watching everyone and finding fault. She’d had the impression that he had at first considered whether Kate was a potential human being—and once he’d answered the question in the negative, had ignored her thereafter.
Lady Blakely, on the other hand, had tried to encourage Kate into friendship at first. And perhaps at second and third. It was Kate who had turned away from her.
“She didn’t like you,” Lord Blakely said shortly. “I assumed she had to be ten kinds of a useless fool.”
Kate felt a flush go through her. They were talking about
her.
No doubt they thought they were having a private conversation, even if it was being held in her parlor. She needed to clear her throat, or trip over the door as she came into the room. At the very least, she could do them the courtesy of coughing very,
very
loudly.
But she didn’t. Instead, she held her breath.
“People don’t have to like me,” Lady Blakely said with amusement. “You didn’t, at first.”
“That’s calumny.” A longer pause. “If we’d known, if she had felt she could come to us, none of this would have happened. Ned’s leg. Being charged with a crime—in a police court, of all places, and God above, will the gossip rags go on about that. Jenny, she’s a
Carhart.
I’m responsible for her. And I let this happen. All because I let myself be fooled into thinking she was precisely as she seemed on the surface.”
Kate had spent most of her life having people dismiss her because of the way she looked. Even put in these
stark terms, the hidden approval in those words shook her. She’d sent Blakely the letter, telling him everything she’d done. And now it was too late to take it back.
“She’s not quite as useless as she seems, is she? I do recall
someone
might have said something along those lines….”
“Don’t gloat,” Blakely huffed. “It doesn’t help.”
“Does this help?”
No answer. Kate hardly wanted to be the source of marital strife. She peered into the room. Lord and Lady Blakely sat next to each other on the divan; the marquess had turned to his wife, and his head rested against her shoulder. Her hands ruffled his hair gently. The couple looked upset, tired and altogether miserable. Nobody would have looked at them and imagined them
happy.
And yet still it hurt to watch that easy intimacy, to see that comfortable sharing of burdens. It was almost a physical pain she felt, stabbing into her. So this was what a happy marriage looked like, even under circumstances that were far from happy. This was what it really meant—not that they never suffered, but that when they did, they shared their burdens.
Does this help?
Three words she could never imagine saying to Ned—not without him freezing and walking out of the room. With a broken leg, no less.
This
was what she wanted—this trust from her husband. And while she could rely on him, he’d told her in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want her close enough to offer assistance.
Kate crept from the room, not quite understanding what she’d just witnessed, or why it had shaken her so. She
knew only that if she entered, the tired mass of burdens she carried might overwhelm her.
If you fall,
Ned had once told her,
I will catch you.
She now knew precisely how true this was. He was strong, powerful and
reliable
—so much that she might lean on him for support, not even realizing as she did so that he was walking on a broken leg.
This feeling that she might throw herself backward and he would catch her, no matter the consequences—this blind and unhesitating
trust
—this was what love really looked like. Love was courage. It was shyness made gregarious, softness rendered strong. It was all her secret vulnerabilities trusted to him, and transmuted into hidden strength.
But there was pain in that realization. That moment of intimacy she’d witnessed between the marquess and his wife burned in her mind. Lord Blakely had had no compunction about leaning on his lady.