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Realisation slammed him in the stomach.
A very ancient and valuable emerald, fashioned to look like a tiger’s eye…
He stared at the jewel and felt his mouth open. Drunk as he was, perhaps Hyde felt the shift in the atmosphere, or perhaps some spark of memory ignited a subconscious recognition.
‘Get out,’ he slurred, his face darkening. ‘Get out of my bloody sight and don’t come back.’
‘Very good, sir.’ Jem’s hatred rose from him, like heat. ‘I’ll say good night.’
Up in the attic, the frost crept in curlicues across the black windowpane and the candle flame stuttered in the icy drafts. Hours after the house had settled and the girls’ muted voices across the landing had fallen silent, Kate waited, pacing the floor to keep warm and to work off her agitation.
Her indecision.
She had vowed never again. What had happened in the summer was the kind of madness that led to nothing but trouble. She had allowed her judgement to be impaired, her professionalism compromised. She had rediscovered something in herself, but lost sight of her responsibilities. She should count herself lucky that she had come to her senses before anything truly disastrous happened. What was she doing, unlocking the door and opening herself up to that risk again?
The creased scrap of paper was on the desk, but she didn’t need to read it again to remember what it said; the words had been echoing around her head all evening. There are things I need to say. He may not actually have added before I leave, but still she heard it, and it chilled her.
It was inevitable, really. He’d never belonged at Coldwell. He wasn’t like Thomas, or the Twigg boys: someone who would keep his head down and plod on, accepting what he was given without question. He would never settle in this out-of-the-way old house, nor have his will bent to the tyrannical rule of Sir Randolph and Henderson. He didn’t have to explain that to her.
Perhaps it would be better if he didn’t.
The key to the dividing door between the attics was on the desk, beside his note. She imagined herself picking it up, tiptoeing out into the corridor, and sliding it silently into the lock. In less than a minute, she would be back in her room and could undress and slip between the cold sheets, and leave it all behind: the summer of madness they had shared, the thrill of secret glances in the servants’ hall, brushed fingertips when passing a cup or a laden tray. She could forget, in time, that a handsome footman called Jem Arden had ever been at Coldwell and had brought her briefly back to herself. After a while, the pleasure and exhilaration and sense of possibility she had felt with him would become a faded dream.
The candle flame swayed in a sudden current of air. Her taut nerves hummed. She stood up, reaching for the key, but a soft step on the landing told her she was too late.
Swiftly she crossed the room and opened the door. It need not be too late: she could tell him to go back—he wasn’t like Henderson, he would do as she asked. But every sound seemed vastly magnified in the listening house; the creak of the old floorboards as he slipped into the room, the squeak of hinges and the click of the latch as he closed the door behind him. She pictured Eliza and Abigail, Susan and Doris lying a few feet away, heaped beneath their eiderdowns, and couldn’t trust herself to speak.
And besides, she couldn’t think of the words. Not when he was standing only inches away, half-hidden by the shadows, the gold of the candle glinting in his eyes, gilding the ridge of his cheekbone, the edge of his upper lip.
‘It’s so late… I thought he’d never go to bed.’ His voice was a breath. ‘You’re shivering…’
In one fluid movement, he slipped off his jacket and came closer, putting it around her shoulders so she was enveloped in his warmth. Neither of them moved, and their eyes held as the silence pooled around them, the ripples of sound spreading outwards and dying away.
‘Kate—’
She knew what he was going to say. She wasn’t sure what form his goodbye would take, only that she didn’t want to hear it. Perhaps it was pride as much as anything that made her press her finger to his lips; the fact that she would be left here, in this stagnant backwater, while he rejoined the current of life and was carried away from her. Perhaps it was some perverse instinct for self-preservation that made her want to put off the moment of parting, not just from him but from the woman she had been when she was with him. Or maybe it was simply a childish refusal to accept reality that made her take his face between her hands as she kissed him, the need to snatch a few more moments in her blissful fool’s paradise before it was lost to her forever.
With a soft moan he kissed her back, grasping the lapels of the jacket and pulling her against him, where she fitted the contours of his body.
It was as if she was watching from outside herself. Marvelling at the abandonment of the woman in black, who fumbled at the buttons of his shirt and slid her hands inside and pushed it off his shoulders, so his bare skin gleamed like burnished ivory in the candle glow. Envying her as he worked free the small buttons of her dress and unhooked her corset, bending his head to brush his lips along her collarbone, to press them against the swell of her breast above her chemise. Storing up the images, the memory, to feed on later, when he was gone.
But then the watching part of her was pulled back into her pulsing, shivering, arching body, and there was nothing but that moment, stretched and exquisite, and the darkness beyond the circle of candlelight.
Outside the window the silent stars went by.
Eliza woke.
At night, the baby—freed from its tight-laced restraints—rolled and flipped inside her like a fish in a barrel. And yet it wasn’t that, nor the burn of acid at the base of her throat that had jolted her from sleep, but a noise. A cry.
An owl perhaps. Or a fox? Something high and primal, quickly hushed.
She lay in the darkness, listening, as the child inside her arched and stretched, nudging her bladder and pushing the air from her lungs, but the noise didn’t come again.
The silence settled, like snow.
Jem watched the stars, and the shadows flickering on the walls as the candle burned itself down.
He should get up and blow it out, but he couldn’t move. Kate’s cheek rested against his chest and her body was tucked into the crook of his arm, one leg across his thigh, pinning him down. He hadn’t meant for her to fall asleep, but in the aftermath of what had happened between them, he’d felt spent and scoured out, and he couldn’t find the words.