“Then you were not paying attention.”
“Evidently not.” He moved past her toward the door, close enough that his shoulder brushed hers—a contact so brief it could have been accidental, except that his hand caught her elbow as he passed and held it for a single, deliberate heartbeat. His thumb pressed against the inside of her arm, where the pulse beat fast and traitorously visible.
“One hour,” he said. “I’ll tell Crawford to prepare the carriage and to keep the house secured whilst we are gone. Lottie can manage Rose.”
Then he released her and was gone, his stride carrying the coiled energy of a man walking toward something rather than away from it.
Penelope remained in the study. The room smelled of bergamot and ink and the lingering warmth of a body recently departed. Through the window, the estate lay green and gold under the climbing sun—the south meadow where they had ridden, the hill where she had smiled without permission, the gravel drive that would carry them, within the hour, toward the most reckless thing she had ever done.
She was terrified.
But beneath the terror ran a current of something brighter, something with teeth—the fierce, clean certainty of a woman who had spent twenty-two years waiting for permission to act and had finally decided to stop asking.
She pressed her palm flat against the windowpane. The glass was cold. Beyond it, the morning waited.
“Hold on, Marianne,” she whispered. “I’m coming.”
She turned from the window and went to prepare for war.
The journey took four hours. Neither of them spoke for the first two—Penelope staring out at the countryside unravelling past the window, Alastair opposite her, his expression impassive.
The Whitcombe estate announced itself through iron gates and a long, elm-lined drive that should have been handsome but felt, on this grey afternoon, like a corridor narrowing toward something inevitable. Gravel crunched beneath the wheels. Thehouse materialised—stone-fronted, symmetrical, every window in the east wing shuttered against the daylight.
Penelope’s stomach turned. A house with its curtains drawn at midday was a house keeping secrets.
Alastair descended first and helped her down hurriedly.
“You are not welcome here.”
Lord Whitcombe filled his own doorway like a barricade.
“And yet.” Alastair adjusted his cuffs almost too calmly. “Here we are.”
“I wish to see Marianne.” She spoke now too. “She is my friend. I will not leave until I have spoken with her.”
“My daughter is unwell. She is receiving no visitors.”
“Your daughter,” Alastair said, and every trace of pleasantness was gone from his voice, “sent her newborn child to strangers rather than trust her own parents with its life. She is not the one I’d call unwell.”
Whitcombe’s face contorted. Lady Whitcombe appeared behind him—chalk-pale, lips compressed to a bloodless seam—and whatever silent exchange passed between them lasted three seconds and ended with her stepping aside.
At last, Whitcombe moved too. He held Alastair’s gaze with the trembling, impotent fury of a man who understood that his authority ended where a duke’s began, and hated it.
“You will regret this,” he said quietly.
Alastair leaned closer. “I have many regrets, Lord Whitcombe. None of them involve protecting children from men who treat them as inconveniences.”
Then he placed his hand against the small of Penelope’s back—Loss warm, steady, unmovable—and walked her through the door.
CHAPTER 25
They found her in an upstairs sitting room at the end of a corridor. The curtains were drawn. The hearth was bare and the air stale.
Marianne sat in a chair by the empty grate. She was thinner than Penelope remembered—wrists like birch twigs, collarbones sharp beneath the high neck of a grey dress that looked as though it had been chosen by someone who believed colour was a privilege to be revoked.
She looked up when the door opened. Her face held nothing—not recognition, not relief. Just the flat, wary blankness of someone who had stopped expecting.
Then she saw Penelope, and her face crumbled into tears.