It had been only a few days, all told, since that meeting with Brundage in Paris, but it already felt another man entirely had made that gentleman’s agreement to find the earl’s fiancée.
And to think he had once felt invincible. Impossible to believe now he’d been so deluded. He’d once felt he had the might of the British Army behind him. The whole of England itself. He’d felt arrogant and righteous and gifted and brilliant and charmed.
And he’d still been taken down by the banality that was Brundage.
Now Hawkes was just a rather battered man who was alive because “justice” was for people who could buy it. And he’d felt utterly alone in his icy fury and speculation until he’d revealed a little of his suspicion to Hardy and Bolt.
What had Aurelie said?
I didn’t want you to call out in the night and find no one there. I didn’t want you to die alone, if you were going to die.
God. She must have felt—must now feel—entirely alone, too.
He suddenly realized his breathing had gone shallow. As though he ought to have been able to protect her from whatever had made her run.
He dragged the tip of his finger softly over that word. “Aurelie.” As if in so doing he could soothe away her fears. Undo harm done.
His fortunes were currently staked on revealing her whereabouts to Brundage.
So what now was he going to do?
But he thought he already knew.
He recalled sitting across from Brundage and holding that miniature of her so tightly it had pressed a groove into his palm. As if his future was already imprinted upon him. As if he’d known even then.
Chapter Fifteen
The last thing Aurelie had expected when she’d fled across the Channel was waking up with a sherry head and her ears still ringing from a certain Mr. Delacorte’s fine, if unsurprisingly loud, baritone.
The evening had been odd and splendid, and the more pleasant it became the more guilty she felt for lying to these people, which only redoubled both her determination to leave and her regret that she must. The sooner she did, the less time she needed to spend pickling in her own conscience.
And leaving meant she would likely never see Mr. Hawkes again—except in her memories, where that other Mr. Hawkes lived as a remote glow.
This seemed like an unbearably unfair price to pay.
After having what was apparently a good smoke with Captain Hardy and Lord Bolt in the correct room for that sort of thing, he’d returned to sing two songs in a lovely baritone, and he’d turned the pages of the music for her, gallantly, when it was her turn to play. And in those moments of absorption and pleasure and the spiky intoxication of his nearness she had forgotten everything her life had become.
Such that when the weight of it returned and settled back into place her circumstances seemed much more oppressive. And as the numbing protection of fear and fury began to fade, her flight from Paris began to seem more and more mad and frightening than brave and determined.
Best not to mull upon it, she thought. Best to simply do as she’d been doing: step by step. Best to keep moving.
She took a pleasant breakfast with the very earliest risers, the proprietresses of the house, and Dot—while everyone else was sleeping off the sherry, or apparently taking breakfast in their rooms.
And then everyone scattered to the day’s activities.
She had no day’s activities, unless she took herself directly to the address on The Strand.
Because no message had arrived from Mr. Erasmus Monroe. She’d asked Dot about it twice just today—once after breakfast, once just before noon—and felt she could not ask her three times without seeming like an absolute looby.
Perhaps her own message somehow hadn’t yet reached him?
But the longer she waited to hear from him the longer she would remain at The Grand Palace on the Thames, and the more money she would spend, which would cost more money. And sooner rather than later she would have no money left at all.
And surely Mr. Monroe would forgive Edouard’s sister for taking a liberty?
She could say, perhaps, that she was in The Strand for an errand, and had impulsively decided to see whether Mr. Monroe was at home. She was supposed to be a widow, and surely widows could roam about untethered to chaperones?
She sat for a moment with this notion, mistrusting her own instincts, wondering whether desperation had taken her reason hostage. It just seemed imperative to dosomething, rather than to merely sit withher thoughts, which would torment her regardless of whether she applied them to worrying about the future or allowed them to flood with Mr. Hawkes, the way a room could fill with sunlight if you so much as parted a curtain.