hurried Lucy into Lady Judith’s outstretched arms, and the pair escorted Lucy to the part of the house where Colin’s siblings and cousins had gathered. Colin looked up in time to see Lucy’s back, and his face saddened. But when he turned back to his guests, he was smiling once more.
Emmeline’s stomach twisted. She wanted to throw open the window and yell Marry her instead! But she knew she’d only embarrass herself . . . and Lucy.
When Lucy had been found, drugged and held hostage to her cousin’s ambition, Em had expected Colin to call off the wedding. She’d even been relieved. But Colin had returned from London, even more committed to their impending nuptials. He wouldn’t break the engagement, nor would he—and his damned honor—let her, though she’d tried. Instead, he’d told her he’d wait, for a day, for a hundred, for however long it would take to ease her mind. And she’d realized in that moment that they would remain engaged, forever if need be, none of them happy.
Had she only refused him . . .
But it was too late for such regrets.
She looked past the chapel to the forest and open fields beyond. She had one way out. She could run.
She looked down at her walking stick ruefully. Anyone trying even half-heartedly would catch her.
Her father, Reginald, Lord Hartley, had run more successfully. He’d left one morning for a meeting in London and never returned. For months, the neighbors had speculated that, come spring, some cottager would find his remains at the bottom of the gorge. He wasn’t a man—they thought—who could bear such grief. Months later, he’d written his solicitors, directing them to forward his funds to a bank in Amsterdam. He never wrote her directly, never to her knowledge asked after her, and she, not knowing what to say, let all communication come through his solicitor.
She held her fist against the roiling in her stomach. Was this how her father had felt? Hemmed in by expectation and love? Or had he merely been the coward the townspeople called him when they thought she wasn’t listening? Deaf as well as lame, they seemed to think her, and the more she ignored the gossips, the more emboldened they became.
She caressed the head of her walking stick. Every time the gossips had called him reckless, she’d become more sober. Irresponsible, more dependable. Shameful, more upright. Until one day, they seemed to forget altogether that his blood ran through her veins as well as her mother’s. She was faithful where he had been faithless. Such a woman stood by her commitments, even those that frightened her.
If she didn’t know who she would be as Colin’s wife, she couldn’t imagine who she might be if she ran. She drew her sense of self from her land and her people. But her father had also grown up on the land, and he had run. He’d made a new life in a new country where he had no ties and no obligations. Could she?
She turned the idea over. She had her own funds through her grandfather. She could travel until the scandal died down—or forever, if she wished. She could even still travel to visit her father, simply without a husband. She’d memorized her father’s address years ago, a Venetian palazzo on the Grand Canal that he shared with his new family. Given his past, he could hardly refuse her. But he’d abandoned her once before. And if he rejected her again, what would she have lost that wasn’t already gone? The thought of running made her breathe easier than she had in weeks.
Below her window, Colin stood, still smiling, as upright a man as she’d ever met. A man she would have been proud to marry . . . before. The anxiety returned. Even if she could run, could she expose Colin to that sort of opprobrium? Could she repay his kindness with scandal? And if she became faithless once—and to her dearest friend—could she ever be found faithful again?
No matter what choice she made, someone suffered.
The bells rang out the final call to the service.
Look up, she willed him, wanting Colin to look toward her window and give her courage. Just a glance could settle her nerves. But he stood in heavy conversation with his brothers and Sam, until the duke gestured them to the chapel’s office door. She watched Sam hold open the door, watched Colin follow the duke inside, and watched the door swing shut. She imagined it thudding against the door frame as would a prison door.
The carriage yard was empty. As she was.
She waited. Jeffreys would return soon to escort her to the chapel.
Then she saw him.
A severely dressed man in a dark red tailcoat walked through the graveyard. A man who should be dead. Letting himself through the gate, he strode toward the chapel. His steady pace was more suitable to a funeral than a wedding. Inexorable, unyielding, like the progress of time.
She didn’t need to see his face to know it was Adam.
She’d watched him walk across the fields too many times.
He’d come.
But not for her.
She knew him that well, at least. No, like Lucy, he’d come to say goodbye.
But he’d come. Even if back from the grave, he had come.
Somehow that helped her to decide.
Jeffreys’s knock at the door drew her attention from the window. “Lady Emmeline, it’s time.”
“Join me, Jeffreys.” Emmeline walked slowly to her writing desk and took a seat. “I need your counsel.”
Chapter Three
He hadn’t thought this through.
All he wanted was to forget her. A dead man should be able to forget. But every night, if he slept at all, she appeared to him, her hand uplifted as if to touch his cheek, her dark eyes filled with tears and anger. In the dreams, he called out, wanting her to stay. But each time she turned away, as he’d expected, as he’d intended. Leaving her had made dying easier. He hadn’t known then that the living could haunt the dead.
At first, Adam could escape Emmeline’s ghost by burying himself in work—in plans and stratagems, intrigue, and machinations. He chose the most dangerous assignments, hoping that someone would do him the kindness of making him a dead man a second, more permanent time. So, it seemed only reasonable—if reason could be found at the bottom of a bottle—that seeing her marry would exorcise her ghost and give him peace at last.
Of course, he’d come to that reasonable conclusion, while alone in the dark belly of Whitehall, hours after his Home Office colleagues had left for the wedding in the spacious carriages Lord Colin had provided. Once Adam had decided he must go to the wedding, his only option was the last seat on the last post coach from London to Gloucestershire.
As further punishment, he’d spent the ride wedged between a Sadler’s Wells actor and an itinerant preacher, both declaiming loudly from their respective holy books, and neither liking the other’s performance. Adam, for his part, made a drinking game of it: one swallow of Irish whiskey for every “hale fellow” in Shakespeare or for every heathen smote with the judgment of the Lord in the Bible. The bottle was empty long before Oxford.
Adam turned his hired horse into yet another stable yard, hoping this one—the tenth in as many miles—would have an open stall. A brisk walk to the wedding would clear his head of its spongy whiskey edges. Besides, he needed to come
