Portrait of a Scotsman by Evie Dunmore

Chapter 35

She recognized the ticket, and froze as if caught mid-crime.

“I see,” he said coldly. And here he had thought they had reconciled. Instead, there had merely been a delay.

Blood roared in his ears when she approached with a guilty look in her eyes. Nah, she was not planning a holiday.

He stayed her advance with a shake of his head. “Explain.”

She nervously knotted her fingers together. “It’s true,” he heard her say. “I must go to France.”

“Must, you say—in what capacity?”

Her shoulders drooped.

His pulse was racing. The ever-lurking whispers at the back of his mind became a roar: the stolen selkie always got her justice … the stolen selkie always returned to the sea.

He came to his feet. “Why?” he bit out. “One day you’re terrified of losing me, and next, you’re scheming to run?” His voice was raw, exposing the clash of emotional front lines inside his chest. His selfish, possessive side would prevail; it must, or else he’d lose her.

Harriet pressed her fingers to her temples as if to block him from her mind. “I’m not running—I have thought of France for years, if counting my girlhood dreams,” she said. “Now I have important reasons to go.”

No, he wouldn’t be interested in her reasons; reasonability could go hang. “Were you planning it yesterday, while in bed with me?” he demanded. “At the time, you seemed pleased enough.”

She blushed. “It was very pleasurable, and we both needed it,” she said. “But it also confirmed that it would be right to leave.”

“You confuse me, Harriet.”

But she hasn’t surprised you, not really.As denial raged, that realization kept hovering quietly and clearly like a sublime line in the skies above the carnage. It had been a superficial ambush; his shock was halfhearted. The fear of losing her had always been there. Out of sight. Beneath the rocks. But there. The truth always was.

She ran her hand over her face. “I must leave precisely because whatever bliss we share doesn’t silence the nagging voice telling me to go. That is why I cannot ignore my desire. It’s not a whim. It’s not impulsive. My mind has returned to it over and over since we married, certainly because of how we began. And there are other reasons wholly unrelated to our marriage. My heart—”

“Your heart,” he interrupted, “your heart has a duty to me.”

He cringed and wanted to yank the words back the moment they had left his mouth, because they sounded both commanding and needy, and Harriet had gone white.

Her gaze lingered on his chest. “I’m aware,” she murmured. “I’m aware.”

“What does that mean, now?”

“It means,” she said bleakly, “that you were willing to take a bullet for me.”

“And that troubles you?” he asked in disbelief. “You were the one who said we should all have someone worth taking a bullet for.”

Her knuckles were white, her nails restlessly biting into delicate skin. “Yes,” she said. “And I feel immeasurably cherished. I’m also acutely aware that my being indebted to you in such a way has made your hold over me even more powerful.”

What of your power over me?he wanted to say. I’m a fool for you!

“I was speaking of your marriage vows,” he said, trying to restore calm. “Nothing else. Wanting to draw Matthews away from you was pure instinct, I could have told you that. So there. Does that absolve you?”

She searched his face and a hesitant smile curved her lips. “A little, I suppose.”

His muscles, coiled for battle since she had walked in, relaxed a fraction. “Good,” he said. “As for France. Why can’t you just take a holiday, why such secrecy?”

Her face shuttered again. “But it isn’t a holiday,” she said, “first because I don’t know for how long I need to be gone—”

“Oh, but I need you to know this.” For the first thing that sprung to mind was that if she stayed away for more than two years or so, she could properly divorce him on grounds of abandonment ….

“But I don’t know how much time I shall need,” she said, stubborn now. “More importantly, I must feel certain you cannot just order me back.”

“I wouldn’t,” he said. “Why would I?”

She gave him a speaking glance. “You bodily dragged me from my path to France once before.”

The crowded platforms at Victoria Station flashed before his eyes. He had grabbed her, and she had called him a miserable brute. But that was different, he wanted to say … though it would not look to her that way, would it? And would he really stand by and let the time lapse until she could properly divorce him, should she fancy it? As her husband, he had the right to demand she live where he lived before it came to that; he could enforce it, too ….

“Then what do you propose?” he said, and the glinting edge to his voice made her hesitate.

“A separation,” she finally said. “A mensa et thoro.”

There it was.

“You are asking for a divorce, love.”

She shook her head. “It merely entitles me to be absent from your bed and the marital home.”

Merely. “You would call that semantics,” he said, and she shrank a little from the bitterness in his voice. A mensa et thoro, “from bed and board,” was granted by the church for all he knew. She would be free to stay away if she wished, and there’d be nothing he could do. She could take lovers … yes, his selkie was flying toward her freedom. And in every legend, all good people would rejoice for her. It felt as though his lungs were on fire. Breathing hurt.

“What about Oxford?” he asked.

“I sent a note today that I’m taking a sabbatical,” she replied. “I have missed a few weeks of term already.”

She had planned it through and through.

“And what of the scandal,” he managed, “of being legally estranged?”

She raised her chin and seemed inches taller. “I shall weather it,” she said firmly. “After having a pistol pointed at my head, and seeing it pointed at you, I shall weather slander.”

He took her in, how she was standing up to him, with the proud tilt to her head, with red hair moving around her face like liquid flame, and he could not contain his emotions.

“You must know that I love you,” he said. “Deeply.”

The slight quiver of her soft lips betrayed her feelings, but there was steel at the bottom of her eyes. “What I know is that I wish to be courted by the man I love,” she said. “I wish to be wooed. I wish for him to go down on one knee and have him ask whether I would grant him my hand in marriage. I wish to live without a single doubt that I did not fall in love with my captor because I had no other choice, but that I am freely, truly loving my husband. Marriage costs me my rights. If I were to give them up, I need a choice.”

A choice. Clearly, she had not forgiven him their crooked beginnings. Is da thrian tionnsgnadh—well begun is two-thirds done. He gave a hollow laugh. “I’ve spent half my life making the impossible possible,” he said. “What I cannot do is turn back time.”

“I know that,” she said. “But you never even once said you were sorry.”

His smile spread over his face, black and viscous like tar. “Because I cannot find it in me to regret it,” he said. “I was a captor to you, but you have given me my only hours of true happiness.” His hands clenched by his sides then, as if to hold on to the stolen bliss, but his fingers curled over emptiness. “To me,” he said, “you were the light in the dark place to which I’d bound myself.”

Her determined expression faded into compassion. “You were not my only jailer,” she said. “I’m standing up against everyone who forced my hand: my father; my mother, my sister, a whole society that colludes and agrees that it is morally better for a woman to be chained to a stranger than to be forgiven for leaning in for a kiss. I’m taking a stand against this mortal fear they ingrained in my bones, a fear that something terrible would happen if I refused you.” An exhausted smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “And now I have taken a lot of time out of my day to explain my situation to you.”

The words were familiar, and he recognized them as his own when she had been eager to make herself useful in Drummuir. The ghastly web. She was caught in it, too. And he was holding the strands that bound her. He swallowed. He was falling now, grasping for straws as they flew past, and none of them held.

“You felt like an outcast in your clan, but you’re your father’s daughter,” he finally murmured. “You appear so unassuming, but you’ll strike when it is least expected.” And he didn’t know whether to feel bloody proud about this or to damn it to hell.

She came to him then, and her cool hand pushed into his. He looked down at the familiar shape covering his hot palm, at the intriguing aesthetic of her tapered pale finger. Her hand, unique in the world. An ache tore through in his chest. Only minutes ago, it had felt just like his hand, accessible like his own body, for this was what lovers became for each other when they loved. Now all was changed. Because she was right. He ran his thumb over the silken skin of her wrist. “I hate this,” he whispered, because he couldn’t say I’m hurting. Ironic, that the right thing inevitably crushed his heart when he had only just unearthed it.

“Lucian.” He reluctantly raised his gaze back to her face. Her brown eyes were warm with compassion, a bloody unchangeable sentiment. “Even had you and I begun properly, it would still serve me well to go,” she said. “You see, I was very angry at you after I read the news about Rutland.”

“I recall,” he said. “I thought we had made good.”

She nodded. “We have. But one reason why I was so angry was that I felt stupid. And fooled. I lashed out. If not then, I would have lashed out some other time, because you were right: part of me was testing you. I wanted you to change, to sacrifice, because I had paid such a price. And I wanted proof of your love, because our vows meant nothing, and because I had stupidly traipsed into a trap—”

“Stop saying that word,” he said, his impatience flaring back to life. “You’re not stupid; you’re anything but.”

Her smile was achingly sad. “But I have heard that word, in various guises, for half my life,” she said. “I know it isn’t true, but I don’t feel it. I worry for myself. I have realized that outwardly, I’m well accomplished, but inside, I harbor a version of me still at boarding school, full of old insecurity, and I recognize it now as a breeding ground for odd behavior, for me saying and doing things I don’t mean, for turning to other people’s opinions before consulting my own too often, for feeling unnecessarily hurt because I mix an actual issue at hand with old, still bleeding grievances. I know a few women with such a split disposition—they successfully run a home, but they can’t even make a simple decision without their husbands. Or they insist on controlling meaningless details just to feel in control of something. And what chance did they ever have to be different? We pass seamlessly from father to husband with no opportunity to know ourselves without interference. We are kept childlike in our dependence, in our small world, and in our continued focus on others, and those others keep telling us what we are. But I’m still young. It’s not too late, I can still learn. I already care much less for the opinions of people, and I want more. I need to go to France.”

He signed the papers that brought his authority over her to an end in an ecclesial courtroom in Westminster. Harriet wore a somber gray dress, but her hair glowed like rubies in the drabness of the chamber, and it took effort not to stare at her. Whenever he did look, three distrustful stares skewered him in return, for his wife had gathered her friends around her for support: the Duchess of Montgomery, Lady Catriona, and Ballentine’s dainty missus, Lady Lucinda. That daintiness was a trap; the pointy-faced madam looked ready to tear his throat out with her teeth whenever she caught his eye, and she’d do it gleefully, too.

Outside the courthouse, a blast of cold wind froze his face. Raindrops drizzled into his collar and the cool, wet touch sent shivers down his spine. He glanced at Harriet, who somehow had drifted alongside him through the wide wing doors in the protective circle of her coven. Now she paused and raised her chin at the plaza before them as if to steel herself. Through his frozen dread, he felt a stab of guilt. Their union had begun and ended with headlines in the scandal sheets, when all she had dreamed of had been a rose-tinted production straight from a romantic novel.

He cleared his throat. “You’ll leave soon?”

She turned toward him, and his breath caught. With the soft white fur framing her face, she looked like an ice princess. “Yes,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

She didn’t wish to share her exact destination with him. He supposed it hardly mattered where she went. He could have reached out and touched her pretty face, but there was already an insurmountable distance between them. Bewildering, how one could lie entwined, skin to skin, breathing each other’s breaths, only to become strangers again.

“Turas math dhut,” he said. “Safe travels.”

An emotion flickered in her eyes. Disappointment? But she graciously inclined her head. “Come, dear.” Lady Lucinda clasped her elbow, and Harriet made to follow her.

It tugged inside his chest, as though his heart was still leashed to hers. “Harriet.”

She turned back. “Yes?”

He took off his hat. “I am sorry.”

She bade her friend to wait. Now four pairs of eyes were staring at him. He only really saw one of them; he sank his own gaze into Harriet’s as if intent to reach her very soul.

“I am sorry,” he repeated. “And I’m sorry for not saying it out loud any sooner. I suppose voicing it would have meant admitting to some fault. To the injustice. And I wanted to keep you.”

Behind Harriet’s shoulder, Lady Lucinda snarled.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, “sorry that I kept you when I didn’t know how to care for you. The truth is, loving you took me by surprise. The way love feels ambushed me. It feels brutal. Like an unstoppable force. It demands to be accommodated, against reason, regardless of all that might have been before, and I had too little practice to master it well. I suppose I thought I could remain who I was, and still begin anew with you, but that was wrong. You did right, asking me to let go of Rutland. But I had lived with rage for so many years I saw it no longer; it was part of me, and had I let it go—well, you might as well have asked me to let go of my heart, or some other vital part, perhaps the legs I stand on.”

When he had reflected on whether he had anything to tell her before they would part, he had thought about his rage—the force that had given him so much: his wealth, the strength to persist when the odds were against him. It had occurred to him then that the emotion driving him hadn’t simply been rage—some of it had been hope, too. And perhaps much of it had been grief. Rage had been simpler, an emotion he knew and could name. Grief … grief would have implied that he was suffering. Vulnerable. An accursed feeling, like showing a pink underbelly to a world that was waiting to rip its claws across anything soft. And yet, much as his instinct was to protect and control what he loved, he had concluded that love itself demanded vulnerability. He never loved his wife more, or felt more able to express his love for her, than when she was under him, naked and soft, trustingly opening her most sensitive places to him. And she had looked at him with great tenderness when he had finally stepped back and let her go. He let her go. She was leaving. This, here, now, might be the last he’d see of her in years.

“I wanted to choose you,” he said hoarsely. “And I wish I could turn back time. Forgive me.”

She blinked, and tears fell from her lashes. “Lucian.”

Lady Lucinda tugged at Harriet’s arm.

“Hattie,” he said in a low murmur.

She shook off the commanding hand. She closed the distance to Lucian and rose to her toes. Vanilla scent brushed his nose, then her lips moved against his cold ear. “I have forgiven you,” she breathed. “And I do love you. Please remember that.”

She did not look back when descending the stairs on her friend’s arm, while he stood on the same spot long after her carriage had pulled away from the pavement and vanished in the London fray.