Page 23 of Goodbye, Earl (Ladies’ Revenge Club #4)

S omehow, Freddy ended up in a carriage with Silas and Dot for the full day’s ride out to Chipping Camden.

Ordinarily, this might have been tolerable, but Silas had a terrible, lifelong habit of being rocked to sleep by a moving carriage, even if he insisted he had work to review or things to discuss. Without fail, about an hour in, he’d be knocked to the side, gently snoring into a window curtain.

Freddy knew it was coming. Dot knew it was coming. They both let him believe it wasn’t until the thing was done.

She touched him once on the arm and gave a resigned little sigh. “There he goes,” she said with a little shrug. “Off to nod.”

“Nodding right off,” Freddy agreed with no small amount of envy. “So, that leaves us, then.”

“Does it?” Dot replied, and stood to retrieve the little purple box she’d brought with her, presumably full of material with which to entertain herself beyond the scope of Freddy’s influence.

He chuckled. He could not help himself.

It drew a curious look from Dot, her big green eyes blinking up at him with a polite interest, like a naturalist who’d accidentally stepped on a new species of beetle and now must investigate the underside of her boot.

“It’s nothing,” he said, waving his hand. “You just confirmed a suspicion I had.”

“Oh? What suspicion is that?” she asked, tossing the top of the box off and turning to dig inside of it, as though she did not need to look at him to hear his answer.

“That you accepted my apology,” he answered, propping an arm behind his head and leaning back, “but never really forgave me.”

“Forgave you?” she repeated, drawing out a stack of papers with many folded corners and different colors of ink in the margins and turning to him, a faint curve on her lips. “For jilting me, you mean?”

“That, certainly,” he confirmed. “All of it, really. The me of it all.”

She laughed softly, threading her fingers through the stack of papers in her lap. “Freddy, I haven’t thought about you as my one-time fiancé in years. The matter is largely forgotten as far as I am concerned, I assure you. I thought I had made that perfectly clear back when I married Silas.”

“Forgotten is not forgiven,” he said, raising a brow. “They say that the opposite of love isn’t hate, Dot. It is indifference.”

“Do they say that?” she asked, tilting her head to the side. “I suppose it is true. But I am not indifferent to you, Freddy Hightower. I might have been, if our lives were not so inextricably interwoven by now. I likely would have been. But they are, so I am not.”

“Ever the barrister, aren’t you? You would be such a dangerous man.”

“Probably,” she agreed with a sigh. “I do well enough as a woman, don’t I?”

“So you don’t love me, hate me, or feel indifferent toward me?” he pressed, flashing her a smile, which got a roll of her eyes. “How do you feel, then, Dot?”

“I think the real question isn’t how I feel,” she replied, meeting his eye with the sort of unwavering intensity that had always made him feel just a little bit unsafe in her presence. “It’s how you do.”

Freddy glanced once, quickly, at his brother, as though he might need to kick him awake for protection.

Dot immediately saw it happen and smiled again, a soft little titter escaping through her breath. “You started this conversation, you know.”

Freddy frowned, adjusting the cradle of his head in the arm crooked behind it.

He had never considered the question in reverse.

No one much cared how he felt about any of them, as far as he knew.

Freddy had had to navigate the last several years by making himself fit into their worlds, by finding his own avenues to amends and peace.

How did he feel about Dot Cain? He was going to marry her, once.

He had liked her. Respected her. Thought she’d be a damned good countess.

He’d even found her reasonably attractive, though truth be told, he’d chosen her specifically because she was pretty without being his particular flavor of tempting.

He had been trying to be sensible in his twisted way, back then.

“You make me uncomfortable,” he said without thinking, winning a look of what appeared to be genuine surprise from the lady. “You remind me of all the things that are wrong with me.”

“Do I really?” she said, as though she was not displeased by it. “I assure you it is not deliberate.”

“No, I know it isn’t,” he replied, still stuck in his frown. “You know I couldn’t have made you happy like he does. You know that, don’t you? I could have never kept up, and you would have started hating me the first time I lost the thread in an argument.”

She blinked. “You aren’t stupid, Freddy.”

“I’m not stupid, but I’m not him ,” he said, gesturing to Silas with his free hand.

“You two were grown in the same garden. I bet you have a case review after domestic disagreements. Even when things were going well between us, I was confused half the time. You’d start rattling off wedding logistics, and I’d feel like blankets were piling on top of my brain, making me stupid.

You’d tell me what your father was working on, and a little mouse named Panic would start chewing on my ribs because I couldn’t follow half of it. ”

“Oh,” she said, and blinked again. “Really?”

“Yes, really!”

She smiled fully then, her teeth flashing like he’d just given her true joy. It was such a terrifying, genuine reaction that he began to laugh, and so she did too. They laughed together until it disturbed Silas, making him grumble and adjust in his sleep.

She was still chuckling silently, while Freddy had his hand cupped over his lips. But when they met each other’s eyes this time, it felt somehow a little more connected, like a tiny, fragile bridge of insecurity and confession had started to stack itself into place between them.

Freddy felt something release inside him that had been clenched there for so long, he hadn’t even known it was there anymore. Just a tiny thing, a little fist around a dam of guilt. It didn’t vanish, but it eased. It let some of its holding through. And he breathed a little easier for it.

“What are you reading?” he asked, enjoying the extra space in his lungs. “Something legal?”

“Oh, not at all,” she answered, considering him like something in her had released too, perhaps. Something different, but matching. “It is a fairy story, a rather dark one, actually. Claire wrote it.”

He glanced back at the stack of pages in her lap with renewed interest. “Can I read it?”

“Oh,” she said, a little uncertain. “I don’t see why not, but I don’t think you really want to, Freddy. I think it is … well, I know it is about you.”

“Is it?” He pushed himself forward, leaning onto his knees to try to get a peek at it.

She immediately folded the sheets over themselves like a stern governess. “Yes! She wrote it many years ago, though. I think it is about … well, about what happened while you were still in Bruges.”

If she was attempting to put him off his curiosity, she was doing a terrible job of it.

“What did happen?” he asked softly, not wanting to spook her away from the subject. “I have always wondered exactly what the hell happened while I was locked away.”

She got an odd, wistful look on her face.

Her eyes softened, her lips twisted, and she even seemed to color a little in the cheeks and throat.

“That is a very complicated question,” she said, as though she were still thinking about how to answer.

“You know, it never occurred to me that you are still in the dark about it all, but then, I think I still am too, about a few things. If I answer your questions, will you answer mine?”

“Of course,” he said immediately, too stupid to feel wary right away.

Dot glanced down at the box beside her and nodded toward it. “This is Claire’s box, you know. She calls it her dower chest. I am only entrusted with it because it holds the fairy tales she wrote when Oliver was still a baby. It holds a few other things too.”

“Oh?” he said, and then felt it, the little spark and sizzle of concern, and yet still was not intelligent enough to abort the conversation before it got too far. “Such as?”

“Things Millie wrote. Things I wrote. The gossip sheets, Freddy. I assume you know about those?”

His brows shot up. “I have heard tell,” he said, sounding a little strangled even to himself. “But I’ve never actually seen them.”

Dot sighed, shaking her head with a faint look of begrudging affection on her face that Freddy was certain was for Claire, not him. “I don’t know why she kept them, but she did. After you left me at the altar—”

“Dot!” he said, startled by it, but she only gave him a look and continued her thought.

“After that,” she said firmly, “I was left in dire financial straits. The money from the dissolution of Fletcher and Yardley had been intended for the wedding and my father’s care while you awaited the payout from your trust, if you recall.

When you left, I had nothing to live on, and my father was still very sick from his apoplexy. ”

“Jesus,” Freddy muttered. “Dot, I am so very sor—”

“Yes, I know,” she said, waving her hand as though it didn’t matter anymore, leaving him white-faced and captive.

“If it weren’t for the financial stress, I might not have let Claire in when she arrived that day, bedraggled and throwing a bunch of jewelry at my feet, begging me to hide her.

It was so surreal and alarming but also the exact answer to every problem that had been haunting me for almost two years.

She begged me not to tell anyone, and so I didn’t. She was also very, very pregnant.”

Freddy could only stare. He could see it, almost, in his mind’s eye, and seeing it was horrifying.

“Once she’d settled, I started to feel angry at you all over again.

Here was Claire, too real and warm and breathing to resent from a safe distance, but you were over there, locked away, clearly having driven her to this, and that was perfectly reasonable, wasn’t it?

Perfectly reasonable to put it all on you.

In fact, doing so made it easier to almost absolve Claire, to tell myself she had been an unwitting victim too, just another hapless thing sucked into your orbit.

I do know that isn’t true now. I know it isn’t. ”

“Oh,” said Freddy, because nothing else would come.

She frowned and let out a little sigh. “We wrote the gossip sheets because it felt like the only way to pay you back, in any fashion. It felt like the only way to feel as though we were not wounded by a man who still had no scars.”

He nodded, a little sick with the force of the knowledge. “I can see that,” he managed to say.

“Why did you run off together?” Dot asked, setting the fairy tale aside and adjusting her posture toward him, completely toward him. “And why did she run away?”

He tried to swallow past the lump in his throat, failing and giving a dry cough.

“I … we … it was obsession,” he managed with an apologetic grimace and a shrug.

“We both got caught up in it. I followed her home. It was a mess, to tell you the truth. We had already eloped before I had a single critical thought about the thing. I saw her for the first time and I completely lost my mind.”

Dot looked intensely thoughtful. “Yes, all right,” she said, nodding. “You were both young and attractive. Stranger things have happened.”

He gave a humorless little laugh. “Right, yes, I’m sure they have,” he said, darting another look at his sleeping brother. “Certain they have, in fact.”

“Indeed,” Dot agreed, softening long enough to also look at Silas, to touch him again, just a brush of her fingers at his temple.

“As to why she left,” Freddy said with a humorless little smile, “that was the gambling. It was the worst I ever let it get. It was burrowed so deep into my bones that I’m surprised I ever surfaced again.

We had to keep fleeing city to city every time I lost a little too much.

I woke up one morning expecting my wife and instead found a quartet of Dutch policemen and an empty safe. ”

“She robbed you,” Dot said with a nod. “Yes, I suspected she had. You deserved that, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” he allowed, strangely finding a bit of ease in his shoulders at having it acknowledged. He had robbed Ember. Claire had robbed him. It was fair. “What about Ember? How did you find her?”

At that, Dot flashed her teeth again, a look of nostalgia settling over her face.

“She found us,” she said with a giggle. “She was following us. By then, Silas had already started to lean on us to stop the sheets, attempting to call it slander and so on. I think Mr. Murphy was likely already following us as well, trying to prove that I had Claire hidden in my house. Ember had read the sheets of her own volition, like any other Londoner, and had immediately seen an opportunity for alliance. She was in dire straits too, you understand.”

“Yes,” Freddy said through clenched teeth. “I understand.”

“It is all in the past now, Freddy,” Dot said, soothing him like he was only about as old as Oliver and about to lose his hold on himself. “You did ask.”

“I did,” he agreed, blowing out a lungful of steam and shaking his head. “I know.”

“Ember lived with us too, during that time,” Dot continued, gazing to the side like she could see through time, right past the window.

“Without all four of us, including Millie, who was the only one thinking clearly about it, we would not have come to the solution we did. We would not have been made whole.”

“Is that what you are?” he asked, wondering in all sincerity. “Whole?”

She nodded, a look of long-held awe in her eyes. “Yes. I am. Millie and Ember certainly are.”

“Not Claire?” he asked, surprised.

“Oh, Freddy,” she replied with a little laugh. “Of course not.”

He didn’t laugh himself, but he did let a grudging sort of smile come onto his face, because he knew that Dot understood everything, just like she always had. “Good,” he said at last. “I’m not either.”

“Well,” Dot answered, turning to flip through the box and dig out the gossip sheets. She held them out to him, offering the knowledge he wasn’t sure he wanted. “Maybe you could be.”

He took them. “Thank you, Dot.”

“Hush,” she said, scooting back into her seat and throwing him one last little look of sympathy. “I’m reading.”