Page 30 of Goodbye, Earl (Ladies’ Revenge Club #4)

T hey sat for an hour. Maybe two. Long enough that the pasties were long gone and all that remained between them was the soft cushion of the grass and a comfortable silence.

Claire scooted closer to him, feeling an absurd little tendril of nervousness about it, despite their five years of marriage and very recent declarations of love. It felt practically adolescent, letting their arms brush, just letting their knees knock together.

She took a bracing breath and put her head on his shoulder like it was the most wanton, perverse thing she’d ever even considered.

She felt a flock of birds burst in her chest when he draped an arm over her shoulders; she felt it scatter and beat when he rested his cheek against the top of her head.

“Ah,” he said after a moment. “Look there. Tommy’s about to burn the castle down.”

“She’s what?” Claire said, too tired to be fully alarmed. “Why?”

“Because it’s temporary,” he said with a chuckle, squeezing her, “and she’s the queen here. My mother always used to say that one day Tommy wouldn’t be here to do it anymore and it would have to be me. I’m not convinced that will ever happen.”

“She will outlive us all,” Claire agreed, and then, after a moment, she added, “if you ever make me a dowager, Freddy, I will never forgive you. If you do that, it will be the final straw.”

“All right,” he said, and she could feel the curve of his smile against her temple. “I will never die.”

They watched together as the tiny flame of Tommy’s torch drew closer to the center of the field, surrounded by a half-circle of fellow torches carried by the remaining revelers, come to bear witness.

They watched the leading flame as it lowered and caught on the thin wood of the little painted castle in the center of things.

They watched as the fire grew, large enough that they could hear it on the hill, large enough that they could smell the change of the smoke, now tinged with sweet cedar and hints of the paint.

“That is a little sad,” Claire said. “Don’t you think?”

He shook his head. “I think it’s a promise to come back next year. It might be sadder in a place where everything else wasn’t so enduring.”

She frowned, tilting her head up so that he would pull slightly back and look at her. “What do you mean? The only things around here are the sheep, and they certainly aren’t eternal.”

“Maybe you’re meeting the wrong sheep,” he said, because he could never help himself. “No, that’s not what I mean. Look, I will show you.”

He stood then, suddenly enough to make her squeak, and offered her his hand to assist her to her feet. When she accepted, he hoisted her up and grinned at her, not releasing her hand. “We’re walking this way anyhow,” he said, and gestured with a nod of his head toward the cottages.

“I suppose we are,” she answered, too intrigued to bother with confusion. She glanced over her shoulder one more time at the flaming castle in the valley, flickering and sparking and tossing little baby flames into the air above it, and then left it behind her to follow Freddy.

“Here,” he said after they’d crested the wold and come back down on the other side. He stopped, their feet on a series of bricks deep in the earth, surrounded by sprigs of grass and clover, and pointed down at them. “There, do you see that?”

“The ground?” she asked. “Yes?”

“The bricks,” he clarified, more excited than this topic ought to have made him, “the road. Well, this isn’t the main road, it’s just a little path, but it leads to the big one.

You can see the trail.” He pointed to the sequence of the old, dirt-deep bricks winding their way up near the cottages and out toward the central road. “Do you see it?”

“I do,” she confirmed.

“It’s Roman,” he said, his voice falling a level, like he was telling her a very delicate secret.

“The hands that put these bricks in this ground did so almost two thousand years ago, Claire. Two thousand years! Longer than we can even comprehend, really. Exponentially longer, and look, here they still are, tonight. With us.”

“Roman,” she repeated, a little skeptically.

It made him laugh, a delighted little laugh like he couldn’t believe his luck in being the first to tell her. “Sometimes I forget you lived all your life in London,” he said fondly.

“There are plenty of ancient things in London,” she countered, raising her brows.

“Yes, exactly,” he replied, admiring the dirt on his boots and the stones that sat under them. “Living in the center of things tends to make you forget all the other bits in orbit. But London was never the only place with people in it.”

“Ah,” she said, giving her own feet a second look, testing the brick under them with the edge of her shoe. “You might be right.”

“When Fosse Way, this road, was built,” he said, taking her other hand and stepping around to look down into her face, “there was no England. There was no Alfred the Great, no William the Conqueror, no Cotswolds or Chipping Camden. Just Hwicce and Rome. Tribes and empires. And the sheep.”

“Oh, the sheep,” she said with a little smile. “Of course.”

“Cotswolds,” he added. “Do you know what that means?”

“I know wolds are hills.”

He nodded, his eyes managing to sparkle even in the dark. “And cots are sheep.”

“They are not!” she protested, a laugh bubbling in her throat. “You are teasing me.”

“I am always teasing you,” he confirmed. “But they are. It is true. The sheep here really are enduring.”

“Fine,” she said with a smile. “You, Tommy, and the sheep. Here forever. Just like this road. Fosse Way, you say? Does that mean something terribly romantic too?”

He paused, blinking twice, and then said with a little shrug, “It means ditch.”

It made her laugh. “I suppose in the right light, a ditch might be romantic.”

His teeth flashed in the dark. “It is tonight. In any event, there was a point I wanted to make.”

“About ditches and sheep?” she asked, teasing.

“Perhaps,” he answered, rubbing his thumbs over her knuckles.

“I wanted to show you that when something is built properly, Claire, when something is meant to exist, then it will always persevere, even if it gets a little overgrown. Things that are built with love always last. They always hold, even as war and culture and time moves on top of them. The deep things persevere.”

She felt the smile falter a little, felt her chest cave in a fraction. She wondered if the sky had stuttered a bit at the thing he’d just said.

She rose on her tiptoes and brushed her lips against his, featherlight and soft.

He returned it, just as carefully, just as gently. He looked like he wanted to ask her something, his head tilting, his fingers tensing a little. He pressed his lips together, clearly not wanting to risk it. Not yet, anyhow

“Are you ready to go back?” she asked quietly, as if to give him permission to let it wait, if it must.

“Back?”

She nodded, stifling a yawn. “It’s getting very late. The governess needs to be relieved. We should go back.”

“Not back,” he answered, just as softly as she’d kissed him. “Forward.”

He didn’t wait for her to answer. He moved to follow the trail of old stones. He walked with purpose. And he held her hand all the way back to the cottage.

They bathed separately. The bathtubs, of course, were still in their separate rooms.

It gave Claire time to think, to try to turn over everything that had happened today. To consider it all and try to make sense of it.

She wondered if she ought to have kept a journal like her sister did. She wondered if maybe it was easier to understand the things that happened all at once when you could write them down, tear up the pieces, and try to put them into some sort of order.

Claire had never been able to write for just herself. She’d made a single journal entry once, when she was about eight years old, to try to be like her big sister, and then immediately had run it across the house and insisted Millie read it.

Millie had tried to explain that this wasn’t how journaling was meant to work, and Claire had decided in that moment that it was a stupid habit and a waste of good prose.

She laughed softly to herself, dragging an arm out of the deep, round tub and pushing a soapy cloth over it. Her hair was pinned on her head, but several long pieces had escaped down the column of her neck and into the water, each clinging to her skin in twisting patterns.

So she’d told him the truth. She’d confessed to loving him.

She supposed she had known this whole time that she still did.

She had known it when she fled Bruges. She had known it when she’d sat in Dot’s study, pregnant with Oliver, and agreed to write those gossip sheets.

She had known it when she watched him arrive on the drive that morning, squeezing the curtains in Oliver’s nursery.

Love had never been the problem.

Or the solution.

But perhaps this time could be different. Perhaps this Freddy was different.

No, there was no perhaps about it—Freddy was altogether new. He was changed. He could bake a pie and explain ancient history and stop their son from having a strop in the middle of a wedding. He could pause and be silent as easily as he could taunt and tease and laugh.

He was still himself. He was still the man who’d struck her like thunder, but now! Now, he was …

He was …

She dropped the rag into the water, gripping the thin lip of the tub and pushing herself to her feet, water sloshing down her bare body and taking the soot and soil of the day with it.

She reached for the dressing gown. She reached for the memory that she couldn’t quite let herself believe, and then, once she was safely wrapped in velvet, her mind allowed the thought to escape.

He was not a betting man.

Freddy Hightower was not a betting man.

Could that be true? Could it actually be true?

They had been trying to tell her he had changed for years now. First Millie, of all people, then Dot, then Ember. They had told her absurd, unlikely things.

They said he had smuggled two maidens out of the country to escape a violent father, with nothing to gain at all for himself. They said he punched a man a foot taller than him in defense of a friend, with absolutely no stake in the matter.

They said he could cook and clean now too. They said he insisted upon it! That he rankled Abe for being untidy while sweeping debris in his wake.

That one had been proven true, hadn’t it? At least the premise had, if not the specifics. Did that mean the other stories were true as well?

She floated out into the hallway to check on Oliver, to peek into his room and ensure he was sleeping as he was told to be. To her surprised relief, he was, curled on his side in bed, cuddling that gigantic wooden sword like a stuffed animal.

She leaned against the doorframe, stifling her little gust of laughter at it, and just watched him for a moment, the torchlight behind her dancing over her son’s face. She pulled the door shut quietly and tiptoed away.

She could hear the others returning to the cottages as she passed back toward her bedroom, the stifled baritone of Silas’s voice overlapping with Tommy’s response. Dot’s voice, the only clear one, said, “Good night.”

“Good night,” Claire whispered back to her friend through the glass.

Part of her wanted to go out there too. Part of her wanted to catch Dot by the wrist and ask the question that was burning in her, right at the base of her throat.

Have I changed too?

Am I any better?

She frowned and pulled the curtain shut, blocking out the light from their lanterns as they passed by.

Would Dot be very cross with Claire, should she openly take Freddy back? Would she be disappointed, even though she would never say it?

Claire hated the idea of hurting Dot again, in much the same way. She hated it, and yet she still intended to have him, and have him completely, consequences be damned.

So there was her answer. She was not better. She was not different.

She was just as she ever was, while Freddy had emerged shining and improved. Yet, he still wanted her anyway.

He still did.

She went to her room and crawled into the bed, arranging herself in the center of the mattress and swirling the sheets around her fetchingly. She checked her reflection in the faraway vanity. She took a bracing breath.

She waited.

And waited.

Certainly for an hour or more, despite what the lying clock said!

She waited. An agony.

Until she could wait no more.