Page 33 of Goodbye, Earl (Ladies’ Revenge Club #4)

I f the servants found anything amiss about finding their lord and lady abed together the next morning, they did not make it known.

Claire supposed that was likely just professional decorum, and that they were likely deeply scandalized and irreparably shocked. Certainly they hadn’t all seen this coming. Surely it hadn’t been the assumed outcome on the day Freddy arrived, so long ago now, and they’d put his things in her room.

She had slept very late the day after the games, but of course, so had everyone else.

There was some balm in knowing she hadn’t been the only one frolicking about until sunrise.

She had awakened long enough to decline breakfast and dismiss the disappointingly unscandalized staff, and collapsed right back into sleep.

When she did finally rouse, well after noon, it was to the patter of fat, warm raindrops at her window and the conspicuous absence of Freddy Hightower.

She had paced through the cottage in her wrinkled dressing gown, yawning and stretching and looking for her son and husband, only to find neither.

Only the governess was about, indulging in one of those cherry hand pies in the kitchen. She, at least, looked viciously startled to be discovered with pastry flakes on her fingers in the empty, rain-dappled light of the kitchen.

“They went on a walk,” she explained, “an hour past.”

And Claire had nodded, shrugged, taken her own pie, and gone back to find some clothes for the day. She decided in that moment that she would not suffer another rain-logged trip back to Bourton, twice as long as it needed to be and thrice as treacherous.

They could wait for dryness. They could outlast the storm.

They could … well, Claire amended, they should probably inform the others and allow them to make that decision on their own. That would give her something to do besides.

She braided her own hair down her back, something she hadn’t done with her own fingers in many years, and strapped herself into the padded gown Freddy had joked about yesterday morning. Only yesterday!

She had never known days to be as dense as these.

She gartered her own stockings, laced her own boots, and threw open her own curtains, allowing an oddly sunny sky to shine in through the raindrops. She sat at her vanity table to eat her pie, marveling at how short a time it had truly been here, in this place.

It felt like a lifetime.

When she stepped onto the drive, holding a shawl over her head and aiming at the cottage Dot and Silas had chosen, she crossed paths with Freddy and Oliver, returning from wherever they had been, mud-specked and soaked to the bone.

Their identical cow-licked hair was burnished bronze by the rainwater, matching in a swirl against their scalps.

“Oh, for the love of goodness, Freddy!” she chided, eyes wide and locked on their muddy, ecstatic child. “What have you done?”

“We had a walk,” Freddy provided, grinning proudly at her. “Down Fosse Way.”

“Look, Mama!” Oliver said, holding up two hideous, curling rocks, one in either hand. “They are the devil’s toenails! From the devil! From his toes!”

“I can see that,” she replied, cutting her eyes back to her idiot husband, who seemed just as overjoyed by the heretical toenails and his son’s grip on them. “Bath. Now.”

“Oh, but Mama,” Oliver protested as she shook her head, pulled Freddy near to drop a kiss on his cheek, and continued about her business, leaving them to argue it out behind her.

Behind her, she heard the satisfying gasp of at least one scandalized observer. Her son. Whispering in horrified observation, “She kissed you !”

She smiled to herself, pulling the shawl tighter around her head, and sped up a little, her boots splatting in the mud as she reached the steps leading to Dot’s cottage.

She hesitated at the door, looking from the bell to the doorknob to the door knocker and deciding on the last option, lifting and dropping it so delicately, she rolled her eyes at herself.

It was Silas who answered, much more rumpled than she’d ever seen him, a shadow of stubble over his face and shaving cream speckling his fingers where he had obviously been mixing it, one thing to address the other. He stared at her rather than greeting her.

“May I come in?” she asked, making him startle and step aside, clearly deeply disturbed to have been caught without a full jacket and a folded cravat. “I’m sorry to have surprised you.”

“No, it is … shall I fetch Dot?” he asked, blinking at her with those dark cobalt eyes, just like Tommy’s. “She is just having tea.”

“Wait a moment, if you would,” she said, reaching out to touch his arm, to stop him, wincing at how puzzled he looked by the gesture. “I … I have … Silas, I’ve reconciled with Freddy.”

“Oh,” he said, stopping and turning to fully face her. “I am …” He trailed off, grimacing.

“You are not surprised,” she suggested, winning a blink and a slight flush from him.

They stared at one another in silence for a second before he cleared his throat, flicking his eyes to the side like he’d find stage directions there, then looking at her again with an apologetic roll of his shoulders. “Are congratulations in order?”

She almost laughed at the question. Silas was ever the respectful and attentive gentleman, Claire thought. He was very steady. Very polite. He was very, very uncomfortable with all of this, and it showed.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “I don’t know how anyone is going to react to it.

I came here to preemptively apologize to your wife for not holding firm, for faltering at the line we drew in the sand all those years ago.

Silas, I fear I have many apologies to issue on the matter. I do not know where to begin.”

He opened his mouth to respond and she cut him off, a sudden clanging anxiety throwing itself into the possibilities of his answers.

“Oh, also the rain!” she said, shrill and too fast. “The rain. I don’t want to go back today! Because of the rain!”

There was a pause. Silas watched her, gauging whether she was going to have another outburst, and then nodded slowly and gently like he thought sudden movements might initiate another untoward explosion.

She braced herself for how he would respond, for what he would say. She tried to predict the deflection, the excusing of himself, the awkward shuffling.

Instead, he leveled her in his gaze, gave a wistful little shake of his head, and said, “I know how you feel, Claire.”

“What?” she said, knowing she was balking at him. “You couldn’t possibly.”

He laughed then. He was the one who laughed! He reached up and rubbed his stubbled jaw and breathed in a big, indulgent breath that he blew back out again, shaking his head.

“He is my brother,” he said to her. “My brother, whom I love, and had to love while I also found and married Dot. You don’t think I understand? All of that happened before he … before …” He chuckled again, shrugging at her. “Before he was who he is now.”

“Oh, but that isn’t the same,” she protested, before she’d even given it a chance to settle into consideration.

It wasn’t the same, of course. Brother was far more inherent than husband , especially estranged husband . Even so …

“I suppose it’s not completely removed, however,” she added with an apologetic little sigh. “Was she cross with you about it? She must have been.”

“I don’t think she was,” he answered, sounding not entirely convinced. “Obviously, it wasn’t a thrilling prospect, especially not in the beginning, but she wasn’t angry. Things are very different now, besides. Very different.”

“He is different,” she corrected. “I am not sure anything else is.”

It was Silas’s turn to balk. He stared at her for a moment like she’d sprouted a second head. Like she’d just kicked her boot off and revealed that she was actually the source of those horrid devil’s toenails.

She didn’t like it. It was enough to have already seen Silas in a single new context today, but now they were verging on half a dozen.

“You don’t really believe that, do you?” he said finally, his voice echoing a little in the empty foyer. “Do you believe that?”

“Well, obviously things have moved along with the necessity of time,” she said, confused by his confusion. “You had Vivian. Mr. Cresson became a barrister. Abe and Millie opened Morning Glory Investigations. I only mean myself, really. I am the same. Entirely the same.”

His brow had begun to wrinkle at the first word, and the wrinkle had grown with each subsequent one. She stopped talking lest he turn into a dried apple very soon, nothing but creases and dust.

He looked over his shoulder again, like he was considering calling for his wife and escaping the room entirely, but he did not call out or otherwise make a move to do so. He turned back to her looking more distressed still, utterly confounded that this had arrived on his doorstep today.

“Do you remember the night we met?” he asked her, so suddenly that it made her jump. “That night I brought the supplies and the maid to the Fletcher house?”

“Of course,” she said warily.

She had seen him plenty of times before he had seen her, of course.

That autumn had been an exercise in intrigue, and Claire herself had stayed hidden throughout it.

It was only after Dot and Silas became engaged to wed that she was revealed to him, that she was able to safely come forward, because the marriage would mean their interests were now aligned.

He had come up the stairs hand in hand with Dot. He had started the ascent smiling, and when he had seen her, round with Oliver in her belly, pale from being sequestered indoors, ragged from months without styling or luxury, his face had fallen completely.

That had been Claire’s doing. Claire had sobered a man newly in love.

It wasn’t a memory she enjoyed.

“Dot warned me that you had been the source for those gossip sheets and that I was not to attempt to impart guilt or shame upon you about it,” he said, his eyes going a little out of focus as he recalled it.

“I don’t know what I thought you would be.

I think perhaps up until that moment, I had imagined the only girl Freddy would fall so hard for would just be a copy of himself in a dress. ”

“Silas!”

He smiled at her gently. “You were not that. You were so small and afraid, Claire. You looked like you thought I had come to put a boot on your back.”

“I was not small,” she protested with a sniff. “I was so very pregnant.”

He nodded. “Yes, and somehow that made you look all the smaller. I cannot explain it. All I could think was that you were harmed. That my brother had harmed you. That you were injured and hurting and so, so fragile.”

“I was fragile,” she confirmed, hugging her arms close to her ribs. “That is true.”

He nodded, blinking away the image of it that hovered in his mind.

“You were at the wedding. You had Oliver. You stayed in London for almost a year after that, and you still seemed to me like a woman who was limping, spiritually. You seemed … not broken . That is a harsh word. But hobbled in a way that could not be entirely hidden.”

“That sounds very lovely and dignified, Silas, thank you,” she replied dryly.

He paused, tossing her a sheepish look of apology and shaking his head.

“I only mean that it seems hard for me to reconcile that girl with the one I’m talking to right now.

I only mean that you are not the same. If I had met you back then at one event and then again today, I would not believe that you were not two, entirely separate women.

I would believe they were related, certainly, but cousins at most.”

“I do not look that different,” she said, squeezing herself tighter. “Even without the pregnant belly.”

“No,” he agreed. “Your features are almost entirely unchanged. It is everything else that has grown.”

She wanted to believe him. She wanted so very badly for this to be true. It just didn’t sound correct to her. She had never woken up in a morning, looked in the mirror, and found herself improved.

Silas continued, as though he weren’t dismantling her understanding of reality.

“If that girl, the fragile, harmed one, had taken Freddy back, then yes, Dot might be cross with her. But this one? This woman who stands upright and knows who she is and acts only with intent? That is a different matter entirely.”

“I am not that upright, Silas,” she protested, feeling a little weak, like she just wanted to run back to bed now and forget that she’d ever attempted this. “I have faltered many times just in the last many weeks.”

“Well, yes, we all do that,” he said impatiently.

“The question is if you can imagine the last version of yourself that knew Freddy making the same choices, saying the same things, and following the same routes that the you of today has. You ought to really try to imagine it, Claire. I think you will find the flaw in your belief.”

She frowned. She tried to do just that, quickly, so as not to strain his patience.

“I suppose,” she said after a second, “that the me of five years ago would have begun crying at many junctures in recent days. I cried quite a lot back then. It was an effective way to shut people up.”

“Was it?” he asked, with half a smile. “I suppose crying women do often make me abandon course.”

“Yes, it is extremely effective, Silas. A good barrister ought to know that,” she snapped back, making him chuckle. “I suppose that is true, though. I do not cry so often anymore. I do not cry much at all.”

“Hm,” he said. “What do you do instead?”

She blinked at him, an odd sort of tingly warmth starting in her belly and inching out toward her extremities, calling to her fingertips and toes. “I don’t know,” she said sincerely. “I suppose I must be doing quite a lot of different things, depending on the situation at hand.”

“Yes,” he agreed, stepping to the side and holding his hand out, as though to invite her deeper into the house. As though to invite her to the pretense of the task that had brought her here in the first place. “That’s exactly it, Claire Hightower. You are doing quite a lot of different things.”

She felt something bubbling in her, on the edges of that warmth. Relief? Pride? Joy?

She wasn’t sure.

She only knew it wasn’t the urge to cry anymore.

“Thank you, Silas,” she said as she accepted his invitation and stepped further into the cottage. “Thank you so much.”

“You are welcome,” he said with a relieved little sigh, half fondness, half exhaustion. “You are my sister now, after all.”