Page 35 of Goodbye, Earl (Ladies’ Revenge Club #4)
“Oh,” she said after a while. “Oh, I am glad you did not throw it into a fire.”
“What?” he exclaimed. “When was I going to do that?”
But it didn’t matter, and she did not explain. She only smiled through her tears, wound her arms around his neck, and kissed him, firm and decisive, on his beautiful mouth.
“We should put it in my dower box,” she decided as he sat there, dazed and seemingly pleased by her wet, teary kisses. “Oliver can have it when he is grown.”
“Your box of fairy tales and gossip sheets?” he asked, raising his brows. “Beside your sister’s manifesto?”
“Just so,” she said, carefully folding it back into its neat creases. “Right next to the rest of his legacy. Oh, Freddy, it is perfect. What you wrote here was perfect, even if you didn’t know it then and don’t remember it now.”
“I remember it a little,” he amended, “now that I’ve seen it again.
Mostly I just remember standing in the sun that day, after Dot eviscerated me in that carriage and Silas took me to his office so I could slap what was left of my entrails along a signature line.
I stood there, right in his window, waiting to feel something awful, and instead, I just felt … joy.”
“Joy?!” she said, almost choking in her surprise. “Joy?!”
“Joy,” he confirmed, chuckling. “When I was in jail, I wrote the most pouting, self-indulgent thing to Silas, trying to feign bravado over how you’d vanished. I knew you’d run off of your own accord, of course, but lest he find out the specifics before I could, I pretended to be well shot of you.”
She gasped, swatting him with the back of her hand.
It only made him grin, catching her palm and kissing her fingers.
“Do not fret. There is absolutely no chance he believed the act. The truth was that I sat in that cell and made myself sick with worry over you. I thought you might vanish and no one would ever hear from you again. I still didn’t know, that morning when I arrived back in London.
I didn’t know you were safe and healthy and giving birth to my baby until Dot told me.
And once I knew, everything else just … well, it just fell away for a bit. ”
“Did it really?” she asked, a little skeptical. “You just described being disemboweled an hour prior.”
He chuckled, shaking his head. “I can’t really explain it.
I just know that I stood there and felt warmth from the light, even though it was cold that day, and it put a kind of peace on my shoulders.
I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get back what I’d lost, but I knew that I could try now.
I knew that the chance had been given to me, whether I’d earned it or not. ”
“So that is why you drugged and robbed Mr. Murphy?” she asked, batting her lashes. “To get home to check up on me? To stage a rescue?”
He tilted his head just a fraction, off to the side, in affirmation. “He was an easy mark.”
“Don’t ever let him hear you say that,” she scolded, pink-faced with joy. “Or maybe do, somewhere in my line of vision.”
He gave a long, nostalgic sigh, lifting the lantern as he stood. He offered her his hand and hoisted her up to her feet, dropping a kiss into her hairline as she came to stand.
“Why did you name him Oliver?” Freddy asked, as though it were merely an afterthought.
“Rather than Frederick Octavius Hightower IV, you mean?” she replied, laughing at the way he grimaced. “It is silly. You will laugh.”
“Then you must tell me,” he replied. “Silly things are amongst my favorites.”
She paused, just in the arched entryway between the kitchen and the hall. She tugged his hand so he would come around to face her, nudging him with her shoulder to preempt his look of amused expectation.
She leaned down and blew out the lantern, only willing to deliver the truth to the dark. She stood opposite the little twirling column of smoke that rose in place of the flame, once she had doused it.
If Freddy found it strange, he did not say so.
“I named him for the olive tree,” she said softly, so quietly that it would not have been audible with any light in the room. “For the olive branch. Freddy, I named him for you.”
She looked back up, to the shape of him, his features inscrutable in the recently acquired darkness around them. She couldn’t see him, and yet somehow, she could feel the tears in his eyes all the same.
She wrapped her arms around his middle and held him close, nestling her face into the hollow at the center of his chest. She listened to the beats of his heart.
“It bodes well,” he said, once he trusted himself to speak. “A boy born to bridge the gaps between us all.”
“If he likes,” she said, her voice muffled into his shirt. She tilted her head up, smiling. “He’s already got a talent for it.”
“We have a lifetime ahead of us now to do with as we please,” he told her, keeping his hold on her as he moved to her side and gently pulled her toward their shared bed, toward rest. “And as you said, my son is very gifted.”
“My son,” she corrected, stifling a little, grinning yawn. “Ours.”
“Ours,” he agreed softly.
Claire climbed into bed, burying herself in softness, and watched her husband climb in after her. She watched him pull the blanket up over them both and leaned into his warmth once he had. “Do you think you’ll write another letter like that?” she asked before she slept. “Next time?”
“Next time I go to jail and lose track of you?” he answered, glancing over at her with a twinkle in his eye.
“No, silly,” she said with a titter and a light jab into his side. “No. For the next child.”
“The next …?”
She smiled. “For all of them.”
“All of them,” he repeated a little dreamily, pulling her into his arms as he mirrored her yawn. “Yes, Claire. I think I will.”