Page 34

The knock on his door was executed with such force that the maps on the panelled walls trembled in their frames.

“Yes?” Nathaniel called out, rising from his chair at once, though he had scarcely time to do so before the stablehand stood before him, mud-splattered, breathless, and his cap crushed between trembling fingers.

“My Lord … Lady Loxley, she … she took out the grey. The mare. Rode hard for the upper meadows. She … she looked distressed, My Lord. And she hasn’t come back.”

Silence fell, vast and sudden, the kind that made men still their tongues from the weight of it. Nathaniel said nothing.

His hand, already at his side, closed over the signet ring of his uncle’s, worn thin from years of turning. The lad before him shifted his weight, uncertain, but Nathaniel’s stillness was not indecision. It was the eye of a storm.

The next moment, he was gone.

The great door of the study slammed back against the wall as he strode into the hall, his boots striking hard against the stone floor. Servants drew back.

A footman murmured something, but whatever he said was useless and irrelevant. He did not stop. Not for coat nor hat, though the weather outside had turned with the petulant unpredictability of spring.

At the stables, the grooms were startled to see him. His own horse, a coal-black gelding, pawed the earth in agitation as though he too sensed something amiss.

“She took the mare?” Nathaniel asked, voice even, but low and cold as an iron gate. He did not look up as he cinched the girth. His movements were swift and precise. It was not the frenzied panic of lesser men, but something honed sharper for its containment.

“Aye, My Lord,” came the reply, from the same lad now following at his heels. “She said … she said she wished to be alone. That she needed air—”

Nathaniel mounted.

“Which direction?”

The boy pointed. “West, My Lord. Towards Henley Copse.”

He did not wait. The words had scarcely passed the boy’s lips before Nathaniel spurred the horse forward, hooves pounding the earth with the fury of a cannonade.

Eleanor.

She had come to him shrouded in lace and uncertainty. He had not meant to love her. He had not believed himself capable.

But she, with her gentle wit and quiet steel, had wrought something in him that his uncle’s death and his father’s cold hand had never managed. She had carved light into the corridors of a life long resigned to shadow.

And now …

He pressed the horse harder, heart hammering in rhythm with the beast beneath him.

Wind tore past his ears. The hedgerows blurred.

She had been overwrought, the boy had said.

Distressed. He knew the weight she carried, the grief she bore in silence, as he did.

But for her to ride out alone, so recklessly …

A thousand images warred in his mind. A fallen horse. A broken neck. Cold hands in colder water. God no.

He did not pray. Nathaniel had never trusted in the mercy of Heaven. But he would tear the world apart with his bare hands if harm had come to her.

The rain came down in earnest now, a curtain of silver that blurred man and horse alike into spectres on the sodden path.

The ground beneath his horse’s hooves grew slick and treacherous, and every stride was a gamble. Yet, Nathaniel did not yield. He leaned forward, urging the beast on with knees and voice, mud spattering his coat.

The world narrowed to a tunnel of movement: streaks of green and grey, wind like a blade, and one face: Eleanor’s.

He saw the orchard as a dark line against the slope, those familiar gnarled trees heavy with spring’s first blush, and he veered towards it. There, he saw hoofprints in the loam, deep and erratic. A patch of torn earth and darkened grass trampled in a jagged crescent.

His pulse spiked. Then he saw her.

At the base of the incline, she lay crumpled in the wet as if cast there by some cruel hand. Her pelisse was sodden, twisted half over her frame. One leg lay askew, painfully unnatural. Her hair, dark with rain, clung to her brow and cheek. She did not move.

He was off the horse even before the beast had stilled, stumbling in the mud, then falling to his knees beside her. His gloves were gone, tossed aside, and forever lost, but he didn’t care. His hands, bare and shaking, found her cheek.

“Eleanor,” he breathed. “Eleanor … please …”

No response. Her skin was chilled and clammy, but not deathly. His fingers moved to her neck … there. A pulse, fluttering faintly beneath the skin. Her breath came, slow and shallow. She was alive.

His throat tightened with a sound he didn’t recognize. Relief, jagged and raw, surged through him, nearly bringing him down again. For a moment, he simply stared at her, his hand against her cheek, as though his body refused to believe she had not been torn from it.

Then he moved.

Careful as if she were made of spun glass, he lifted her into his arms. Her body sagged against him, limp but warm. Her head fell against his shoulder, and something inside him cracked. His arms closed around her, trying to keep her close to him, forever more.

“Eleanor,” he murmured again. “I have you.”

A breath escaped her lips, barely more than a tremor. She stirred faintly. Her fingers brushed weakly against his coat. But her eyes were still closed.

“I’m here,” he repeated, holding her tighter. “I’ve got you now.”

He sheltered her with his body from the pouring rain. He had lost too much already: his uncle, his childhood, years dulled by duty and silence. He would not lose her, too.

He rose with her, slowly, feeling the tightness of his breath against the pressure in his chest. Her leg lolled with a sickening drag, and he adjusted his hold, cradling her with the care of one who had known too much loss already.

Her head leaned against his shoulder, with her breath fluttering against his throat like moth wings.

“I have you,” he whispered again, though his voice cracked. “I won’t let you go.”

He mounted in a single practised motion, lifting her before him with arms honed from war and years of restraint, but which now shook like a novice’s.

Her form curled into his chest, limp as a dropped ribbon.

The horse pawed the mud anxiously, but Nathaniel drove him forward with a sharp command.

They rode fast, and he didn’t look back.

Rain blurred the world into a smear of motion: hedgerows, iron gates, the sweeping dark of the woods. None of it mattered. Only her name on his lips, again and again, like prayer or penance.

“Eleanor … stay with me. Please. Just stay.”

And as they galloped through the storm, the truth came, unbidden and brutal.

He loved her.

He always had. He loved her since Hyde Park when she had stared him down with those fathomless eyes and refused to be cowed by title or temperament.

He loved her since every single time she dared to challenge the granite of his reserve, demanding more than the scraps of affection he was taught to ration like coins.

And he had failed her. At every turn.

He should have followed her this morning. He should have stopped her when he had heard the desperation in her voice, seen the pain, and still, he let her walk away, his arms folded and his words withheld, just like his father had taught him … like a Loxley man should.

God forgive him.

Loxley House loomed through the mist, grey and sharp as a knife’s edge. The moment they passed through the gates, servants scattered. Their gasps and cries trailed in his wake as he thundered into the courtyard, reining the horse to a skidding halt.

A scream shattered the air the moment they entered the house. “My Lady!”

Lucy dropped the pitcher in her hands. It shattered on the stone. She ran forward, with her hands over her mouth.

He didn’t stop.

“Get the physician!” he barked, his voice like the crack of a whip. “Now!”

Her head lolled in his arms, rain dripping from her curls and her skin far too pale. A footman moved to assist, but Nathaniel’s glare turned him to stone.

“Out of the way.”

The household erupted into chaos. Footsteps pounded. The butler shouted orders. Lucy sobbed into her apron. And then, he heard his mother’s voice.

“Nathaniel?”

The duchess was standing at the top of the steps, one hand white-knuckled on the balustrade, her face waxen with disbelief.

“What has happened?” she demanded to know.

Still, he said nothing. He didn’t even slow down.

“Nathaniel!” she called out again.

“I said, get the physician,” he snapped, not breaking stride. “And clear the blue room. She’s going there.”

“But—”

“Mother,” he turned briefly, eyes flashing. “Move.”

She fell silent.

Inside, the warmth of the manor clashed with the storm’s chill, but Eleanor shivered still in his arms. A trail of water marked his passage down the corridor.

He had no memory of opening the doors, only of lowering her gently to the chaise in the blue room, the sheets already being stripped and replaced by frantic hands.

He brushed the wet curls from her brow, his touch trembling.

“You’ll be all right,” he whispered, more to himself than her. “You must be.”

Nathaniel knelt beside the chaise where Eleanor lay, her form still too still, her hair damp against the embroidered cushions.

He had peeled the sodden pelisse from her shoulders and covered her with the thickest woollen throw he could find, but still, she trembled faintly now and then, her breath catching as if even unconsciousness could not dull the pain.

He held her hand in both of his, pressing it to his lips as though he could warm her with proximity alone.

The door creaked slowly. Lucy stepped in, with her face red and tear-streaked, and her apron clutched in tight fists.

“My Lord,” she said, her voice thin and strangled. “We’ve sent for the physician. The boy’s taken the fastest mount, he’ll be here soon, I swear it. He must. I … I told them to heat water. And clean linens. And the laudanum, in case—”

She stopped herself, her eyes darting to Eleanor’s pale form.

Nathaniel turned slowly, his eyes rimmed with darkness no sleepless night could explain. His voice, though low, was firm.

“Thank you, Lucy.”

She gave a trembling nod, but did not leave. Her lip quivered.

“Is there … anything else I can do, My Lord?” she whispered. “For her. For you. I—God forgive me, I never should’ve let her go out. I thought … I didn’t know—I didn’t—”

“You are not to blame,” Nathaniel said, sharply enough that she flinched. He softened a fraction. “None of this is your fault. Eleanor is—” His voice caught. He looked back to his wife. “She is strong.”

Lucy wiped her cheeks with the heel of her hand, nodding quickly.

“I will stay with her,” he said. “Until the physician arrives.”

She hesitated. “Should I send someone in to relieve you, My Lord? You are soaked yourself, you might—”

“No.” The word was soft but immovable. “I want to be alone with her.”

Lucy swallowed hard and curtsied low, backing towards the door. “Yes, My Lord.”

The door closed behind her with a click, leaving the room in firelight and silence. A log hissed in the hearth. Rain still tapped at the high windows, softer now, like the sky had wept itself dry.

Nathaniel was still sitting beside Eleanor. Her hand lay limp in his, and he pressed his thumb to her pulse not out of necessity, but out of desperate need to feel the rhythm of her life still beating beneath his fingers.

He studied her face, the faint scratch across her temple, the bruise already darkening along her cheekbone. He had failed to protect her from the world. Worse, from himself. From the distance he built around his heart like a fortress and dared her to scale.

“I was a fool,” he whispered, brushing a strand of damp hair from her brow. “You saw me, truly saw me, and I turned away. I thought … if I kept myself from needing you, it wouldn’t hurt to lose you.”

He looked away for a moment, his eyes wet, though no tears fell.

“But I do need you,” he said, voice breaking for the first time. “More than breath. More than anything I ever thought I was allowed to have.”

He leaned forward and pressed his forehead gently to her knuckles. She did not stir.

“I will not leave your side. Not again. Not for anything.”

And so he kept vigil, while the storm faded beyond the windows. His hand was wrapped tightly around hers, as if by sheer will he could hold her there, anchored to him, to this life, to the vow he would make again and again until she opened her eyes.