Page 59 of To Swoon and to Spar
“Where are we?” he asked, craning his neck to peer at their surroundings. It seemed to be a narrow corridor, poorly lit; the only light was that which spilled around the doorway leading back into the morning room. Penvale could make out stone walls; he squinted and spotted a shadowy set of stairs. It wasn’t a passage, he realized; it was alanding.
“Er,” Jane said, and there was a note of such unmistakable, sheepish guilt in her voice that he immediately wheeled around to face her once more. “We’re in a stairwell.”
“I can see that, thank you. What stairwell is this, precisely? I find myself unfamiliar with it.”
She sighed, but—owing to the barely leashed note of frustration in his voice—did not attempt to prevaricate further. “The secret one.”
“The secret stairwell,” he repeated, taking a step toward her.
She lifted her chin. “Yes.”
“And how many secret stairwells does Trethwick Abbey contain?” he asked, scarcely aware of what he was saying, his mind racing as a number of things suddenly became quite clear. A disappearing ghost, indeed.
“Well,” Jane said slowly, “there’s just the two—one in this corner of the house and one in the opposite corner, where…” She trailed off.
He came to a halt before her. “Yes?”
“Where your bedroom is,” she said guiltily.
“Ah.” He reached out a hand to touch her chin, tipping her face up so that her eyes met his. “How very, very convenient.”
She inhaled a bit unsteadily. “It was, rather.”
He waited for the anger, the frustration, to return—at the trouble she had caused him, at the lengths she had gone to in order to frighten him from his own home. He waited… and yet it did not come. He opened his mouth to speak and then paused, weighing his words. Something had shifted between them, without either of them acknowledging this outright, and their relationship, such as it was, felt somehow more… fragile. It was as though he’d been carrying something carelessly that he now realized was actually made of glass.
And he wasn’t willing to risk shattering it.
He looked at her for another long moment, his eyes taking in the tendrils of hair around her face that were in disarray from his fingers, the color still present in her cheeks—color thathehad put there.
“Was it me?” he asked simply. Her brow furrowed slightly. “Was it something I did?”
Understanding crept in.
“No,” she said, so immediately, sovehemently,that he found himself believing her in spite of it all. “It was just…” She blew out a frustrated breath. “It was just, you grow tired of having men decide the course of your life, you see. And so, if you can think of a way to, well… to rid yourself of the men making the decisions, and live life for yourself…” Her face twisted into something approaching a grimace, half apologetic, half defiant. “You have to try.”
“I see,” he said evenly—and hedidsee, to some extent. He’d never understand, obviously, what it was to live as a woman, to have so little say over one’s own future. But had he not spent the majority of his life trying to regain control over the circumstances—the loss of his parents, of this house—that had dictated his fate?
“And are you still, then?” he asked, striving to keep his voice neutral, not to pressure her in any way. “Trying?”
It was her turn to regard him for a long moment, the silence stretching tight between them, like a rubber band about to snap. “I don’t think so,” she said quietly, offering him her hand. He reached out and took it and felt her pulse against his palm.
“Will you show me these staircases, then?” he asked.
And so she did.
“I can’t believe I never discovered this as a boy,” he said, ducking his head as he came to the bottom of the narrow, steep stairs; by this point, they should have been behind a wall of his study, which was directly below Jane’s morning room. Another piece of the puzzle solved. “I’m honestly feeling a bit ashamed.”
“You were only ten when you left,” Jane reminded him. “I’m sure, given more time, you would have found them—I don’t suppose you spent much time in your father’s study or crawling about your parents’ bedroom.”
“How didyoufind them, then?” he asked.
“The first winter I lived here was a particularly damp one,” she said with a shrug. “My guardian was away for a few weeks at one point, and I was left to my own devices with an entire empty house to explore. I was perusing the bookshelves in the study, checking to see if there was anything worth reading, when I noticed a crack and a latch hidden behind the books. Once I’d found that one, I made amore careful examination of the rest of the house, to see if there was another.”
She spoke casually, but Penvale could envision what a long, lonely winter that would have been for a girl who had only recently lost her father, in a strange place, with no one her own age to speak to, abandoned by her guardian. He remembered, with unfortunate clarity, the winter after his parents had died, in the home of his vague, distant aunt and uncle. And at least he’d had a sister.
He voiced none of this, however, merely looked at her and said, “I see.” She lifted her chin, almost defiant, and he could tell that she knew he reallycouldsee—that he understood the particular heartache of feeling alone in the world.
He turned to face the dark wooden door before him, still conscious of her palm in his. He’d never thought himself the sort of man to become flustered over the weight of a woman’s hand, but something powerful seemed to crackle between them—now that he’d finally consummated the marriage (and what a bloodless, inadequate word to describe that act), all he could think about was pressing her up against the closest wall he could find and doing it all over again.
