Page 63 of The Lord who Captured Her Innocent Heart
“I can tell you certainly they are not passing,” Peter said. “In fact, darling Ella — I should tell you, the events of this very early morning put everything in much greater understanding. My carriage raced across the moors from Brighton. I had every inclination that I would see you this morning, declare my love. Just as I am now. But then, bandits took to the carriage. They wanted to rob me. They wanted to kill me. But my heart nearly burst, knowing that, with that, I would never be allowed the life I so yearn to have with you.”
The story landed like a punch in Ella’s gut. She swept her fingers towards his chest, splaying them across his beating heart. She gaped at him, allowing her mind to trace alternate events, had the bandits succeeded.
“I cannot imagine a reality in which I awake and you’re not here,” she said, her voice raspy. She struggled to drag full sobs back into her body, to cradle them tightly in her stomach. She couldn’t show such raucous emotion in front of Peter, not now. Her lower lip throbbed.
“How did you escape?” she asked, drawing her hand tighter across Peter’s chest. It was as though she wanted continued affirmation that he still existed. The beats of his heart bumped through her arm, making her body shake.
“I released the horse from the carriage, hopped on and rode like my life — our life — depended on it,” Peter said. His eyes were glossy. Perhaps he, too, was attempting to maintain his composure.
Again, Ella wished Tiffany was somewhere deep in the house, allowing her and Peter their much-needed privacy. She pressed her lips together, before saying, “Oh, goodness. Perhaps with this news, I know for sure what’s in my heart.”
“You do?” Peter asked. He shifted his weight and spread his own hand over Ella’s, over the top of his chest.
The touch of his skin against hers felt like the most intimate thing in the world. Ella couldn’t breathe.
“Because regardless of the bandits; regardless of my father and of Brighton; know that you have nothing you owe to me,” Peter continued. “If you cannot return my affections, I will carry on. I will leave you as you are. I know you will find someone much better than me: much stronger, and softer, and poetic, and true.”
“I want to be with you,” were the words that fled from Ella’s lips. They seemed so childlike, so lacking in any sort of intelligence. Yet they simmered in the air between them, growing more and more powerful with each passing moment.
“Truly?” Peter asked.
“Yes,” she returned. She cast her eyes closed. “But you must give me time, Peter. You must give me time to think, and to understand, and to know that this isn’t just a passing phase for you. We are terribly different.”
“I will be proper with you, Lady Chesterton,” Peter said. He drew his fingers around hers, almost too tightly, forcing her eyes to open up to him, like flowers in spring. “I will court you the way you were always meant to be courted. And those long-lost days of our scheming, perhaps one day we will look back at them with humour and light. But now, I have only time and space to think of our future together. And to know that we’ve done the right thing, taking it one day at a time, until we both know we’re ready.”
The rain grew thicker, becoming almond-sized droplets across their shoulders. Tiffany tittered, scampering past them, saying, “I shan’t wait a moment more. Come along. We’re drenched.”
Peter kept his hand wrapped around Ella’s, guiding her towards the rocky path on the other side of the rusted-out gate. They swept forth, with Tiffany leading the charge, and then hovered in the back of the house, watching the late-summer storm spew itself over the moors.
“Where do you think the bandits are, now?” Ella murmured, leaning against Peter’s chest.
Just behind them, she heard the chattering of kitchen staff, the whirl of the maids gathering together an early lunch. Soup simmered on the stove.
“I hope they’re counting the very few bills they stole from me, wondering if they should make some sort of career change,” Peter said, chuckling. “All that work for a few hundred. It doesn’t seem worth it, does it?”
Ella ached with the desire to turn her head just a bit upward, to draw her lips across the warmth of his. But there would be a time for it; weeks and months of courting, of learning about one another on a more intimate, romantic level. No longer were they partners in some sort of twisted crime.
Perhaps they would find a way to be partners in life, instead.
**
Something like a million years ago, Ella remembered walking through the gardens with her sister, Tatiana — talking and bantering about the many years that would fold before them: years of courtship, of marriage.
At the time, her heart had been light, her stomach fluttery, knowing that Lord Frederick Braxton was preparing to return to his childhood home. At the time, Ella had felt a fresh reality opening up before her, one of courting Frederick, of engagement parties, of true love. When Frederick had awaited them at the garden gate, his eyes burning only for Tatiana, Ella had felt something break within her. She’d felt she’d been robbed of a future she’d always tucked away in the back of her mind for herself.
Of course, as with most things in life, Ella couldn’t have written a better story of what was to come.
Now, she walked a similar route through the gardens alone. The rain from the previous morning had shifted, allowing yet another beautiful summer day to fold over them. This time, however, the summer day felt edged with a warning, one that told of chilly autumn nights, of sipping warm cider around the fire. For the first time, Ella imagined herself doing this alongside Peter Holloway, rather than Tatiana.
Peter arriving at her home, fatigued and bleary-eyed and speaking in poetics about his love for her, had truly been a kind of fantasy. She paused at an enormous patch of violet flowers, finding that the colour seemed far more vibrant than it ordinarily did. Was this an element of falling in love? Would Peter make the world a brighter, safer place, simply by loving her back?
For of course, she’d nurtured her love for Peter since she’d realised it. She hadn’t imagined him to be the sort to echo it back.
Ella routed herself back towards the house. The sun dripped lower in the sky, casting purples and blues across the fields. Lost in thought, she half-imagined Tatiana to be somewhere beside her, walking in a half-skip and allowing her skirts to flounce. “I think he was always meant to be yours,” Ella imagined Tatiana saying.
At first, she imagined herself lost in a daydream, when she spotted Peter up ahead — directly in the same spot Frederick had been, all those weeks ago, when he’d asked their father permission to marry Tatiana. How could Peter have possibly known to stand there? How could he possibly envision the mirror of it all?
Lord Chesterton stepped out from behind Peter, beaming at Ella — the daughter who had assumed, all throughout her life, that he liked her the least. Now, she saw his love reflected back to her: a bit unsure, a bit worried. But now, he winked at her, sending her a message.
