Page 19 of The Proposition
But she wasn’t done speculating. “Still, how odd that he would send you there to pick out a gift and then not provide for it. Well. The minds of men, mm? They are utterly unknowable to us.”
A cart carrying firewood rumbled by.
“Utterly unknowable,” Clemency muttered. “And utterly disappointing.”
“I beg your pardon, what did you say? That carriage was so disrupting.” Amy beamed at her, adjusting her green bonnet with a sweet laugh.
“Clemency had a bit of a fall this morning on her walk,” Honora intervened, tugging Clemency away, down the road to the west and toward the lane leading to Claridge. “It seems to have rattled her more than we anticipated.”
“How awful! Let me help you both home—”
“No,” the sisters said in unison. Honora swiftly cleared her throat and patted Amy fondly on the hand. “That will not be necessary. I am quite capable of taking her on my own.”
Amy frowned, squinting at them, the sunshine falling directly into her eyes as she watched them shuffle away. “Oh! But you will not have to! Is that not your family’s carriage now? And there is William!”
And so there he was. The carriage came charging up the road toward them, their brother hanging out the window, whipping a hat around in a circle. The dust flared and then settled, and once they had stopped, William and Tansy spilled out, red-faced and shining as if they were immensely drunk.
“Girls. Girls! There you are! It is the most remarkable thing!” He scooped them into an embrace, Clemency sore and disoriented, inhaling through her teeth as he squished his arm against her cut. Tansy’s bonnet had almost fallen off completely. She righted it, laughing uproariously, joining their little circle of family merriment. In her left hand she clutched an opened letter, waving it around like a flag.
“Do not keep us in suspense, William,” Honora chided, searching between him and his wife for answers. Even Amy came to see what had happened, lured by the commotion.
“It’s theVillefort!” Tansy shrieked.
When nobody responded with the correct amount of enthusiasm, Tansy rolled her eyes and tossed her head, then thrust the letter toward Honora. “My father’s ship! It has returned safely from the West Indies, and her sister ship is expected to arrive in good condition!”
Honora had already flattened out the letter, reading and mouthing the words at speed. Her voice rose when she reached the relevant passage. “It is with all the joy in my heart that I write to you, daughter, for with this bounty of silks and spices, our good name and fortune are restored.” She looked up from the letter in a daze. “Tansy…Oh my dear, what news! What glorious news!”
“Felicitations,” Clemency stammered, stunned. “This is…How wonderful for you both.”
“And so we must celebrate,” William roared, taking Honora by the arm and swinging her around for a jig right there in the street. “You must come too, Miss Brock, and your family. We shall have you all tomorrow to Claridge, after church, and we will toast the changing winds of fate!”
Clemency still felt the hot sting of shame prickling at her throat, but news of this caliber could certainly be a balm. Her eyes drifted to Honora, who had stopped spinning around with William. Clemency’s mind raced to keep pace with reality—Tansy’s fortune belonged primarily to William, and now he might finally have the means to keep Claridge in the family, and even provide larger, more enticingdowries for her and Honora. More than that, it freed her from the financial chains binding her to Boyle.
Freedom.
The relief of that victory did not last long enough to be savored, for she could not forget the bitterness buried beneath the sweet. The man she had loved, that she had joined herself to, that she had nearlymarried,had been keeping secrets from her. And if Mr. Ferrand was to be believed, and now perhaps he should be, those secrets were crucial indeed. Clemency did not share Miss Brock’s charitable view of the situation; there was no good excuse for a man of Boyle’s alleged means to have established such a low reputation at a village modiste. Perhaps this explained why he had never purchased a home of his own in Round Orchard; it was not, as he’d stated, that he preferred to stay with Mr. Connors, but that his debt prevented a purchase of any significance.
Dark secrets. How could she ever trust her judgment again? Indeed, she could not. And that was all right; she could now, perhaps, safely swear off men forever.
While her siblings herded her toward the carriage, Clemency glanced back at the shop, feeling as if the girl who had walked through those doors to buy fabric no longer existed. The Clemency who emerged back into daylight was someone different. Something different. A woman of stronger stuff, meaner stuff, who would not be fooled again.
7
A crisp, cold gale followed Audric into the village. Darkness had only just fallen, the Sunday evening church bells tolling their last as he moved with the bluster down the empty cobbled street. Eventually it dissolved into more of a dirt path that ran the length of a mile through the center of commerce. It was a tiny place, roughly half the size of Heathfield, with the standard English country provisions—cheesemonger, church, cobbler, stable, modiste, miller, bakery, tavern, and vegetable stands. Its most attractive feature was the surprisingly spacious assembly hall built directly across from the charming square with a round stone well and felt bunting hanging from the posts of an outdoor stage.
A few candles burned in the windows as Audric strode by, though only the tavern did any business at that time of night. The echo of the church bells faded as Audric reached Tindall and Batt’s. Distant male laughter leaked from the nearby tavern, a film of fiddle music washing over the chilly silence, carried along on that sharp wind.
As he rode the distance from Beswick to Round Orchard, he worried a strip of fabric in his pocket. He had kept the bit of bloodied sleeve that had once served as a bandage, it having fallen by the wayside while he dressed Miss Fry’s cut witha fresh wrapping. It was morbid to keep it, and unhygienic, but something compelled him to stash it. It seemed to soothe his anxious mind to fiddle with it between thumb and forefinger as he rode, a little unseen ritual in the pocket of his coat.
While his mind ought to be occupied with the innumerable details of letting a new house, instead he thought constantly of her. No woman outside his family had ever dared speak to him the way she did, with so much cheek and so little fear. He frightened most people, which usually he found an advantage, but it also meant that women found him unapproachable. His father had cultivated an earned reputation for severity and stoicism, a reputation he imparted to his son. Happy memories of his father were vanishingly scant, their only shared passion the hunt. What would his father say now if he knew Audric spent his time helping the spurned, insulted, and abandoned women of France find the men that left them in ruin? He had become an instrument of revenge, a man to be feared by liars and cheats. Perhaps his father would be proud, though the far more likely alternative was that his father would find the pursuit ridiculous—men had appetites that women did not, in his father’s opinion; that women suffered the indignities of those indiscretions and not the instigators was simply the way of the world.
No, he was not his father. The elder Ferrand hunted for the kill; Audric hunted—beast and man alike—for the temporary ease it gave his soul. He could sink his mind into something else for a little while, distract himself from his sister’s pain.
Away from his loneliness.
Given his silent, ferocious nature, few mothers targetedhim for their daughters, a mercy most other men of his four-and-thirty years would not be given. Delphine had once overheard a pair of girls whispering about him at an assembly in Paris, describing him asun peu satanique.
Delphine thought it hilarious, of course, but it bothered Audric more than he cared to admit. Did women really find him vaguely satanic? If so, that made Miss Fry’s behavior all the more intriguing. He never had the impression that she found him scary, only—perhaps rightly—exasperating.
