As he pivoted back, she skipped through the doorway toward him, easily, assuredly, their quarrels forgotten. She pressed a hand to his chest, and it felt the most natural thing in the world to trail his knuckles down her cheek.
“It wasn’t you,” Thea whispered, her eyes searching his.
Then Nicholas joined them, and they lowered their hands in a futile charade of propriety.
“Forgive me,” Rafe said. “I need some time alone. I need to think.”
Nicholas laid a hand on his sleeve. “Then take time to think. And think of how it truly was not your fault Katharine died. Not yours, nor Sally’s. You have believed the wrong story all these years. This is what I tried to tell you.”
A disbelieving laugh curled out of Rafe’s throat. “Oh no, old man, do not pretend you ever imagined this.”
“Not this exactly.” Nicholas tilted his head to consider. “Fair enough. Not this at all. But I never doubted you did everything you could for Katharine.”
“Yet it wasn’t enough.”
Nicholas and Thea exchanged a look, and Rafe’s feet shuffled on the checkered floor. His four limbs fought to take him in different directions: to run to London and tear off Ventnor’s head; to pull Thea into his arms and lose himself in her; to dive into the lake and swim to exhaustion; to fall to his knees and weep.
“Miss Knight, if you might give us a moment?” Nicholas said.
“Very well.”
Rafe kept his eyes on Thea as she returned to the drawing room, watching until the hem of her dress disappeared.
Nicholas pulled the door shut behind her and grinned. “She’s truly enchanting, isn’t she, our Miss Knight?”
“Now? You want to do your matchmaking now?” The man was impossible. “Yes, she is enchanting, but recall she is here only so I could secure the funds to finance the medicine business. If you want happy marriages and rooms full of babies, go bother Christopher and leave me alone. I’m the man who could not protect his first wife from her own father.”
He turned to leave but Nicholas caught his arm in a surprisingly firm grip. “You know, my boy, I have always wondered about this plan of yours to make medicines. I wondered how much you wish to save others because you still long to save Katharine. For years, you had to watch someone you love suffer, while you stood helplessly by. I know something of how that feels. But know that Katharine died despite your love, not because of it.”
Air was growing short again, and Rafe glanced longingly at the front door. “Does this sermon have a point?”
Nicholas smiled. “Now you are in love again, and you are afraid.”
“I am not.”
But he was something. Something that did feel a little like fear. He was accustomed to fear as a jolting thing, direct and acute, with teeth and claws or guns and knives. This was a different kind of fear. The kind of fear that used to grip him when he witnessed Katharine’s torments, when he lay awake in the dark worrying what to do. This kind of fear turned him to stone, from his shoulders to his feet, and it was difficult to breathe, with stone lungs.
“Forgive me,” he said again. “I need some time alone.”
Nicholas nodded and stepped away, and Rafe escaped into the air.
Craning her neck at a window in the drawing room, Thea watched Rafe stride across the lawn toward the woods, toward his greenhouse and his plants. Only when he was gone from view did she turn back to where Sally and Martha sat silently side by side.
“This is why you feared I would dismiss you,” Thea said to Sally. “The secrets you kept.”
“I cannot live here,” Sally said. “Not after what I have done.”
“No,” Thea protested. “It was not your love that killed her, but Ventnor’s fear. No one blames you.”
“I blame me.”
Martha laid her hand over Sally’s. “You loved her.”
Sally smiled. “I used to tell Katharine that her illness was due to her having so much spirit, her human mind could not contain it.”
“And when she died, you had to grieve alone,” Martha said.
“I cared for nothing anymore.” Sally stared down at their joined hands. “I could not bear to stay here, so I went to London. I knew I could not harm Ventnor so I used him instead. When he offered his patronage—the whole notion thrilled him, I think—I decided to live as I pleased. After all, keeping secrets had led only to heartache. But in the end, I was sent running again.”
Thea growled. “Yet another reason to loathe Ventnor, for chasing you away.”
Sally suddenly grinned. “The man who threatened to cut me was the same man I had shot. He told me his shoulder ached in the cold; I told him I was sorry for it, and regretted not shooting him in the heart.” Her mirth faded as she shook her head. “Listen to me, talking as if I were brave, when I could not even denounce Ventnor to the world. All I can do is look after those in my care, and I never let anyone be harmed on my watch.”