Taking a neatly pressed neckcloth from the drawer full of neatly pressed neckcloths, Rafe paused and looked around his clean room. He stepped into the silent corridor, the wooden floorboards cool through his stockings, and studied the row of windows overlooking the courtyard garden. There were too many windows—an extravagance on his father’s part, given the taxes on windows and glass—but they were all spotless. The candle sconces along the wall gleamed. The door frames were polished.
He opened the next door down; this room too was fresh and tidy, albeit with signs of Nicholas’s occupation. Rafe shut the door and kept walking, opening each empty room in turn. In each room, he found the same thing: The curtains were closed against the sun, but nothing was under dust covers. Everything was clean and fresh. One might think the house was fully occupied, and that the entire family and their friends would soon come crowding back. Every day, while Rafe went about his life, scores of invisible hands were keeping this house ready to welcome its inhabitants home.
I have kept this house in readiness for the day you brought home another bride, to house a new, happy family, Sally had said. Because if you could free yourself of the past, maybe I could too.
Then Thea had arrived.
How right she had looked in the library, in the drawing room. How easily she had slid into place, as if she was the one the house had been waiting for. Thea, an outcast wearing her sister’s clothes, the merchant’s daughter who had learned to walk and talk like a lady, the optimistic survivor who had a plan for fixing her life that did not include Rafe.
Rafe walked on, faster now, until he reached her rooms. He knocked. No reply. His heart thudded a violent protest. Surely she would not leave without first saying goodbye?
His chest tight, Rafe shoved open her sitting room door; her belongings were still there. He crossed to the window and looked out, over the gardens, and beyond, the woodlands and fields. And below him, a flash of yellow.
A chestnut-haired woman in a butter-yellow gown was traipsing through the flowerbeds.
Rafe pressed a palm to the glass.
If he were a different man, he would walk with her in the sunlight.
And then he remembered that everything had changed, and if everything had changed, then he could change too. If he chose.
He could choose to keep living in fear of watching someone he loved suffer. Or he could choose to be that different man.
He wheeled away from the window and ran.
Chapter 21
First, Rafe found a straw bonnet and a yellow shawl, flung across a wooden bench. He set his neckcloth down beside them and walked on.
Next, he found a pair of women’s shoes and stockings. Rafe peeled off his damp stockings and laid them down. Barefoot, he walked on.
Then, he found Thea.
She was drifting through the gardens, singing to herself, fingers brushing over the flowers and leaves. Her hair was pinned up but for a few tendrils and one persistently errant lock, and her feet were white against the green grass, beneath her yellow hem. It felt like a lifetime since he had touched her; it was a wonder he had stayed away.
She spared no thoughts for him, he supposed, lost as she was in the simple pleasure of watching butterflies in a flower garden on a warm summer’s day. This was her strength. It was not the kind of strength the world valued, but its power stole his breath. This was what made her a survivor: her gift for transforming the ordinary world into a wondrous, captivating place. Despite everything, no one had taken that from her. If Rafe had his way, no one ever would.
An entrancing sense of lightness swept through him, rushing through his blood as if he had swallowed a drug, but no medicine’s effect was this marvelous. Every fiber in his body itched to dance. Every detail, every color, was rendered clear and crisp. The light was brighter, the bees buzzed louder, the honeysuckle smelled sweeter than ever before.
Thea gave no sign that she had seen him, but the set of her shoulders made him suspect she had. Without looking at him, she skipped behind a hedge.
Motionless, Rafe waited. Her hair appeared over the top of hedge. Then her forehead. Then her smiling blue eyes. As soon as their eyes met, she ducked.
Chuckling, he went after her. Again she skipped away, until she paused to study an orange daylily, her face half turned toward him. Her dimple told him she was fighting a smile.
He edged closer. “You have left a trail of clothing in the garden.”
She laughed. “It’s terrible of me, I know. No decorum at all, and the sun must be doing perfectly horrid things to my complexion. But it feels so good, doesn’t it? The sun on one’s skin, the air so fresh and clean, and so much sky and nature! I shall have none of this in London.”
The breeze crawled over him. He gripped one wrist in the other hand so hard it hurt.