But once she had done what she needed to do, she could look to her future. Rafe could only hope that he lived in her memory. That she could gaze into her memories of him and they would guide her back to him.
Oh, by all that was sacred, let her come back to him.
Wherever you are now, Thea, know that I love you, he said to her in his mind. Come back to me, or I shall not know how to live.
And the house—the house had to be ready. No more stale biscuits. He’d clean the whole blasted place himself. Make it ready for the day she came home.
“I understand now,” Rafe said to Nicholas. “If I had married her, if she returned as the Countess of Luxborough, she would never have known what they truly thought. And Thea—she needs to know.”
“And once she knows?”
“Perhaps, then, she will come back.”
Nicholas absently shoved up the drooping shoulder of his toga. “You know, Rafe, my boy. If you came with me to London, she wouldn’t have as far to come back.”
“I’m not going to any blasted costume party.”
“Of course you’re not,” the bishop said.
Back at her lodgings, Thea and Gilbert found her trunk sitting on the front step and the landlady blocking her entrance, arms folded, jaw set.
“This is a respectable house,” the landlady said. “I don’t take women like you.”
Thea looked down at her trunk, back at the woman’s beady eyes. “What kind of woman do you imagine I am?”
“Exactly the kind your two gentleman callers told me you were.”
“You’re mistaken,” Thea protested. “And I paid for the rest of the month.”
“Least you should do. Now be gone.”
And yet another door slammed in her face.
The crowd streamed past them. Across the street, an anomaly caught Thea’s eye. Two finely dressed gentlemen stood as confidently as if that spot of London belonged to them. Some passersby took care not to jostle them, but several hopeful vendors swarmed around them, like flies on horse dung.
Yes, indeed. These two gentlemen were horse dung in human form.
Percy Russell and Francis Upton.
Her gentlemen callers, she presumed, whose lies had once more lost her a home.
They saw that she had noticed them. In unison, they doffed their hats and offered deep, mocking bows, their faces tilted up so she would not miss their malicious grins. They had everything, yet everything wasn’t enough, not until they were sure others had nothing.
Gilbert was hovering. “It’s getting late, miss. We must find you rooms.”
“It was hard enough the first time, for a woman on her own,” she said. “Maybe I can find an inn outside London.”
“I know somewhere. I’ll let them know you’re coming.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Miss Larke would have my head if I didn’t make sure you were all right. Not to mention his lordship.”
His lordship, who had let her go. If only she had stayed with him. But that had not been real either.
Gilbert lifted one handle of the large trunk. “My cousin owns a coffeehouse near here. You can wait there while I confirm this place for you. I’ll bring a hack.”
Numbly, because she had no better ideas, Thea lifted the other handle and together they walked to Pimm’s Fine Coffee House. The place hummed with energy, from the men perched on wooden benches, each with a cup or pipe in one hand, and a page in the other. Some read quietly, others muttered in urgent conversations, and a few were in loud argument, ignored by the rest.
When Thea and Gilbert arrived, everyone paused mid-sentence and looked at them, but all decided at a glance they had no information to offer and went back to what they were doing. As Gilbert located Mrs. Pimm, Thea studied the room.
It was in coffeehouses such as this one where young Thea had loitered, dressed as a boy, running errands for a coin. She had practiced her reading on newspapers and memorized the conversations she overheard, to repeat for Pa. How she had basked when Pa’s eyes lit up and he said, “Excellent. I can use that information, oh yes, indeed I can.” What a team the Knight family had been.
As Thea inhaled the aroma of coffee to chase away the stink of smoke, a peculiar lightness came over her. Again, she recalled that time when her family had watched the hot air balloon, and her childish fear at knowing the balloon would no longer be anchored to the earth. All her life she had done whatever she could to stay anchored, but now her parents had definitively cut the ropes.
And Thea did not feel fear. She felt…freedom. During those three years of her exile, she could have done anything, gone anywhere. But she had not. She had stayed, stuck, her mind closed to the future, seeing only the past, trying to find her way back.