Faith, he thought, was this—believing that the man he’d spent years visiting would say “I love you” in the language that he most often used: “That sounds horrible. Let me take care of this for you.”
He was jolted from his reverie when the woman from the telegraph office approached him from behind.
“Excuse me, sir,” said she. “I know you were waiting on a reply to your telegram. It’s arrived.”
Adrian took hold of the wax-paper envelope and yanked the sheer slip of paper from its container. He read, his heart pounding…
NO TIME FOR OBSTACLES
GET WHAT YOU PROMISED ME
AND QUICKLY
For a moment, his heart sank. Once again, not even an “if you please.”
He stared at the paper, willing the dark ink to change. The letters remained firmly fixed in place.
GET WHAT YOU PROMISED ME
AND QUICKLY
Since the words wouldn’t change, Adrian would. He took a deep breath, then another, thinking, imagining, putting things together.
He shouldn’t make anything of the terse nature of the reply. Telegrams were no place for pleasantries. This wasn’t a letter or a comfortable afternoon talk over tea. One didn’t say “I love you” via telegram.
It also wasn’t a useful answer. Not in the slightest. What was he to do with this?
Well. It was likely Adrian’s fault. His original message had been unclear; he’d left doubt. “Emergency annulment” had seemed fairly straightforward in his own mind, but… Without knowing the circumstances, how would his uncle know he was talking about himself?
His mistake had been in trying to save space. He could be more clear.
“I’ll need to send a response,” Adrian said. The woman handed him a form, and he thought for a moment before scrawling his answer.
CANNOT EXPLAIN VIA TELEGRAM
TASK ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE
SITUATION DIRE
He looked at the clerk, who would have to convert this entire thing into dots and dashes. The woman no doubt heard far more entertaining stories.
Still… It was with grave hesitation that he committed the next lines to paper.
I HAVE BEEN FORCED INTO MARRIAGE AT GUNPOINT
I DESPERATELY NEED YOUR HELP
There. He could not make matters more clear than that. He handed the material to the clerk and slid over a coin. The woman made change, then read the telegram. Her brow furrowed.
She paused halfway through, frowning. She read it again. “Your pardon. I want to be sure that I have read this correctly. This does say…‘forced into marriage at gunpoint’?”
“Forced into marriage at gunpoint,” Adrian said. “Yes. That’s exactly what it says.”
The woman made a notation above Adrian’s light pencil marks in dark slashes of ink. FORCED INTO MARRIAGE AT GUNPOINT.
“Gunpoint, sir? That word is gunpoint?” Her voice seemed incredibly loud and echoing in the small room. “Are you certain that you intend to say gunpoint?”
“Yes.” Adrian felt his face heat. Good thing nobody else was about to overhear this. “I absolutely intend to say gunpoint.”
“Gunpoint.” She frowned at the page. “Well. Will you be waiting for a reply?”
For God’s sake. His involuntary plunge into matrimony would be the talk of the town.
“Yes.” He put one hand over his face. “Yes, I definitely need a reply.”
She turned from him, a frown on her face, and tapped idly into the machine. She then took the sheet he’d written everything on and slipped it into a folder.
Adrian froze. “Do you have to keep those?”
“No,” she said with a smile, “but sometimes someone bungles things upstream, and it’s a terrible mess if I don’t retain them. I know; I’ve tried. Besides, it does get quite boring in here.”
Well. It was good to know the wreckage of Adrian’s life was providing amusement to someone.
“I hate to be nosy, but…” She paused, raising an eyebrow.
Adrian met her gaze, doing his best to give her no invitation. Hated to be nosy? He suspected she lived for that very thing.
“But the woman you married at gunpoint,” she continued, ignoring Adrian’s distinct lack of interest, “was that Miss Camilla Winters?”
He frowned at her.
“Bishop Lassiter was here earlier,” she said, “sending a telegram about her. I’ve been rather cut up about it, to be quite honest. I saw her a few times with the rector, when he came in, and…I know it’s not right, to talk that way about the clergy, but the way he’s treated her…”
“Mmm?” Adrian bit his lip.
“And the others in that household. He does go through servants. And he said he was paying her half wages right in front of me.”
“I…see.” He wasn’t sure that he did. “It was her, yes.”
“Well.” The woman nodded. “Tell her for me, will you? If she needs anything, anything at all, please have her call on me. It’s Beasley, Mrs. Susanna Rose Beasley, at her service. I wish I’d said something to her earlier.” She sighed. “Too late for that now, I suppose. I’ll fetch you if there’s a reply, then?”
This reply took two hours. Mrs. Beasley took it upon herself to take it to him where he waited with a pint of ale at a nearby pub.
“Here,” she said, handing the envelope over with a solemn look on her face. “Tell me if you need to respond.”
NO REPEAT NO UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES
I BELIEVE IN YOU
YOU CAN DO IT
NOTHING IS TRULY IMPOSSIBLE
ALSO COMPLETELY UNABLE TO HELP WITH ANNULMENT UNTIL CURRENT MATTER RESOLVED
CHURCH POLITICS
AM SURE YOU UNDERSTAND
“Son of a bishop,” Adrian muttered.
“What sort of church politics?”
Mrs. Beasley was still standing there, peering over his shoulder. For God’s sake. Adrian looked up at her, considered his ale, and gave up.
“The political kind,” he said. “The kind you keep secret.”
She clapped her hands together. “Ooh, those are my favorite! Here, now. What kind of secret? Perhaps I can help!”
She continued to look at him in slowly dissipating delight before she realized that he didn’t intend to explain.
Adrian thought long and hard on his reply to his uncle. He could try to explain further—but once his uncle claimed it was a matter of church politics, he was unlikely to budge. And when he thought of it…
Well, the response did make sense. In a horrible way. Denmore would have to push Adrian’s case through personally. He’d need to vouch for Adrian’s character. If his uncle wouldn’t reveal the truth of his relationship with Adrian at this moment, he couldn’t actually do much about the annulment. Not yet.
He wouldn’t do anything until Adrian found the evidence of wrongdoing that they both now suspected.
Except now that Adrian was in desperate need of an annulment, he was unable to obtain that evidence.
Damn, damn, damn.
He hated that his uncle had a point. He also hated being stuck in impossible situations.
He hated that “I believe in you, you can do it” was the way that his uncle said “no, no, under no circumstances will I come to your aid.” He hated it.
He hated that if Grayson saw this exchange, he’d raise his eyebrow, and Adrian would know that he was thinking that he had told him so.
Adrian exhaled.
No. No. If he believed just a little longer—if he did the impossible—it would all work out.
Still, he tried one last time. He had to try, even though he knew that pushing the matter was already futile.
YOU PROMISED, he sent to his uncle.
He drank beer while he waited for one last response—not so much that he lost his senses, of course, but enough that he felt his thinking beginning to fog at the edges. Enough that the connections his mind made started to loosen. Enough that he stared at Alabi’s sketches that he’d
put in his notebook and actually tried to make something of them with his own pencil. He couldn’t draw at all. He made nothing but a mess.
It was afternoon by the time the response came. Adrian had nothing to show for his time but sketches of lopsided bears, alongside some ideas he had about his uncle’s problems.
I ALWAYS KEEP MY PROMISES, his uncle’s final telegram said.
BUT SO DO YOU