“A dock with many ships,” she finally decided. “Or a hallway with many doors. Or maybe a crossroads, one with many byways meeting and signs pointing every which way.”
“Not,” the duke said slowly, “a room with many books? Or a room filled with many people?”
She thought for a moment. “No. Those aren’t the same thing.”
“No,” he agreed with her. “They are not.”
Wordlessness reigned after that, broken only by the wind crashing against the ancient walls of the house and whipping through the hills around it.
“It is the possibility itself that is the most potent,” she said after a while. “The potential of anything. When you are standing in one place, it’s almost as if the future is already written, like a branch that’s been pruned of anything deemed not productive. But the ability to go anywhere, to do whatever you please…”
She trailed off. She shouldn’t say things like this. Not because she thought it better to lie, but because she was supposed to be harmonious. It was why this marriage had been arranged in the first place. Harmonious Eleanor to save everyone’s day.
But to her surprise, the duke nodded, seemingly not bothered by her open admission that she wished for possibilities beyond what she already had.
“It took me many years to learn what you already know, Lady Eleanor. And it took me many more to learn the lesson that follows.”
“Which is?”
He stared out into the world of silver and rust, his eyes fixed on something she couldn’t see. “That we make our own futures, wherever we are. Wherever we’re starting from, whatever we feel has been…pruned…the future is still unwritten. It may be beyond the mist just yet.”
His words sank into her, warm and sparking and alive, vital in a way that nothing had seemed vital since she learned she was to be married.
Still unwritten.
“What if I don’t know the rest?” she asked in a low voice. She shouldn’t ask. She shouldn’t betray anything that wasn’t gratitude that she was to marry this man’s nephew. But she couldn’t help it. Up here on the tower, surrounded by mist, and with only the wind and the house and him, she wanted to be herself. “What if all I can imagine are the ships—the doors—the roads—and not where they take me in the end?”
When he looked at her, she felt young, and also just the right age, and she was shivery and hot, and also steady as the house underneath her feet.
“Perhaps,” he said, “you cannot imagine where they go because you are not on them yet. Perhaps deciding when to go is more important than deciding where.”
He said the last sentence like it was something he’d realized long ago and repeated to himself often. He said it like it was a cherished verse or maxim to live by. He looked away from her then, lost in his own thoughts, and below them in the gardens, Eleanor heard the murmurs of guests taking a walk. And out of the mist came the faint jingle and creak of an approaching carriage, more guests for the wedding.
Her wedding.
Abruptly and terribly, she was ashamed of herself. She’d told herself that she would marry Sloreley, that she’d endure. And the first chance she had, she was expressing a sense of ingratitude and talking about running away.
“Far Hope, though,” she started. She planned on saying something conciliatory and vaguely dishonest to smooth over her earlier confession, but found the words leaving her mouth to be entirely true. “Far Hope seems a place like that. That whatever I imagine waiting for me just beyond the mist, I could also imagine here too. It’s a place of possibility.”
A line appeared between his brows and he turned away. “For some,” he said gruffly.
Then he bowed to her and stalked away. He disappeared through the doorway, taking the spiral stairs down in a storm of bootsteps, and left Eleanor alone on the roof.
It was nonsense to love him—she was too sensible not to know it was nonsense. It had only been a week of knowing him. A meager handful of hours.
Three hours in the drawing room feigning interest in the journeys of their guests.
Six dinners. A moment alone on the tower, in the wind and the mist.
If he were a book, she wouldn’t have had enough time to read him—not even half of him.
And yet.
And yet she felt something awful, a slow clamping in her chest like someone had clipped an artery. Like something inside her would starve and die if she had to be this close to the duke for the rest of their lives and yet be nothing more than a relation to him. Nothing more than a solution to a thorny problem.
She had planned to live without her pride, without her dignity even. She had planned to live without joy or ease.
But to live with this? This restlessness, this hunger that would forever go unfed? This branch of a life as Sloreley’s wife, pruned of all other possibilities? It was unthinkable. It couldn’t be borne. No, she wouldn’t endure it.
The future is still yet unwritten, he’d told her.
The moment she agreed with his words—the moment she thought what if I could still write my future?—she couldn’t unagree with them.
She thought what if I just… left? And then the idea of leaving became its own presence, its own being. Like a shadow, or a pet, it followed her from moment to moment and from room to room. It paced behind her while she ate and crouched at her feet while she made polite conversation in the drawing room.
It curled up next to her while she slept.
It whispered her own words back to her, quietly, urgently, desperately.
What if I just…left?
A week before, she’d dismissed the idea as ridiculous, as dangerous. As foolish as climbing into a hot air balloon. And what had really changed since then? Sloreley was childishly self-centered, but she hadn’t expected any better. His mother and sister were unpleasant, but again, she hadn’t expected much better there either. All that had really changed was that she had fallen in love with the duke.
She tried and tried, but try as she might, she could not untether the two things from one another. The duke and leaving. Leaving and the duke. Maybe it was what he said on the tower; maybe it was because it was he who finally gave her the words to choose something different, something other, but when she thought of leaving, she thought of him, and when she thought of him, she thought of leaving.
It would hurt, leaving someone that made her feel like she’d felt on the tower—young and old and floating and anchored all at once—but it would hurt even more to spend the rest of her life stealing glimpses of him while the rest of her was slowly eaten alive by the Sloreley Project. No, she wouldn’t do it.
Her future would be just beyond the mist after all.
The duke had been right. Once she decided to go, once she decided when to go, the possibilities came like the first flowers of spring—a couple shooting through the earth here and there, and then all of a sudden, there were possibilities everywhere, carpeting her mind and blooming faster than she could pluck them all up.
Jewelry.
A literal dock with many ships.
A godsister in Edinburgh who would help her and keep her visit a secret for as long as she needed to make her final plans.
Truly, it was not so hard to run away as she might have once believed. The answers to her earlier questions about fleeing this wedding—how and where and when—came easily enough once she let go of safety, security, and reason. Once she accepted that whatever waited for her beyond the mist would only be hers if she plunged right in to chase after it.