Pick a time when everyone is drunk and preening.
Pay off everyone who helps you.
Take enough jewelry and petty money to get to Plymouth, where there will be plenty of ways to get to Edinburgh.
She could not even say the choice was hard, looking back at the past few days. She would rather stare into the inky black of a Dartmoor night than into the duke’s magnetic blue eyes. She’d rather face down snakes and bandits and lightning than have to watch the duke’s thighs pull against his tight breeches as he walked and rode and danced.
She would rather bolt into danger than sit in stillness near the object of her desire for the rest of her life.
No, there was no choice, not in the end. The world had had enough of her time, enough of her patience and energy. It would not get an ounce more. Let them all find some new victim to feed the minotaur that was Sloreley.
And her future and her time and her energy would finally, finally be her own. Whatever she did after Edinburgh would be for her and her alone.
Just beyond the mist.
The night was chilly and damp as she walked briskly down the lane leading away from Far Hope. The fog clung to her skirts and her shawl, and her breath puffed out in front of her. She had decided against lighting a lantern until she was much farther away lest she be spotted, and the darkness soon swallowed her whole. The moon was covered by clouds, the lights of Far Hope quickly did nothing, and even after she lit the lantern, she still tripped with nearly every single step. Over puddles, over ruts, over rocks.
Before long, she fell. And fell again.
Her palms were scraped. Her skirts became heavy with wet and mud. She could hear her own breaths like she was trapped in a small room.
She thought of the duke and refused to turn back.
She thought of the duke, and she kept going.
She thought of his words and reminded herself of how it felt to know they were true.
Still unwritten.
And some hours later, when her teeth were chattering and her lantern wouldn’t stay lit in the wind, Eleanor had to admit to herself that she was lost.
Which was when the rain came.
Chapter Three
Ajax Dartham, the Duke of Jarrell and uncle to the world’s worst nephew, had honestly not given Eleanor Vane much thought until she’d arrived at Far Hope. Until then, she’d been the convenient solution to a most inconvenient problem. He needed someone to straighten Gilbert out—someone who could keep Far Hope running and the dukedom respectable until Gilbert finally settled down and saw to his responsibilities—and she was undeniably that someone, according to every source Jarrell had interrogated on the matter.
God knew he’d waited for this moment long enough. He’d only survived the bleak, miserable years after Helena’s death because he knew he’d be free of the dukedom and this wretched estate when Gilbert reached his majority.
The paperwork was all drawn up; the lawyers ready; the dispensation from the King and the Committee for Privileges all prepared. As soon as Gilbert married, Jarrell would give him a wedding present that Gilbert in no way deserved and hand him the dukedom. Gilbert would be Jarrell. Gilbert would own Far Hope. And Ajax could finally be free.
Free of the memories. Free of the ghosts.
He would retire to the Orkneys maybe, or to the west of Ireland. Or perhaps even Canada, where his isolation could be frozen and utter and complete. He would be alone in body just as he already was in spirit, and perhaps he would eventually find some kind of peace that way. Some kind of relief.
But he could only leave once he’d surrendered the title, and the nightmare of papers, wills, and deeds had all been drawn up with the stipulation of Gilbert’s marriage—something Jarrell had thought would be a foregone conclusion when he’d begun the laborious process of begging the Powers That Be for the right to abdicate the title years ago.
It was very much not a foregone conclusion.
Having been a recluse for the last sixteen years, Jarrell hadn’t seen his nephew for an extremely long time. However, he’d still assumed the occasional tales of Gilbert’s wild behavior that had drifted all the way out to Devonshire had been partially exaggerated. Indeed, Gilbert’s mother had assured Jarrell of it whenever she wrote. Gilbert was a good man, she’d insisted, and had only been caught up in a bad group of friends, or perhaps he’d been mistaken for someone else, or perhaps he’d had a fever and that’s why the malicious gossips had assumed he’d been drunk at Lady So-and-So’s party.
Jarrell knew the wildness of youth all too well, and so he factored in some degree of willful maternal ignorance in her impression of her son, but he also truly hadn’t counted Gilbert’s misbehavior stretching this long. He hadn’t counted on the Italian incident, and he hadn’t counted on Gilbert being so immature. Yet when Jarrell welcomed his nephew to Far Hope that first day, he saw it was exactly what Gilbert was.
Not wild, not spontaneous, nor playful. Not the things that could be coaxed and polished into respectability. No, it was pure and true selfishness, the kind a spoiled child might exhibit.
Yes, Jarrell had definitely not counted on that when he’d made years and years’ worth of painstakingly difficult plans.
More worryingly, he hadn’t counted on the Lady Eleanor Vane.
The Lady Eleanor Vane who was selected because of her competence, her managerial acumen, the patience she displayed with her ailing mother and the never-ending work at Pennard Hall. When Jarrell had first heard of her, he’d pictured some kind of Viking maiden—tall and capable, icy and controlled. A jarl’s daughter fiercely ruling his land until he returned from his raids. A girl like that would be just fine managing Far Hope, even with its burdens, even with its hidden debts to God.
But when she arrived at Far Hope, Jarrell was confronted not with a shield maiden, but with a petite, rosy-cheeked damsel. Though twenty, she barely came up to his chest, and while she was no waif, there was something eminently delicate about her. Her mouth was set not in the determined line of a seasoned administrator, but in the slightly curved frown of someone who’d forgotten how to smile. Her eyes were not iron-dark with rigid authority, but a green that made him think of tender, growing things.
And her manner—soft, gentle, sad—but steady for all that. She reminded him of certain spring blossoms that unfurled with so much bravery and trembling beauty only to be blown away by the wind a week later.
And, somehow, she was the near-heroic daughter that the ton loved to praise? This apple blossom of a young woman? He could hardly credit it—and what’s more, a deep fear began to slither through his belly at the thought of leaving her with Gilbert. At the thought of saddling her with Far Hope and its wicked, if abandoned, legacy. After all, Helena had seemed to him a proper shield maiden once—buxom and ferocious—and then, in the blink of an eye, she’d been gone.
What chance then could this tiny little Eleanor stand?
Finally, on the night of the betrothal ball, Jarrell had to admit some things to himself.
One: Eleanor Vane was made of far sterner stuff than he’d first supposed. Under those sooty lashes flashed eyes of jade resolve, and while the lush fullness of her mouth was often pulled into that subtle, if elegant frown, the words she spoke in her surprisingly throaty voice were never self-pitying or timid. Indeed, she was nothing but serene through the entire week—although he often caught her glancing to the side and swallowing, as if refortifying herself in the face of numbing small talk and Gilbert’s petulance. But other than these small swallows, she was as relentlessly tranquil as usual. She evaded Gilbert’s sulks with ease, she attended patiently to her mother’s many physical complaints in the damp chill of the old stone manor, and she steered her father’s thoughtless remarks into neutral waters. She wasn’t the blossom at all, Jarrell realized, but the tree. One anchored so deeply that nothing seemed to move her. Fixed fast to a landscape with invisible, subterranean strength.