“Miss, we have the current,” the captain called to her. “We must embark.”
Julian’s skin was hot beneath the drops of rain. He was so ill.
He won’t remember this. You’ve betrayed him. Deliberately and publicly. He’ll be furious when he recovers his right mind, and you’ll be trapped.
“Raise the anchor,” the captain called. “Miss, you must climb aboard.”
Love is a system of behaviors. He came after you. You did all that, and he came after you.
She looked from the man who had been her past to the ship that represented her future and closed her eyes and chose to risk her poor, bedraggled heart one final time.
“I’m not leaving. Unload my trunks.”
“There isn’t time,” the captain shouted.
“Then give me my dog,” she said. “And my valise.”
A crewman handed Shrimpy over the rail, along with the travelling case with her money and her jewels. The pup whined, annoyed to have been wrested from his cozy basket and moved into the rain.
Julian’s eyes fluttered open. “Stay,” he said again.
She kissed his forehead and prayed he would remember that he’d wanted this.
“Julian, don’t worry. I will fix this.”
She found a sailor who knew a man with a cart who could carry Julian’s drenched body to an inn, despite the pouring rain. She found a boy and paid him a shilling to go looking for a doctor in the weather. She coaxed the innkeeper, whose lodge was full, to make a room available—bribing its previous occupant to share a room at the pub down the road.
Through it all she held Julian’s hand as he went in and out of consciousness, wiping sweat and rain from his eyes and repeating the same words to him over and over. I will fix this. Please live and I will fix it.
When she finally secured the room she’d paid for, she spread her sopping cloak over the filthy ticking mattress and had the innkeeper lift Julian onto the bed. She sent the man’s daughter to fetch hot water and clean linens and lemon and ginger in hot broth.
She’d never nursed anyone in her life, but by God, she would learn to save a life by simply doing it.
She tugged and pulled Julian’s sodden, frigid clothing off his body.
For once, she did not stop to admire the beauty of his form but only to run her hands over his cold, puckered skin, trying to abrade warmth into it, trying to infuse him with the force of her own life, her own heat.
She murmured to him as she worked, telling him how foolish he was, for it was she who was supposed to defy all sense with grand, possibly deadly gestures. What would become of them if they both started acting foolish and impulsively?
She wasn’t sure if he was listening, for his eyes only fluttered when she spoke, so she told him of all the tears she’d cried as she’d fled in her rented coach along the muddy roads, contemplating never seeing him again after she’d humiliated him like this—and how all those tears were wasted, because now she would have to cry again at his funeral since he’d gone and frozen himself to death.
When, finally, the doctor arrived, the day had turned to night and the rain had turned to howling wind and she was half-mad with worry.
“Please,” she said to the physician, “save him.”
She stepped out of the room to give the doctor space and saw the assembled residents of the inn—the proprietor, his daughter, the cook, assorted guests and sailors—all staring at her disheveled form.
Their faces were locked in grim anticipation. They were waiting for her to announce his death.
Well, they could wait.
Didn’t they know she’d never met a problem she could not fix?
Apthorp’s body was composed entirely of pain.
Fatigue and rain and ague and heartbreak.
He was neither living nor dead, awake nor asleep. His only thought was misery.
Except when, through the fog and the pain and the thirst, there was Constance.
Constance whispering to him. Constance’s hands on his brow, his chest, his back.
Constance putting damp cloths to his forehead, putting liquids in his mouth.
Her voice played in his mind, inseparable from fever dreams, spinning fairy tales that meandered with his half-formed memories.
She whispered of an estate in good repair, attended by a well-trained staff. The dairy made sweet milk and the garden bloomed with tender lettuce in the summer. The mines were in working order, for a foreman had been hired to improve the yield of salt, and the waterway had broken ground and might be finished earlier than expected, given all his careful planning.
There was money in the bank—enough to pay off all the creditors and warm the hearths with coal and thatch the roofs to keep the heat inside.
Margaret and Anne wore fine dresses and spent their days reading stories and frolicking in the fields and waiting for the gentle politician who adored them to return home from London. His mother rested comfortably in the dower house, content.
And he and Constance made their home on the Strand, which was filled with art and people and the laughter of two little blond-haired children. A daughter who could not be coaxed to stand still or pay attention and a son who was well-mannered and looked after her. Sometimes they made mischief, but no matter what they did, they never thought to question where their place was, because they knew from the time they were small that they were cherished.
And beside him in bed there was a wife who loved him so much it sometimes scared her. A wife who still presided over London society, but whose favorite nights were the ones she spent with him comparing notes on how they would conquer the world together, bit by bit. And then he took her hand and led her up to bed and brought her to such heights she sometimes wondered how she’d ever come back down to earth. But she did come down, because beside him was her home now. The only home she’d every truly had. The one she’d never known how much she wanted.
He shook and sweated and ached and raved and still this vision unfurled in the space inside his consciousness.
This will be our life, the whisper said. This will be our future.
Together, we can fix it.
Just come back to me.
Just open your eyes.
Stay.
He opened them.
Julian stared at her. Wan, scarcely awake. Alive.
“Constance,” he said.
His voice was ragged from fever. His skin looked like watery cream gone slightly off. His lips were chapped, the skin peeling off in whorls. His beard had grown out and his hair was matted to his head.
He had never looked so good to her in his entire resplendently beautiful life.
“Oh, Julian.” She rushed to him, burying her head on his chest. “I was so worried I had lost you—”
He forced himself up on his pillows and dragged a hand through her hair.
“You thought attempting to cross the English Channel in a squall would be enough to throw me off?”
A great pressure lifted from her chest. She could barely speak.
“You remember?”
“Oh, Constance. A man does not forget it when his heart breaks.”
A tearless sob of pure relief escaped from her throat. “Oh Julian, I’m so sorry.
He wrapped his arms around her. “Hush. I’m the one who’s sorry. So damnably sorry. Let me hold you.”
She settled into the crook of his arms. But she did not hush. She had many things she needed to say.