Scandalous Ever After

by Theresa Romain

  “Oh.” Her fingers clutched at his. “Evan. You are not perfect, but you are just right.” She didn’t meet his eye as she said that—except for a quick sidelong glance. Almost shy.

  “Wise words,” he said. “I think I’ve heard those before.”

  She squeezed his hand, hard, then withdrew hers into her lap. Laced her fingers together. “I’m sorry for the way I’ve treated you,” she blurted.

  Ah. They were to talk of it at last.

  Manners would instruct him to deflect the apology with pretended misunderstanding. Evan declined to use good manners.

  “What, chatting with me as a friend and brushing me with your skirts like a lover? Pulling me toward you, then pushing me back again, so I never know what to expect?” Somehow he managed to keep his tone even, his feet planted steadily on the stable floor. “Come, now. What is there to apologize for in all of that?”

  Her brows lifted. “Anything else?”

  “That’s all. For now.”

  The line of her mouth softened, curved. “I am sorry, truly. I’ve felt awkward. I wasn’t sure what to do after…we…ah. Then I missed you, and I was afraid.”

  I was afraid too. I missed you. I have always been sure of you. He waited, words bated at the tip of his tongue.

  Kate twisted her gloves in her grasp. “I’ve never trusted anyone in the way I trusted—that I trust—you. I think I trust you more than I trust myself. You would not hurt me, and I…I cannot say the same for the choices I’ve made.”

  It was being wounded and healing at once. Her trust was a balm, but it was searing too. She had placed him in the role of infallible friend, as surely as she had made of herself wife, daughter, mother. And if she felt trapped—how was he to feel? The role of friend was the only one she had told him that gave her room to laugh.

  He did not feel like laughing now. He could not fathom how he had laughed this evening at all.

  “You have apologized,” he said. “Does that mean you won’t do it again? The inconsistent sort of toying with my heart?”

  There. Heart. He had said it.

  She did not miss the word, clearly more intimate than what she had expected, and her mouth fell open. Startled. Considering.

  Then she rallied and moved on as though he’d used a word far smaller. One that fit into the role of friend, exactly as we were. “I will not do it again. I am grateful for the sort of easy friendship we have discovered, where I make a fool of myself, you show me improper artifacts, and we get to pet a horse.”

  “So easy.” He could not keep the scoff from his tone. “So…friendship…y.”

  He ought to say more, but what was the point of words? Being in Wales was a tricky balance. It was a rich vein for exploration, and it was a hammer to pound him into the proper shape.

  “Now you’re making up words,” she said. “Does that mean you forgive me?”

  Ah, Kate, lantern-lit and sweet. As sincere in her apology as she had been in her passion and her hesitation. This sincerity was a clutch at his heart, though it felt like a shackle too.

  “Yes,” he said. “It means that I forgive you. But it does not mean that I agree.”

  Thirteen

  The following morning, Kate crossed a sea.

  Their journey had begun early, following an old stone bridge from Anglesey to the smaller Holy Island, where the packet awaited. There she and Evan and Susan bade farewell to John Coachman and to Jerome and Hattie. Hattie stamped her hooves, which were still perfectly shod. Jerome looked at Kate with soft, reproachful eyes that made her heart twist. When the chestnuts turned about, Kate felt as though she were saying good-bye to her family all over again.

  But there was so much to see that she set aside the hollowness of parting. The packet in Holyhead Port was swift and solid, a good-sized barque laden with freight and mail as well as passengers. When Kate flapped a glove at Lady Alix, the saucy little mare followed her aboard readily enough.

  “You’re meant to be my horse,” Evan grumbled as he led Her Ladyship to a stall belowdecks. Susan, too, went to the quarters below.

  Kate found a spot at the bow and looked and looked. The sea was different every time she crossed it, and never had she departed from Wales. The coast was crumbled into rough islands of varying sizes. Anglesey led to the smaller Holyhead, and South Stack, home of a lighthouse that beckoned ships toward safe crossing. The rugged low bump of North Stack, the scatter of the Skerries—low islets that caught so many ships unawares, a lighthouse was placed there too. Seabirds filled the air with their buzzing calls, flying up and landing in great waves of pale wings like air-flung rippling cloth.

  When someone took up a place at the bow beside her, she knew who it was without looking. She knew the size and shape of Evan, the feel of having him stand next to her.

  “How can you leave it?” she asked. “How can you go to Greece?”

  How can you leave me, just when we found each other again?

  Friends didn’t ask that sort of question. Friends weren’t that selfish. So she pretended she wondered only about the sea.

  “I’m going where I’m needed,” he said. “I want to be needed.”

  “What a blessing for you. I want to be needed less.” What was a life like with no burdens? With mischievous horses, and children who always had clothing the right size, and land that either was yours or wasn’t, and none of this in-between fear?

  She swallowed hard and tipped her face to the breeze. At sea, there was no need for such thoughts. The sea was neither here nor there, and so it was home to no worries.

  “Perhaps we ought both to be careful what we wish for,” he said drily.

  “Perhaps we ought.” The dark blue sea grappled with the boat, the waves hungry tongues. “I would never tell you to count your blessings—”

  “God forbid.”

  “—but I ought to count mine. I’ll get to see my children again soon.” She looked up at him, squinting into the blue wash of the sky. “And you will too.”

  She had left alone, but she would not return so. Evan stood beside her, a figurehead at the bow, watching the water ruffle past.

  * * *

  The ferry ride took only a few hours, but Kate wished it had been far longer. As soon as Evan could rent a carriage and team in Dublin, he saddled Lady Alix and rode postilion beside the women. Another ninety miles lay between them and their destination, and it would take five days, at least, to cover.

  Susan had become nauseated during the ferry crossing, and a jouncing carriage ride over rough roads turned her positively green. When they stopped at an inn that night, Kate saw Susan to their chamber with warm broth and a compress for her head.

  “You shouldn’t, my lady,” the maid said in feeble protest.

  “You can pay me wages for this hour,” said Kate. “If that makes you feel better. Now, drink the broth.”

  Susan had grown up as part of the Whelan House staff. Kate was ten years her senior and remembered her as a child of no more than seven, kicking her legs on a tall kitchen chair as she peeled fruits. Later she’d been a housemaid. For the past five years, she’d been Kate’s lady’s maid. Sometimes Kate’s only companion—not that Kate confided in her.

  She didn’t confide in anyone. Except Evan.

  Maybe.

  She pulled back the coverlet for Susan, unpinned the young woman’s fine hair, and bathed her face with a cool cloth. It was like taking care of Nora, should Nora, at the great age of twelve, let Kate tend to her.

  Of a sudden, she missed her children so much that she had to sit, heavily, and let the bed creak beneath the weight of her wish to be with them.

  “Sometimes it’s nice,” Kate realized, “to have someone need me.” But Susan was asleep before she spoke the words.

  Now Kate was awake alone, with no one to help her undress and nowhere to sleep unless she could shove
Susan over. She ought to have thought of this first, rather than getting caught up being the rogue housekeeper.

  Maybe she could ask Evan to…

  Evan could… No. She arrested the thought as soon as it came into her mind. It would be unkind to ask him for such help.

  Even though he had already seen her bare. Even though she thought he would like to see her so again. Even though part of her craved that closeness, that intimate, trusting touch again.

  A larger part was terrified of further change. Now that she had got her friend back, how could she lose him again? She couldn’t ask him to be a lover, then a friend, then a maid, and not send him—and herself—screaming across Ireland.

  No. She would find the innkeeper’s wife and get help from that quarter.

  And so she did, creeping from her chamber quietly so as not to wake Susan. When she found the innkeeper’s wife, a stout and sonsy woman with wide hips, bosom, and smile, Kate inquired as to the possibility of getting a different room for herself.

  “I can’t,” said that lady with apology. “My man’s just after giving the last chamber to another couple. If you’d need some extra blankets, that I can give you. You’d make a lovely pallet on the floor.”

  Kate agreed to this, then submitted to being unlaced by the innkeeper’s wife in the inn’s private parlor. Best to stay out of her chamber; Susan needed to sleep off her illness. Kate depended on her help when they traveled—and maybe, a bit on her chaperonage.

  Thanking her hostess with a silver coin, Kate wrapped one of the blankets about her shoulders to cover the sagging back of her gown. Then she gathered the rest of the blankets and made for the back stairs so she could creep back to her chamber unseen by other guests.

  The stairs used by servants and family, narrow and steep, were of rude boards and whitewashed walls. Kate slid along the wall, feeling her way up in the near dark. A window cut high into the stairwell provided a touch of moonlight, enough to limn the edges of the stairs.

  A spark was struck a few steps above, and a glow came into being. It moved in a sinuous line, and Kate realized someone in the stairwell had lit a smoke.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said. “I must get by.”

  The glow paused in midair. “Kate?”

  She tilted her head. “Evan?”

  “Yes.” By the light of the moon and the tiny ember, she saw him shift to one side. Making room for her to pass? Or maybe to sit beside him. “Nice outfit you’ve adopted. I’m not saying the cut of it will set a wild new fashion, but it does look comfortable.”

  “It serves the purpose.” She hitched her extra blankets to one hip. “Why are you smoking in here, not outside or in the taproom? You are behaving like a naughty stableboy.”

  “Not a bad description, though I’m a few decades too old to be called a stableboy without my dignity being wounded. I didn’t feel like having company. And it was raining like the devil outside.”

  She could hear drops still pattering the window above them. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

  “No, no. Stay with me. You’re a sight different than the company of strangers.” He waved the cheroot at her. “Want to share my smoke?”

  She hesitated, aware of her gown and stays gaping open, shielded only by a rough blanket. Oughtn’t she return to her chamber at once?

  No, this was a chance to bridge the persistent distance between them. To return to the way things had been, when they drank whisky and shot targets and smoked and talked until all hours of the night.

  She mounted the steps to sit at his side, settling the extra blankets on the stair above them. “I can’t recall the last time I smoked.”

  There was hardly room for them to sit side by side on the stair. Her hip bumped his, cushioned by the bunched skirts and blankets wrapped about her. Still, she felt the closeness as a bolt that prickled—electric, from scalp to toes. It left her warm and tingling, her hands uncertain but eager.

  She took the cheroot from him. It was thin, long as her hand from middle finger to wrist, and sharply scented of clove and ash. She held it between trembling fingers.

  Evan bumped her shoulder with his own. “How do you manage to look like a lady while wrapped in a blanket, smoking a cheroot, sitting on servants’ stairs? Such a talent ought to be taught in every finishing school.”

  “How do you know that’s not where I practiced it? Along with all my other charming, delicate qualities.” She snorted, then brought the cheroot to her lips. Inhaling lightly, no more than a sip, she took in the hot, fragrant smoke. It seemed to scour her lungs, a feeling both bracing and disagreeable. “I’ve no idea. What do you mean by lady?”

  “Am I going to get in trouble?”

  “Not if you give a good answer.”

  “No pressure, eh? A lady, then, is someone worthy of respect.”

  This, she had to think about. “I’d hope you knew, Mr. Antiquarian, that appearance has nothing to do with worth.”

  “Indeed I do know it.”

  She tried to blow a smoke ring, but only breathed a cloud of fog. “Look, I’m a dragon.” She handed him back the cheroot.

  “You make a fine gray smoke,” he said. “May I ask why you’re wearing a blanket?”

  “You may. Though you ought to know I’m wearing a lot of other things too.” She explained about Susan’s illness and exhausted slumber, and the assistance of the innkeeper’s wife.

  “I find myself enlightened,” he said. “Nothing could make more sense than you sneaking about dressed in blankets.”

  “I thought you’d come to see it my way.”

  “Without doubt. I would say I could have helped you, but I think that would be a bad idea.”

  “It is the sort of thing friends might do.” She hesitated. “But not when they are male and female.”

  “And that matters, does it?” He passed her the cheroot.

  “Yes. I think it does.” She drew on the thin cigar again, aware that her lips were where his had been. The smoke was hot in her lungs, not pleasant. But she wanted it all the more for it being unpleasant. “Do you remember the first time you smoked?”

  “Oh, yes.” Her eyes were dazzled by the glow at the end of the cheroot, and she could hardly make out his form. But somehow she could tell he was smiling as he explained, “I was about eight years old. I took a cigar from one of the grooms. Coughed till I thought I’d never get my breath again.”

  “And then?”

  “I did get my breath back, and I took another smoke. I couldn’t have a groom laughing at me, could I?”

  When she returned the cheroot, he held it at arm’s length. “Nasty habit. I never got accustomed to it. But it’s a way to end the day, like having a drink.”

  “Or talking to a friend.”

  “That too. When did you first smoke? Were you a stubborn child like I was?”

  “I was, yes. I think grooms must be the tempter for us all. Jonah and I told our father’s head groom, Lombard, we wanted to try it. Actually, we wanted a plug of tobacco to chew, because that’s what Lombard did. Still does. He is always chewing at something and spitting.

  “He had some sort of cigar he said he wasn’t going to smoke, so he gave it to us. Told us to take a great big breath.” Not the most delightful of her childhood memories. “I coughed. Jonah vomited. I was proud of holding my own better than him.”

  “Both of us sickened by it, yet here we sit with a cheroot.” He blew a smoke ring, then another.

  “Here we do,” she said. “It’s a kind of mastery, isn’t it? I won’t let a scrap of dried-up leaf tell me it’s stronger than I am.”

  Again, he handed it to her. She burned her fingers taking it, and she hissed. He licked his fingers and pinched it out.

  They went into moonlit darkness again. “So many firsts,” she said. “I don’t often think of them. But as there was a first che
root, there was a first time you and I met. A first time I saw you. A first time I beat you at target shooting.”

  “That last one never happened,” he said. “I don’t remember it.”

  “Oh, please. I beat everyone at target shooting.”

  Did she remember the first time she’d met Evan? It might have been as soon as she reached the Whelan lands as Con’s bride. “Were you staying at Whelan House when Con came back with me? Is that when we met?”

  “It was. He’d gone to England to buy horses, and back he came not only with three mares, but also with a bride.”

  “The human sort of broodmare,” she mused. “What did you think of me?”

  He hesitated. “I don’t remember.”

  “Yes, you do. Why won’t you say? Is it horrid?” The notion was lowering. She could remember only dimly a time she had not known Evan, and the whole time of knowing him was wrapped in thinking him one of the people nearest her heart.

  “Does it matter at this distance in time?” His voice was quiet.

  “In a way, no, because it was so long ago. But I’m curious. Our first meeting was the foundation for what we’ve become since.” Whatever that was. Had been. Would be.

  “Well, then.” He shifted on the step, the wood creaking beneath him. “I thought you were far too young to be anyone’s wife. You were pretty and bright and your hair was all of a curl, as though you’d just been tumbled.”

  “I probably had been,” she murmured. Con had had his own idea of how best to pass a lengthy journey. It was a notion with which she had enthusiastically agreed, and which had resulted in Nora being born scarcely ten months after their wedding day.

  “I assumed at first that you were some decorative little English miss. My mistake. For then you marched forward with strides like a racehorse—”

  “That is hardly flattering.”

  “—and shook my hand, hard, as though we were already friends of long standing. You told me you were glad to meet me, and I felt you meant it. After that, I knew you were capable of infinite surprises, and I wanted nothing more than to be your friend in return.”