Two

There was barely any room to sit in the carriage, crammed as it was with parcels. Kate suppressed a chuckle as Evan folded his tall body into a too-small space on the squabs across from her. They had retrieved his belongings from a Cambridge inn, which had only added to the crush.

Strained as the Whelan finances were, she shouldn’t have bought so many gifts in Cambridge. But she missed her daughter Nora a bit less when choosing ribbons and fabric to complement the girl’s dark hair. She knew her son Declan would think of her when he played with the set of toy soldiers. For the dowager Lady Whelan, Con’s mother, an impish urge persuaded Kate to buy a prayer book. A rare Protestant in a land of Catholics, the lady was certain that no one was as devout as she.

Evan was the first to speak—casually, as though most of his attention was directed to finding a place for his left elbow atop the parcels. “You were sly, answering my question about Ireland with no information at all. But I am even more sly, and I pretended that I did not notice.”

“You are entirely spoiling the effect of your cleverness by boasting of your triumph.” As the carriage lurched into motion, Kate coaxed a hatpin free, then another. Her hat was pretty, the first new one she had purchased since her year of mourning for Con had ended a year before. The first gown in a vivid print, too, with a pelisse of coppery wool that made her red-blond hair shine. Thank goodness for fashion plates and the talented seamstresses of Thurles. They had given her armor enough to return to Newmarket for the first time in five years, to beg a fortune from her father.

Not that she had quite got around to that yet. As far as Sir William Chandler knew, his eldest daughter was visiting because of the race meetings that made Newmarket the hub of English society each October.

Settled now against the back-facing squabs, Evan glanced at her sharply. “Since I’ve spoiled the effect, I might as well ask again. Kate. Is there some problem in Ireland? Is—how are the children?”

So many times she had been asked this question since Con died. Kate gave the same answer every time. “They’re fine.” After a pause, she added, “They are staying with Con’s mother. They have missed you.”

“And you? How have you been?” His eyes dark as chocolate, he watched her with the same careful scrutiny he’d given to his magic lantern slides as he packed them away.

She pulled another pin free, then another, feeling more bare with each one. “I’m fine too.” Pulling free her blossom-trimmed hat, she jabbed the hatpins through the plaited-straw brim.

She was fine—or as fine as she’d been for years and years of her marriage. Years of financial strain and dawning awareness of her husband’s infidelity. But over those same years, she had become skilled at appearing fine. And for Con, by God, there was nothing more important than making a good appearance.

“Your words aren’t rationed, you know.” Evan relaxed against the squabs of rust-colored velvet, sliding one boot forward. “You can use more than three when you reply to me. More than four, even, if you have something of particular significance to say.”

The familiarity of his banter made her chest tighten. She swallowed, hard, before replying crisply, “You are fortunate that I was judicious with my words rather than being perfectly frank with you.”

“I’m going to regret asking this, but I will all the same. What did you want to say, Madam Frank?”

She lifted her chin. “That you behaved like an utter ass.”

Though she had spoken the words lightly, they took on great weight in the close confines of the carriage. “I will grant that I deserve that.”

“At the very least. Two years of silence. Evan. Didn’t our friendship mean anything to you?”

He held out his wrists. “Slap the manacles on me. Whatever punishment you care to inflict, I will accept it.”

“I could poke you with a hatpin.”

He made a gesture that was not precisely polite. It had the effect of drawing a smile from her before she added, “It’s a fair question, Evan. And I’m sly enough to notice that you didn’t answer it. You could have come back any time after you chose to leave. After you and Con argued on the day he died.”

He snapped upright, drawing his feet in close beneath his seat. Withdrawing into a shell, it seemed. “I couldn’t come back after that.”

“And why not? Not only could you have, you should have. What was I to think when you left Ireland without a word of farewell?”

“What indeed? What did you think?”

“I didn’t know. I still don’t.”

The two chestnuts, Jerome and Hattie, pulled the carriage along with smooth strides. For the distance of one…two…a half dozen of their long steps…Kate was silent. Then she added, “Con wouldn’t tell me what had passed between you, only that you’d argued. He was upset. Terribly upset. So shaken that he should never have ridden out. And—”

“My God.” Evan rubbed a hand over his jaw, the chiseled line of his mouth. “You think it’s my fault that he died.”

Her head snapped back. “Not your fault. It was no one’s fault. His fall in the steeplechase was an accident. Everyone said so, from housemaid to magistrate. The cinch on his saddle split, and…and he fell. Badly.”

“Maybe fault is not the right word. What of blame? Do you blame me?” His dark eyes were steady and fathomless.

She held his gaze. “No. I don’t blame you for that. If I fault you for anything, it is that you called me friend, then and now, but you never showed it when that friendship was tested.”

He made a dry sound, like a laugh gone cold. “You cannot know how I was tested.”

“I cannot, because you never told me. Not a single word. All I know is that you and Con argued, and you left, and that was that. You threw our whole family away like rubbish.”

“There is no such thing as rubbish,” he said quietly. “Only pieces that antiquarians will one day discover and come to understand.”

God. He was so…so Evan. “That,” she replied, “is not adequate. I need more from my life than the hope that someone will try to piece it together hundreds of years from now.”

Through the carriage roof, Kate could hear the occasional cluck or halloo of the coachman. Sir William’s traveling carriage was built on spacious lines, like Chandler Hall and his stables. Every surface was brushed clean and gleaming.

The conveyances in the carriage room of Whelan House’s stables were neat but patched, oiled but aged. A few years ago, there had been many more. A few years ago, everything had been different.

Was it wrong that, despite her crushing debt, she was happier as a widow than as a wife?

Was it wrong that she didn’t mind if it was?

“What has it been like for you?” Evan’s question seamlessly followed the ones she posed herself. “These past two years?”

“Like running down a hill, hoping I can reach safety before a rolling boulder crushes me.”

“That is an alarming analogy.”

“I thought you’d like it,” she said. “Because of the stone. Pretend it’s an ancient rolling boulder.”

He shook his head. “Still alarming, though now the alarm bears historical significance. What has got you running, Kate?”

She waved a careless hand. “Nothing much. Administering an earldom for my ten-year-old son. Constantly playing hostess to my crying mother-in-law.”

Evan looked to heaven. “Ah, good old Gwyn. I’ve known her since Con and I were at Harrow together. She’s always been the epitome of calm and selflessness—if one is speaking in opposites.”

“If I ever called her ‘good old Gwyn,’ she’d probably have an attack of the vapors. She prefers I call her ‘Countess.’”

“Pure love and sunshine, that one is.” Evan toyed with the carriage window’s shade. Frrrrrip. It rolled up. Frrrrrup. It rolled down, casting the interior of the carriage into half-shadow. “Did she want you to come to Newmarket? If I make my guess, she’ll spend the whole of your time away on a fainting couch declaring how exhausted she is.”

“She didn’t want me to travel, exactly, but she saw the need for it.” Kate chose her words with deliberation, skirting the line between truth and polite fiction.

“You needed to see your father, you said. Is he ill?”

“No.” She arranged her hat beside her. She should have brought a hatbox, maybe? Or her lady’s maid? She was out of practice with fashion.

Evan leaned forward, the late-afternoon light from the carriage window throwing his features into sharp relief. “It’s a financial matter, then. Isn’t it? Con must have left you in a bad state.”

“Ugh. You are always so noticing,” Kate said. Evan had a scholar’s curiosity, not only for chips of flint and Roman vases, but also for the heart-deep workings of a household. No subject evaded his curious mind. “Yes, Con left a financial ruin behind him. I have sold what I could, but I owe…so much. The magistrate, Finnian Driscoll, has bought up all my debts—”

“Con’s debts.”

“Well, Con doesn’t plan to pay them,” she retorted. “So I must, on behalf of the earldom, lest I am forced to sell off all the Whelan lands that are not entailed.”

Frrrrrip. Up went the shade again. “Is it as bad as that?”

“Worse. I have only until the end of the year before Driscoll calls in all the debts.” Three months before a family heritage hundreds of years in the making was lost, all due to Con’s fondness for gambling and spending.

“Con was my friend,” Evan said. “Closer to me than my own brother. But he was also a damned fool, and I told him so many times.”

“He laughed it off. He always did.” Kate could almost smile at the memory—almost. “That was a particular gift of his, laughing off anything he didn’t want to hear.”

Con had been fond of carriages, the flashiest and highest-perched and quickest imaginable. They had seemed irresistible to Kate once. A rich man’s toys, a treat in which to ride. When a few bad harvests made funds more and more meager, there was less money for toys and treats of any sort. Yet Con had never been used to denying himself what he wanted, or to waiting for it. This was one of the reasons he and Kate had wed at such a young age.

Kate and Con had met at a fortunate time. He, returning to Ireland by way of Newmarket with Arabian stock he hoped to breed with Chandler mares, and she, wanting an escape. Her mother had died three years before, her father was endlessly traveling, and she was far too young, at seventeen, to care for her siblings and run a household.

Con, four years older and flush with the newfound power of attaining his majority, had wanted her rich dowry. She had wanted to run off with him, for he was handsome and blithe and confident. By post from Spain, Sir William had given his permission for Kate to wed a man he’d never met.

If there was a flaw in the logic of a woman who married to escape the thankless care of her siblings—well, seventeen was young. Too young to think beyond the next yes, the tussle of passion, the excitement of going somewhere new.

For rich years on end, the young earl and countess had been a team, pulling in harness, supporting one another. Theirs had been a good arrangement for a while. Then, with the coming of poverty, it had not been. Then there had been Con’s other women, some staid, some as flashy as Con’s favorite carriages.

Kate had pretended not to know. But there had probably been other women all along.

“I want to help you,” Evan said. “I will help you come up with the money somehow.”

Ouch. One of the hatpins had jabbed her through her skirts. She hadn’t realized it stuck out so far through the brim. “No. I don’t want that. I plan to ask my father to lend me the money needed. That’s what I need to speak to him about.”

The corner of Evan’s mouth turned down. “Why do you not want my help?”

She fumbled to explain. “Because…I don’t want you to be obliged to me. I don’t want our friendship to be a burden—if it still exists at all, after two years of silence.”

And Evan’s parents might be wealthy, but he was not. There was no way he could scrape together even a fraction of the debt owed.

“Of course our friendship still exists,” he replied. “Surely we know each other as well as anyone does.”

“Maybe,” she granted. Maybe this was true. Though no one besides Kate herself knew of the spark that had lit her hopes for years, the hidden wish that her life might be different. She had hidden this wish from Con behind dutiful pleasantries.

She had certainly got what she wanted, deprived of husband and income and friend all at once. Perhaps she ought to have specified the sort of different she would prefer.

“This could be a good thing,” Evan said. “Your time in England, away from Whelan House.”

“How do you mean?”

“No one can make demands on you now. You can just be…” Frrrrrup. “Kate.”

“Leave that shade alone or I shall tie your hands together.” This was an easier response than who the devil is Kate? For thirteen years, she had been wife, then mother, now widow. At the age of thirty, she could not remember a time she had not been someone else’s rock.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Evan said.

“That you’re reaching for the shade again? Correct. Please, Evan. Stop. Go…go ride with the coachman if you are burdened with an excess of energy.”

Frrrrrip. One last time—Kate hoped—the shade opened, revealing a square of clear sky and horizon distinct as a pencil line. “I like the sound it makes.” Evan took a handkerchief from a pocket and wiped a bit of dust from his hands. “And no, I was thinking that you’re thinking that Kate has to be all things to all people, and so how could that possibly be a respite?”

“How did you—” She slammed her mouth shut. After a moment, she said, “You are shockingly incorrect. That’s not at all what I was thinking.”

“Hmmm.” He stretched out his boots, hooking one foot over the other. “Right. Well, even if it wasn’t…despite the other people and tasks that lay claim to her time, Kate was once my friend. Can she be again?”

A flip, simple answer was at the tip of her tongue—and then she noticed his hands. The handkerchief was stretched between whitened knuckles, and he had dug his blunt nails into the linen.

The tightness of his grip made her throat close.

There were many ways one might help, weren’t there? And there were far too many things for which one might grieve without looking for more. She could keep opening the wound of Evan’s absence, his long silence—or she could accept his apology. His company, as long as it lasted. The comfort of his laughter. The honesty in his dark eyes.

When she thought of the matter like that, she was able to turn her back on the hurt of their separation. To look ahead, and to answer him truthfully.

“Yes. I want my friend again, Evan. I have missed you very much.”