Eventually, after the doctor had stitched and bandaged the wounded and the constables had come and taken the two prisoners off to the village lock-up and Julian Quenten was sedated and sleeping, the house party assembled in the drawing room with brandy and hot chocolate and pots of tea.

‘All Lettie and I had in common was that we weren’t happy,’ Bella said, her hands curled around a glass of brandy as though for warmth. ‘I was lonely and I wanted someone to be miserable with, I can see that now.’

‘That Thomas is besotted with Mrs Quenten.’ Dover was treating his brandy in a more straightforward manner. ‘He’d been with her and her brother since they were youngsters, so they say in the servants’ hall here. He’d do anything for her. Looks like he’ll hang for her too.’

‘Will they hang Lettie?’ Guinevere asked. Her hands were clasping hot chocolate that Jared had laced with brandy. He was watching her closely, but she seemed to be coping remarkably well.

‘Conspiracy to murder?’ Sir Andrew said. ‘It will all depend on whether they find her fit to plead. If she is not in her right mind she will be confined. If she is fit to plead she may be transported. It will depend on the judge.’

‘Poor woman,’ Guinevere said. When they all stared at her she shook her head. ‘She was so unhappy, so angry, so obsessed. There must have been some point, somewhere, when she could have been stopped, could have been saved. And those little boys. One day they will find out what their mother did, what became of her.’

‘I’ll do what I can for them,’ Theo said. He was restricted to tea on doctor’s orders after the blow to the head and was not happy about it. ‘Until I have children of my own, their father is my heir. We have to get this back to being a normal relationship, somehow.’

‘Are we sure he didn’t know?’ Jared queried.

‘He is trying to blame himself,’ Sir Andrew answered. ‘I had a few words before the sedative took effect. He forbade Lettie sending any more money to her brother – that had been one of the contributing factors in the Quentens’ financial crisis – and he did his best to stop her writing to him. He says he made her desperate. I genuinely believe he had no notion of what she was doing.’

‘At least that solves the mystery of why Francis thought he would find his sister at Allerton Grange,’ Guinevere said. ‘He was not receiving letters from Elizabeth.’

They talked on, unwinding from the tension and danger. Jared realised Guinevere had fallen silent. He wanted to go and take her in his arms, carry her off to bed, but that wasn’t what either of them really needed now.

She was looking from face to face, a slight smile on her lips, quite clearly thinking about something more pleasant than what had just happened. I almost lost her. If she hadn’t been strong and brave and determined, he might have done. Wherever you go, I go, she had whispered and she had meant it. Lord, but he’d been a fool, proposing marriage because it was the honourable thing, because she was a lady. That wasn’t what Guinevere needed to hear, it wasn’t the truth that had finally bludgeoned its way into his thick skull. Tomorrow, he promised himself.

 

Guinevere woke with the dawn and lay there watching the thin, cool light gather and strengthen until the shadows began to fade and the colours of the hangings in her bed chamber became clear.

Somehow she had slept last night, what remained of it. Now she was awake again, however much her body protested that it really would like another six hours, at least.

She climbed out of bed, her bruises complaining, and went to the window. Jared was down below, half-sitting on the wall that edged the steepest drop, looking out over the landscape as the sun rose, shaping and colouring the hills. That was what had woken her, she realised, his presence out there, calling to her. She had reached a decision last night, now she had to discover whether his thoughts had changed also. As she watched him he looked round, up, and saw her. Strange how a look can be a touch. I feel it too, when he watches me.

Jared lifted a hand and she nodded. Wait for me.

Guin picked her way through the wreckage of the little sitting room and out into the terrace, slippers on her bare feet, a warm cloak over her nightgown, her hair loose down her back. Quite shocking, she thought, smiling as she saw Jared’s expression.

‘Are you well?’ he asked. Being Jared he was dressed, his rapier at his side, no sign that his left arm was stitched and bandaged.

‘Stiff, shocked still. Almost empty inside now all that suspicion and fear has gone. You?’

‘The same, I suppose.’ He flexed his left hand. ‘And feeling a fool.’

‘A – No, that is ridiculous. What do you have to feel foolish about?’

‘The way I kept proposing marriage to you.’ The rising sun caught the right side of his face, gilding it, sparking amber lights in his eyes, in his hair. The other side of his face was shadowed. It made it hard to read his expression.

Oh. Well. That answers the question I was asking myself. She kept her chin up, her lips firm. I am not going to weep about it.

‘What I should have said was that I love you,’ Jared said as though she was not standing in front of him as speechless and responsive as a gatepost.

‘You – ’ He was speaking English, why couldn’t she understand him?

‘I love you,’ Jared repeated patiently. ‘You do not seem very happy about that.’

‘You never said it before.’ Guin picked her way through the words that were tumbling into her mouth, clogging her tongue.

‘I told you I was a fool. I didn’t realise. I haven’t been in love before, you see. It takes some getting used to.’ This was not a joke. He was perfectly serious and, she realised, nervous. The tension ran through him, shivering under his skin, sending the pulse at his throat beating hard where his shirt lay open. ‘Will you marry me, Guinevere? Not because you should, not because I think it is honourable to ask you, but because I cannot imagine living without you now.’

‘Yes,’ she said and reached out to put her hands on his, feeling the beat of his pulse, feeling the moment of stillness, of shock, before his fingers closed around hers. ‘Yes. I love you. Yes, I want to marry you, Jared.’

‘Before, you said no.’

‘Before I thought it would be an unequal match, that you were proposing out of duty because you thought it was right, that what had been between us had somehow changed when you became the heir to an earldom. Last night I looked around that room and I saw not an earl and his heir but two men. One I loved, both I liked.

‘I looked in the mirror over the fireplace and I saw a woman who had thought she was not worthy of a title, on whom Society had looked down for marrying a nobleman for protection,’ she said, the words coming easily now. ‘And she looked back at me and I saw someone else, a woman who had fought back, a woman who had stood up with you. I saw a woman who loved you and I remembered your voice when you held me and called me my heart. And I resolved to say yes when you asked me again.’

She was in his arms then and he was kissing her, lifting her, carrying her across the terrace. ‘Your arm,’ she managed.

‘I can carry you up to bed, my love. I could carry you to York and the Archbishop and a licence, if I had to.’

There was a muffled shriek as he shouldered through the door into the hall, then a giggle and a flap of skirts, the crash of a dropped dustpan, the sound of servants scattering before the sight of the new-found heir carrying Lady Northam up stairs with obvious, wicked, intent.

Jared stopped kissing her only when he dropped her on his bed. She looked up at him standing over her, possessive, frowning.

‘What is wrong?’

‘Damn it. We will cause a scandal if we marry so soon after Northam’s death.’

‘There is going to be a monumental scandal once the trial begins. You will be marrying me to protect me, everyone will believe it. Augustus…’ Guin blinked. She was not going to start weeping now. She knew what the poor, darling man would have said. Don’t be a goose, Guinnie. Marry the man. ‘Augustus would have given us his blessing, you know that.’

‘In that case I will ride to York for a special licence tomorrow. I would go today.’

‘But your father needs you here, I know. I need you here, just for one more day, Jared.’ She untied the strings of her cloak, the ribbons at the neck of her nightgown.

‘I won’t be long.’ His sword belt and scabbard hit the floor with a clatter and he pulled his shirt over his head. ‘Two days, perhaps three. Then we can be married here, Theo can give you away,’ he added as he unfastened his falls, pushed off his breeches.

‘Theo can believe that, but I gave myself away to you a long time ago.’

‘Twenty one days, to be precise,’ Jared said as he knelt on the bed and dealt with her nightgown by the simple expedient of tearing it from neck to hem.

It was an outrageous thing to do, as bad as carrying her upstairs in front of half the staff, and they were both ridiculously romantic things and she loved them for it.

‘Three weeks? Is that all?’

‘That is all,’ he said as he came down over her, his body warm and hard and demanding.

Guin curled her legs around the narrow hips and her arms around the strong shoulders. ‘I need you inside me now, fast,’ she said.

‘Fast,’ Jared agreed as he slid home, his forehead resting against hers. ‘And then slow. We have the rest of our lives, Guinevere. Thousands of days, who knows how many thousands of minutes, of seconds, of breaths to share. And a million kisses, my love.’

And then there was no more need for words.