To Wed A Rebel (16 page)

“I didn’t do it for you, I did it out of practicality,” she told him. “If anything had happened to you, I’d be in even worse a situation.”
I don’t care, I can’t care, I know you’d do it all again in a heartbeat.
“I will see to your arm in the evening.”

“Practicality? God, look it’s – don’t bother,” he murmured. “I can manage by myself. I always have.”

“Is this what you call managing?” There was a grim satisfaction in throwing those words back at him, though they did not make her feel better. There was no honesty there between them, no real communication, only half-attempted conversations and lies they told themselves and each other.

“I’ll make a bed in the study,” he said, turning his back on her. “I’ll keep out your way.”

***

The letter changed everything. It arrived after a tiring four days where Isaac and Ruth skirted around one another and September came to stay. A shadow fell across Ruth during the short rest she had taken beside the garden wall, back against the cold stone, face against the sun.

“Mrs Roscoe?” It was a name Ruth was still getting used to and because of it, she started, shielding her eyes from the sun’s glare to see Nessa standing over her. “A boy from the manor was just ’ere.”

“Pardon?”

“It’s from Trewince, over the rise,” she said. “Got a letter and I can’t wake Mr Roscoe. He hasn’t done nothin’ but swear at me all morning.”

“Charming.”

“S’what I said.”

Ruth pulled her gardening gloves from her hands, shaking more soil into her lap, before she accepted the paper. Nessa hovered, waiting for more details, but Ruth was loath to give her any.

“That will be all,” she said curtly, receiving a dissatisfied huff for her efforts. She felt bad, guilty even, still in the mindset that she existed to please everyone else.

And look at how far it’s got me.

Such emotions came and left quickly, for Ruth found something far more pressing to worry about.

***

As if through a sixth sense, she knew when Isaac had finally woken up. A tight band clamped around Ruth’s chest and her shoulders felt heavy, as if the thorns and weeds she had brushed away and torn through all morning had wound around them. He had been getting better as the days went by. His bruises had faded and the cut on his arm was almost healed. True to his word, he kept to the study and no longer allowed Ruth to help him, claiming he could manage alone. Their conversations, the few they’d had, were always short, abrupt and to the point. He seemed reluctant to engage with her and she could not think on what to say when he did. Ruth regretted that she’d been cruel, though she was still convinced he’d deserved it. Where did that leave them? A stalemate, a weighty tension between them, a farmhouse torn in two.

Were it not for the letter, she would have stayed outside with the spikes and the teasels for company, rather than face the sharper creature within.

Were it not for the letter…

It had sat beside her for over an hour, held in place by a rock as a makeshift paperweight. She pulled the paper free, rustled up what was left of her courage and went back inside. Isaac was slumped over the kitchen table, palms at his temples, dark hair hanging down. The room was filled with cooking smells and her stomach rumbled. Nessa’s face was a picture – scrunched up, hostile and bad-tempered – while she made as much noise as possible in order to add to her employer’s sorry state. Good, at least someone was on her side.

“
What?
”

Isaac’s abrupt question was for Ruth. Had he been drinking? Probably. She had half a mind to turn around, go out the door, keep walking and never return. Especially when considering the instructions written on the paper she held.

With a voice bolder than she felt, she said, “We have an invitation to—”

“Well, haven’t you been busy?”

“It’s from your great-aunt,” said Ruth, enjoying the flash of mild panic that found Isaac. “We are to dine with her two days from now.”

Isaac uttered a word that no woman who belonged to polite society should ever hear.

“It says we are to stay with them,” added Ruth, extending the paper to him.

He took it, another curse on his lips.

She did not miss the glance he gave her – and her mind had already provided an answer as to why.

“Are you that ashamed of me?”

A sigh left the man.

“Nessa, leave,” commanded Isaac, banishing the servant immediately, whose ears had already pricked up at the sniff of an argument. She did as she was bid, though not without some reluctance.

Isaac waited until the woman had left and the uneven wooden door had shut them both away together. It was the first time they had been alone like this, a closed room, since that sleepless night shared at the inn and the morning she had woken up with laudanum on her lips. Even when Isaac had been injured and she had tended to him, the door had always been open – an escape if ever she needed it.

“I am not ashamed of you. Had my aunt not approved of you, we wouldn’t even be married.” He spoke into the table, his voice hard to hear. “This invitation is a test, not for you, but for me.”

Ruth sat down on a bench opposite him, leaning back from the table where he leant over it.

“She wants me reformed,” he added bitterly.

Ruth did not hide her unkind expression – reformation seemed far beyond a man like him.

“It’s a game; it always is with her.” Isaac pressed his palms into the wood grain, teeth gritted. “She’s got vast amounts of money and she’ll play us off against one another until the day she dies. My cousin wants to get his hands on it too. That’s why he puts up with her in the summer months. It’s a competition for her favour and I lost that a long time ago.”

And now Ruth was caught up in the mix too.

“Then why even pander to them?” she asked.

“She is what’s keeping me in this place, keeping my cousin from taking it all. We – we never got on, Colin and I. Even as boys.” He shook his head. “We’ve – he – we’re different. He’s never liked me.”

“Who couldn’t like you?”

Isaac gave her a thin smile in return.

“Oh, but rest assured,” he warned. “Whatever my great-aunt is planning, you can bet you’ll be a part of it, love.”

Chapter Nine

Isaac

An unrequested carriage from Trewince turned up in the courtyard two days after the letter arrived, as had been promised. Isaac wanted to walk the hour or so through fields, woods and brambles, to turn up like a bad penny in a sorry state. The old woman, Lady Mawes, had anticipated his mood. She sent a carriage ahead. She made up his mind for him. A sign that his bad behaviour would not be tolerated. As he readied himself, Ruth barely spoke to him and he had no idea of what to say to her either. With every hour that passed, every day, the black abyss between them was fed and grew wider, until he had no way to cross it – and he
did
want to.

Where would he start?

Every time he saw her, guilt knotted his insides. He was angry, not with her, with himself, only he didn’t know quite how to explain the difference.

At least their sleeping arrangement was… Well, it wasn’t working. The study was uncomfortable at best, but it was better than the alternative. Than forcing that situation on her, when he’d forced so much. It had been a week since the fight, since he had holed up in the farmhouse, and the pair lived like spectres, passing through spaces, vacant. They barely spoke, only crossing in the hallway to exchange awkward, stilted words. He slept during the day, moving to the bed when she awoke – always early, to occupy herself doing God knows what. The bed always held her shape in the sheets, but if ever he met her eyes in the small evening hours when they were both awake, he received only her vacant stare.

And he had no way to fix it.

When she had fallen asleep beside him, exhausted from worry, he had been able to fool himself, however briefly, that she was his. Completely, not only in law. That he’d found a woman who meant something to him. He wasn’t that man, to want such things. And she certainly did not want him. Why open himself up to that, to her, when it would do him no good? Ruth was no better than a forbidden dream, a reminder of all he had forsaken long ago.

“Are you going to wear that?” The question escaped him before he could rope it back, waiting for her outside the ramshackle farmhouse on the morning they were to leave. Ruth climbed into the phaeton looking more like a governess than his wife, accepting his hand with some hesitation. A bitter thought crept into his mind, unwelcome, unwanted. He’d been with duchesses and countesses, women with spectacular wealth and fine dresses who had grown obsessed with him and lavished him with gifts. Now, caught out, he was saddled with her.

No, if anything, it was
she
who had been caught out and stuck with him.

“Unless you would like to reveal an entire wardrobe packed with elaborate gowns that you have been keeping from me then yes, I am. I should think you’d be more concerned about the state of your face than my appearance,” she snapped, defensive, and Isaac realised he’d said the wrong thing again. “It’s the best I have,” she added, quieter. “It’s what I wore at the academy.”

“It looks fine,” he said. “My apologies.”

Lady Mawes would not be pleased, but he kept that thought to himself. The woman seemed nervous enough as it was, hands scrunched into her lap, teeth pressed into her lip. If only he could comfort her, if only he knew what to say that wasn’t
I’m sorry.

“My family aren’t – well – it’s hard to explain,” he said, as their journey began, as he pulled at his cuffs. The split on his mouth had healed a little, but the bruises on his cheek were still noticeable. Faded, purplish, yellowed marks. “Lady Mawes is not a woman you want to displease.”

“How did she come to have such a hold over you?”

Over both of us,
he guessed she meant to say, for now they came as a pair – however much they wished it otherwise.

Isaac debated giving her a throwaway answer, but instead settled on the truth. If she didn’t hear it from him, she’d hear it from someone else soon enough and perhaps already had.

“Lady Mawes has always been frugal and she married for money, while her brother squandered all he’d inherited and passed the debts to his firstborn. After my father lost the estate…” He struggled to find words that did not convey the bitterness he still harboured. “The mines failed, the debts mounted and Lady Mawes would not see her family seat fall into ruin. Colin, my cousin, hasn’t the sense to manage on his own.”

“All this for a house?”

“It’s more than that; it’s the place she was happiest,” he surmised. “My great-aunt is clever, her solicitors even more so. She provides me with a small allowance. It’s enough to get by and any further savings I want, I secure myself.”

Isaac did not miss the distaste in her next question. “By brawling?”

“I am good for little else.” Ruth did not correct him on that point. “If my great-aunt gave me any further funding, before long I wouldn’t need her and she would lose whatever leverage she still has over me. Now we’re both here, under her thumb, to make pretend at prosperity for all Wessex society to see. This dinner is only the start. It will get much worse.”

Ruth did not meet his gaze. Instead her attention was on the golden fields, half-shorn now that the harvest had arrived, and on the sky, an oppressive grey that threatened a storm that had yet to arrive.

“There will be numerous balls to attend, along with dinners and dances with dreary people,” he added, trying to draw her gaze.

“I am sure it will not be that bad,” she answered automatically, only filling in the gaps in their forced conversation. She was far away from him, mulling over old worries and fresh concerns.

It irked him.

“There will be talk about us,” he warned.

“Yes,” she agreed, blank, listless.

He’d seen her like this before, when he’d first met her, lifeless amongst all those fakes and fops.

“The parties I usually attend are a little wilder, more riots, really,” he added casually.

“Oh?”

“I should take you to one, though clothes are optional.”

“Yes, I would like – wait, what?”

“It’ll be all drunkenness and debauchery. I am sure you’ll enjoy it.”

“I do not think so,” she said firmly, but he had her attention now, her anger.

Isaac would rather that than cold indifference.

He could stand anything but that.

“There’s a whole world out there you know nothing about, Miss Osbourne.”

“It is Mrs Roscoe now,” she corrected him quietly. “Remember?”

How could I forget?

Isaac went to reply, thought better of it, and sat back in his seat instead. Neither said another word, not until they left the hamlets and endless rolling fields behind, when an intimidating structure peered out through the woods and stained the horizon.

***

Trewince was a grand house, built in an era long gone, when England’s civil war had blighted the country and times were far harder. Wind-breaking trees surrounded it, blocking out the majority of the light. Although the overcast day was warm, it felt as though autumn had already wormed its way into this part of Cornwall and had brought a chill with it.

The place hadn’t changed. Isaac could spot the oak he’d climbed when he was eleven, the lawn he’d chased the dogs on, the old chapel only the bats attended now. It had been home when his father had lost it all, when the old man had been incapable and incompetent, before they put him in the ground. Isaac had been taken in, much to his cousin’s dislike. They were opposites and one boy’s strengths highlighted the other’s weaknesses. Isaac was wild and strong, whereas his cousin Colin was sickly and sour.

Or he had been – there was no way to know the man he’d face now.

The phaeton halted outside the imposing front entrance and Isaac was glad to have something to do, a task to occupy himself with, even if it was only climbing from the carriage and needlessly assisting his wife. It was hard to grow accustomed to that fact. That he had a wife.

The only one to meet them was an ageing servant, who muttered about how the family was “round the back” in the intermittent sunshine: Lady Mawes’s orders.