Chapter Five

The light crept in so gradually, Emily almost didn't notice it. It went from utterly black to having gray highlights, to mostly gray. Then, amongst the rustling sounds of animals doing their morning breakfasting and ablutions, there were voices.

"They're here," she whispered. She wouldn't have to talk to Markshall anymore, not that they'd said anything for hours. She could leave him and this moral-less pit behind her.

"Indeed. Are you ready for this to be over?" Markshall had his arms crossed over his chest and was slumped against the wall of the hole. His blond hair was mussed, and his blue eyes had dark circles beneath them.

A pang went through her. Whatever else he was, he was a sort of gentleman. He hadn't hurt or taken advantage of her, and he clearly hadn't enjoyed this night either.

"The Lady Hunters will tell stories about the great fern hunting expedition that turned into our terrible ordeal." She tried to break the tension that had remained like spores in the air between them since her dream, their kiss, and his confession. "Your heroism in keeping me safe from the pixies over-night in a dark cave."

She could joke now they were going to leave this hole and never see each other again. All the things that had been revealed in the dark would be invisible, bleached clean by the sunlight. "Miss Green might write a poem. She likes that sort of thing. I will be re-imagined as a damsel in distress, and you will be portrayed as a hero, a knight."

He made a derisory snort. "I'm not a hero."

"In your story, you're the villain. And in mine, I am the dull blue-stocking spinster, who has ferns instead of babies." They were beautiful, delicate ferns, but they weren't the family she longed for. "A fine pair we are, an anti-hero and anti-heroine."

"I'm sorry, Emily." He sighed with unsought for gravity. "I really am."

She was about to ask why he was sorry when Miss Green's face appeared at the entrance to their hole.

"Good morning! We have a way to get you out!" Without elaborating, Miss Green drew back, and an object began to be lowered into the hole. A ladder.

Emily jumped up. A cherry picker ladder. Easily sixty feet high, cherry trees needed very long ladders to harvest the crop. How Miss Green had found one so early in the morning, Emily didn't know, but she didn't care. She was profoundly grateful.

The ladder eased down, and when it touched the ground, a laugh bubbled out of Emily. She turned to Oscar.

An odd, half-smile played around his mouth but didn't reach his eyes. "Ladies first." He made a flourish of his hand and a slight bow. "I'll hold the ladder steady for you."

"You're kind, but my skirts make that quite impossible." He would be able to see her drawers. Sight was a funny thing. Despite their proximity last night and their attempt to escape with the rope, now he was able to see her, she felt different. That and his revelation. In the darkness she'd seen two confusing sides to him, and she didn't now know how to act.

"I'm not so desperate for a glimpse of ankle as to look when you tell me not to." He quirked up an eyebrow as he grasped the ladder and pulled against it.

"Are you coming?" called Miss Green from the top of the hole.

"Yes!" Emily put her foot onto the ladder, grasping the smooth wood of the uprights, and stepped up. It was stable, and she stepped again. Then quicker, and the light intensified. She hadn't realized how much she'd missed it. Then she topped out, and her head was in the breeze, the blue and white sky visible between the people and trees. A crowd of the Lady Hunters were all around, clapping and laughing.

"Lady Emily!"

She turned towards the shout and into a bright light, more than the sun she remembered, and she squinted as her eyes revolted at the intrusion. She blinked and swayed, then willing hands pulled her up from the hole and she couldn't take it in.

"Lady Emily, I need to talk to you," Miss Green babbled.

"What is going on?" The light made everything confusing, like waking from a vivid dream into an unfamiliar room.

"Well, that is what I want to talk to you about." Miss Green's eyes shifted to the side and she clasped her hands behind her back.

A terrible thought occurred to Emily. "Is there a photographer?"

"Lady Emily." A man in an ill-fitting suit approached her, notepad and pencil in hand. "How was your ordeal? Is fern collecting a dangerous pursuit? Ought these cliffs to be closed for the protection of the public?"

"I will speak with you in a moment, sir." Her smile was only just friendlier than a gundog baring its teeth. She rounded on Miss Green. "What is the meaning of this?" She grabbed her sleeve and pulled her aside.

"I'm so sorry." Miss Green's eyes were wide, and her eyebrows pinched. She thrust a shawl into Emily's hands. "He overheard us asking the landlord about a rope and offered to fetch the ladder. It was the only way to get you out early in the morning. I thought you'd want to be rescued as soon as possible."

"As quietly and quickly as possible, I said. Quietly." So much for her hopes of starting new ladies' fern hunting groups in London and elsewhere. A stone of resentment lodged in her stomach. She wouldn't get to distribute the informative pamphlets to the ladies who needed them and give them an excuse to go out in the fresh air.

"When he arrived with the ladder he asked if he might just note down a few things for the local newspaper. I didn't think there was any harm. And I didn't see how I could say no, seeing as he'd been so kind…" Miss Green tailed off.

Emily knew the reason Miss Green had run out of words was the look on her own face. She could feel the tightness across her mouth and blood rushing to her cheeks. "You gave our story to a news hack? I will be humiliated. Have you any idea—"

"Lord Markshall!"

She turned to see Oscar emerging from the hole, his crumpled hat safely on his head and hers in one of his hands.

In that photograph, she was bare-headed too, she realized. In public, without a hat. She may as well have been without a corset, as the effect would be the same. People would talk and assume the worst of her and then they'd ask questions and…

"How do you feel after having spent the night alone with Lady Emily?" the hack asked innocently, with only a hint of a knowing look.

Had she said she was grateful for being rescued by this ladder? She took it back. She entirely took it back.

Her muscles wouldn't move, but the need to run was overwhelming. Hands shaking, she stuffed them into the shawl Miss Green had given her. She was going to be ruined. She would be disowned, unable to see her parents, not received by anyone in society, shunned and mocked. The care she'd taken over her reputation in the last few years was so much ash. Even her ferns would be out of her reach, as a woman with a decimated reputation could not lead a group of ladies.

Markshall straightened as he stepped off the ladder and looked at the journalist. He was pale, and one hand remained on the top of the ladder, gripping it with whitened knuckles. He held out Emily's hat and Miss Green dove forward to take it.

"It's irregular to have such an accident on a harmless diversion such as a fern walk, but I assure you that my fiancée and I are quite unharmed, thank you." Markshall gave the man a curt nod.

It was a good thing Miss Green gasped at that moment, otherwise Emily's own sharp intake of breath would have been entirely audible.

"A secret engagement!" Miss Green's eyes lit up. "La, how romantic."

She'd said to Markshall that Miss Green would make a romance out of them, but she hadn't realized he would collude with it. For a second, she considered denying it. But Connie's debut and the newspaperman and the scandal of her being photographed without even a hat on swam before her eyes. She pasted her most tired and distressed smile on her face. "Indeed. We will tell you all about it as soon as I have had a bath and a good meal. I am famished."

"Ems," came her father's booming voice. Her parents were hurrying toward them, and the crowd parted to allow them through. Her father caught her up in a hug.

Relief flooded into her. It would all be over now. Papa would help her sort out this mess. Tears prickled at her eyelids.

"I thought fern hunting wasn't supposed to be dangerous, Ems. Are you all right?" He squeezed her tightly.

"Yes," she whispered back.

He released her and stood back, his dear, familiar face with whiskers flecked with gray. "Well, let's get you—"

"How do you feel about your daughter's secret engagement, Your Grace? Did you know about it?" The journalist had crept up.

Her father turned slowly and leveled the man a quelling stare. "I'm glad Lady Emily was with someone so ready and able to help her when the need arose. I don't think you will find a story here."

"Oh, not at all, Your Grace." The newspaper man simpered. "If it were merely a little accident, I don't think our readers would have been interested. But a romance? Lovers trapped together, that's always interesting. Perhaps you would like to put an advertisement in the paper about the engagement?"

"Call on me this afternoon." Markshall had moved over to stand next to her. "Lady Emily and I will talk to you then. You shall have your story, one way or another." He gave his address to the journalist. "Please excuse me until later, Your Graces, Lady Emily." He bowed to both her parents and her.

Out of the corner of her eye, she watched him saunter away.

***

His head throbbed with every purposefully normal footfall. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. He repeated the refrain with each forward motion.

He had known he ought not to pursue her. The attraction had been too visceral, too much like falling, and now he couldn't stop this. He had no idea how to prevent the train of events he had put in motion. If he hadn't come down to Devon, sick in body from the London fog and sick in mind from thirty-five years of being who he was, he would never have seen her. He wouldn't have had that feeling, like tumbling, when he'd found her again at the Waddington's dinner. If he wasn't the man he was, he wouldn't have followed her in the spring countryside, justifying that it was in character, only to drag her into his pit of wrongdoing.

Marriage to him would be worse than being ruined. He ought to know. Being him was hell. He wanted to go back and rip his own tongue out rather than do this to her. He berated himself all the way back to the village and on the ride on a hired mare back to his house just outside of Totnes.

What had possessed him? Talking of the past, where he'd failed so utterly to take responsibility, that was—no. That bloody journalist was the problem. He'd asked that pointed question, and some nascent chivalry he hadn't even known he possessed had roared that her honor was at stake and that the only respectable solution would be if they were engaged. Stupid, stupid impulse.

He would break it off. It would be much better for her than being forced into a union with a monster like himself. Her father would forgive her indiscretions, send her home for a few weeks and it would all be forgotten by May Day.

But then, what would they do about the journalist? He'd fallen straight into his hands, like a blinking fool. He hadn't really had a story, just speculation. Now, he had a scandal. They'd have to marry; satisfaction blasted through him.

"My lord, more documents arrived this morning about the chimney sweeps issue." His valet took his coat as soon as he walked into the house and followed him upstairs. "What happened to your hat?"

He cursed.

Jones watched him impassively and didn't reply.

"Arrange me a bath." Oscar wiped a hand across his face. "And get another hat. I'll need one for this afternoon when I visit my fiancée's family." He'd thought when he'd grabbed up his hat before starting up the ladder that by doing so, he'd retained some semblance of dignity. The look on Jones' face suggested that was not the case. Thankfully Emily's smaller hat had fared better, but they both must have looked like they'd been dragged through a hedge, fallen down a hole, or... just come from bed after a particularly violent session of lovemaking.

"Yes, my lord." Jones' voice and eyebrows remained level. "The papers are on the table." He unobtrusively left as Oscar gave in to the need to collapse into a chair.

The yielding surface reminded him of his exhaustion after not having slept all night, and of the pain in his back, buttocks, and head. With one heel, he dragged a nearby chair towards him and put his feet up.

"That chair is now muddy," Jones said as he re-entered the room.

"Well, we can add that to the list of a dozen things I've done wrong in the last day."

"I have sent a request for a milliner to bring a selection of hats." Jones knelt and undid the laces on Markshall's boots, frowning at the mud. "Shall I choose, so that you can at least prevent a baker's dozen of poor decisions?"

Oscar smiled despite himself. "Yes, you better had." He lifted first one foot, then the other when Jones indicated and Jones removed his boots efficiently. "Did you manage to get Fanny home safe last night?" Yet another responsibility Oscar had failed.

"Of course. The young lady reported that she is progressing well, and a note from her mistress concurs."

That at least was a relief. "What is the news on the increased costs of adult, rather than child, chimney sweeps? Is it good?"

"Only a very marginal increase in cost, as you predicted." Jones reappeared behind him and tapped him on the shoulder to indicate that he ought to allow him to take off his waistcoat. Markshall complied then snatched up the report from the table and began to read and think of suitably facetious comments.

"I don't want a child dying up my chimney." Markshall read the sobering number of young boy chimney sweeps who perished in their work. "Think of the mess."

"Think of the inconvenience." Jones moved efficiently behind him. "When one can't have a fire in the morning because there is a dead child in one's chimney."

Yes. This was familiar. This was who he was. He was calmer. He was dissolute. He was a lazy lord, making snide remarks that discomforted the proud men in Whites and the House of Lords. He would go to London tomorrow and support Lord Selby by making nasty comments. Finishing reading the report, he threw it back onto the table.

"Send a telegram to Lord Selby about the chimney sweeps bill saying that we need to close that loophole about boys or girls. After all, the act in ‘40 has been flouted for years. I don't want some idiot noticing that we discuss boys acting as chimney sweeps, and deciding that little girls are exempt. Their petticoats would catch fire rather easily."

"Immediately, my lord." Jones indicated the dressing room and Markshall went through. Somehow Jones had readied a bath in less time than it would have taken most people to boil a kettle.

"Go on." Markshall stripped off his trousers and stockings. There was no point in trying to avoid Jones' interrogation. "Say what you have to say."

"Essential as it is to consider your comments on the chimney sweeps bill, might I enquire what you would like to wear to visit your wife-to-be?"

"You can ask the other question, Jones." The question his valet was diplomatically avoiding: where he had been last night and how it had resulted in a proposal.

This whole situation was a paradox. He couldn't marry Lady Emily; she wouldn't want him. He didn't want a wife and had spent years avoiding acquiring one. And yet, he wanted Lady Emily desperately. She had passed his test with the ease of brushing a bit of lint from her coat. She could not forgive him. And that was just as it should be, as he could not exonerate himself.

"It's not my place to ask, my lord." Jones stepped forwards and undid Oscar's cravat. "Just to prepare your quips and your clothes."

"I only require your help with my clothes actually, Jones." Oscar winced at the pain in his shoulders as Jones removed the wilted necktie and undid the buttons of his shirt.

"The quips are free."

Oscar managed a wan smile. What could he possibly say to explain? He held out his hands for Jones to undo the cuffs. "There was an incident with a lady."

A knock at the door interrupted.

"That will be the milliner." A good thing, because he couldn't elucidate his behavior. Or excuse it. "Go and choose a hat, Jones. And see if the old one can be repaired if you want it."

Jones hesitated for a second then dipped his head and left, closing the door behind him.

Oscar stripped off the rest of his clothes and sank into the bath. The hot water burned, and it felt like penance.