Chapter Twenty-Six

G eorge did not come home. Dinner time came and went, and the food grew cold while Arabella waited for her husband, but he did not return. Eventually, Mrs. Hastings coaxed her into eating a little chicken and some fruit. She did not have the appetite for more than a few bites.

“No need to worry, my dear. Mr. Kirkland is keeping himself safe and dry in one of the pubs,” Mrs. Hastings assured her. “No one likes walking River Road during a rainstorm. I expect you’ll see him tonight or tomorrow morning, whenever the rain stops.”

Arabella tried to clear the lump from her throat. “I am sure you’re right.” She smiled, but her smile wavered so much, she let it fall. Mrs. Hastings must not have been fooled, she patted Arabella’s hand gently.

After giving up her fruitless attempt to eat, Arabella took her embroidery into the parlor, sat in her favorite armchair, and tried to bury her worries in needlework. She had long since finished embroidering monograms on handkerchiefs. Now she was embroidering a set of bibs for Caroline Gray’s baby. Caroline’s most recent letter happily reported that she had already felt the baby moving. Having quickened, Caroline was more optimistic about the outcome of the pregnancy.

I ought to tell George about that! After the wedding, Caroline had announced that she would address all her letters to Arabella now, because Arabella answered her letters in a timely manner rather than leaving them to languish in a pile of unread correspondence, as George seemed to do.

Arabella liked to read Caroline’s letters out loud to George at breakfast, though he sometimes had trouble paying attention. But he would want to know about his sister’s improving condition. He did not talk about Caroline’s pregnancy often, but she knew he’d been worried about it. Everyone who knew Caroline worried, since she’d come so close to dying during her miscarriage two years ago.

George tarried so long that night, Arabella had time to finish embroidering the last of the bibs. Since she had no idea what the Grays would name their baby, she could not add a full monogram. Instead, she stitched a fanciful “G” for Gray, accompanied by a fluffy lamb.

How could she keep herself occupied now? Arabella doubted reading would distract her from her cares the way art did. Maybe she could make another blanket? She could embroider lambs in the corners, to match the bibs. Better yet, she could put lambs in two of the corners, and ducklings in the others. In order to do that, she would have to plan out the pattern, and her sketchpad and pencils were all upstairs.

Arabella left the parlor, taking her candle with her. She had almost reached the top of the stairs when the sound of the front door swinging open made her whirl around so quickly, she nearly fell. She frantically caught hold of the banister, but dropped her candle, plunging the steep staircase into a late summer twilight.

“George?” For one painful second, she wondered if it could be someone else. The burglar, maybe? Or someone come bearing news of a terrible accident? Or—

“I didn’t mean to startle you! Are you all right?” George galloped up the stairs. He slipped an arm around her waist to keep her from falling.

Arabella kept one hand on the banister, just in case. “I’m fine. Are you all right? I expected you home hours ago.”

“Right as a trivet,” he assured her. “The rain kept me in town for a few hours, that’s all. Mr. Arkwright offered to drive me home in his gig, but I had to wait until after his dinner.”

“Oh. That makes sense.” Mrs. Hastings had been right all along. George hadn’t been staying away because he was angry with Arabella, or because he had gotten into some kind of trouble. Only the weather was to blame.

She sighed and leaned in closer so she could rest her head on George’s shoulder. She hadn’t realized how tense she’d become until she felt her body slowly relax against George. George must have felt a shift, too, as he embraced her more tightly.

“I need not have worried after all,” she murmured.

“Did you think I’d been swept away by the river?”

There was a note in George’s voice she didn’t quite recognize. Amusement? But it sounded too warm to be mockery.

“You can laugh all you want, but yes, I was concerned! It would break my heart if something were to happen to you.” She blinked, surprised by her own vehemence. Where had that come from? Would it really break her heart to lose George?

Yes, she supposed, it would.

“I am glad to hear that, I am rather fond of you too, you know.” George’s breath stirred a loose strand of her hair.

But his words did not go far enough to suit Arabella. “I am not just fond of you!” She wanted to be precise about her feelings, to leave no possibility of misunderstandings. “I love you. You are my husband and I love you and I was afraid I’d ruined everything because I pried into your personal papers and you were not going to come back and—”

George mercifully interrupted her babbling. “Belle, of course I meant to come back! You are my wife, and I love you, too.” He tipped her chin up so he could press a soft kiss against her lips.

Arabella’s eyes widened. When he said “love,” did he mean friendly affection, which she already knew he felt, or the sort of love poets wrote sonnets about? Before she could ask for clarification, he kissed her more deeply. Somehow, that felt like answer enough.

She closed her eyes and kissed him back, nibbling on his lower lip until he opened his mouth for her. He tasted of sweet after-dinner port, and she would’ve liked to blame her sudden giddiness on that, but she knew perfectly well that the effervescent happiness bubbling up from her heart had nothing to do with wine and everything to do with being loved by George.

Well, some of it might be less the result of his affection and more the result of the way his body pressed up against hers. He was cold and wet from the rain, so embracing him ought to have chilled her, but it had the opposite effect. Heat flushed throughout her body, pooling in a few particular places.

But Arabella stopped her husband when he began to fumble with the closure at the back of her dress. “Not here ,” she whispered raggedly. “Anyone could see.” Or hear . George seemed to like hearing her voice her pleasure, but she would die of mortification if anyone else heard.

“Upstairs, then?” He jerked his chin in the direction of their bedchamber.

“Yes.” She hated having to release him in order to finish climbing the stairs, but it took only a few steps down the corridor to reach their bedchamber. Once the door closed behind them, she did not have to worry about anything but loving her husband.

Arabella had imagined that after George got home, they would sit down and have a long conversation about missing silverware, biscuit crumbs, and mice. She hoped they could find a compromise that allowed George the privacy to work interrupted without turning his study into either a literal or figurative rat’s nest.

As it happened, they had very little verbal conversation that evening. George had been tired out from walking all over creation and Arabella had been exhausted from worrying, so they fell asleep in each other’s arms after exchanging only a few words—though there had been a good deal of physical communication.

The next morning, after breakfast, Arabella steeled herself to begin a discussion about the mess in the study. But George surprised her by inviting her into the room.

“You had something to say to me?” She stood near the door, looking around at the disarray. Some of George’s books were lined up on shelves, but others were simply stacked in piles wherever a clear space could be found. He needed more bookshelves. Fortunately, the study had unused wall space. If they added in a new bookcase, maybe—

“I wanted to come clean about what I’ve been writing this summer,” George said.

“Oh!” That was not at all what she had expected to talk about.

“Why don’t you sit down?” He moved a stack of papers off the chair near his desk and gestured for Arabella to take a seat.

She settled down, sitting up straight, as her old governess would have wanted. She clasped her hands on her lap and steadily met George’s eyes. To her surprise, he chuckled.

“You look like you are about to face a firing party. Relax. I am not going to bite you—unless you want me too, of course.”

Her face flushed and she dropped her eyes. There was, in fact, a faint bite mark on her neck that she’d had to cover up with a shawl. Fortunately, the day was cool and cloudy, so the outfit did not feel uncomfortably warm, but Mrs. Hasting had still given the shawl a puzzled look this morning.

Arabella cleared her throat and tried not to worry about whether the whole household knew how enthusiastically she had been tumbled last night. “So, you want to talk about your writing?”

“Yes.” George still held the stack of papers that had been sitting on the armchair. Now he handed it to her. “This is the novel on which I’ve been working. But it’s not the first one I’ve written.”

“It’s not?” Her eyes widened. She’d assumed that writing novels was a new occupation for George. So far as she knew, his publications were confined to essays and book reviews.

“It’s not.” George smiled wryly. “I’ve been writing novels for a couple of years now. I started back when I still clerked for Mr. Horner.”

“A couple of years ?” she squeaked. “How did you keep it secret? Why did you keep it secret?”

“I write novels under a nom de plume, Belle.” He drew a deep breath and held it for a moment. “My pen name is Alec MacPherson.”

Arabella frowned. Why did that name sound so familiar? She rummaged around in the back of her memory, trying to recall where she’d heard it before.

George saved her the effort. “I wrote that book you disliked so much, Rosalind, or the Lady in the Forest .”

She clapped a hand to her mouth, shocked. “Oh no!”

He chuckled ruefully. “Oh yes! You’ve no idea how crushed I felt when you told me everything wrong with it.”

Arabella closed her eyes and shook her head, ashamed of her own critical words. “I would never have said that if I’d known—”

“I know, I know!” George sounded embarrassed. “That’s not the point, anyway. My point is, I’ve had two novels published already, and I’m working on a third. Or at least I was supposed to be. I mean, I was supposed to be working on a different third novel, not the one I’m working on now, but I couldn’t get anywhere with it, so—”

She opened her eyes and interrupted him before he could get even more hopelessly tangled up in his explanation. “But why didn’t you tell me? Does your sister know?” It wasn’t at all like Caroline to keep a secret like that from Arabella!

He shook his head. “No one knows. You know my father, Belle. He thinks novels are a waste of time at best and a source of corruption at worst. I can’t let anyone in the family know I write them.”

“Yes, I see,” she said gently. She had forgotten about Mr. Kirkland’s opinion of novels, though she had certainly heard him pontificate on the subject. “But you could have told me. I like novels!”

George hung his head. “I know, I know! I shouldn’t have tried to keep it a secret from you. I suppose I thought it would be fun to surprise you when my third book came out...” He shrugged dismissively. “I don’t know what I thought. Maybe I was afraid you wouldn’t like my writing. And you didn’t!” He whispered the last sentence, and Arabella’s heart ached for him.

“I am so sorry,” she repeated. “But you know, I am very proud of you for publishing a novel at all.”

He lifted his head and looked her in the face. “You are?”

“Of course I am! Anyone would be proud!” Anyone except his father, that is, she silently amended. Probably best not to dwell on that, though. “So many people think they can write, but how many of them ever finish a novel, let alone publish it?”

She herself had tried to write a chivalrous romance in blank verse about knights and fair maidens, back when she was fourteen or fifteen and convinced she would someday meet a hero on a white horse. Her romance had never been finished, her ear for rhythm—so necessary for managing the meter of a poem in iambic pentameter—was not nearly as well developed as her eye for color.

“I might have been wrong about Rosalind , anyway,” she added. “I only read a few chapters of it, after all. Perhaps if I’d finished it, I would have a different opinion.” And she most certainly would have finished it if she’d known George had written it!

“No, I suspect you were right about it.” He sounded glum again. “Neither of my novels sold very well. I have high hopes for the one I’m writing now, but it’s quite a different style from the other two, and I don’t know what my editor will think of it.”

“I see.” She knew little about the process of publishing a book, but she could see how worried George was about this. “What is the new book about?”

George’s face lit up. He leaned forward in his chair as he began to explain his newest book, which seemed to be based on the legends about Dogwood Cottage. Arabella could not quite follow the plot—indeed, she was not sure even George knew where the plot was going—but she gathered that the story would contain a murder, a skeleton in the closet, and possibly a mad monk.

George seemed a little doubtful about the last point, because, as he explained, “I don’t know anything about monasteries.”

“So you’re writing a Gothic novel?” Arabella concluded. It did sound very different from Rosalind .

“Yes, but not a Gothic novel set in France or Italy or Spain,” he explained. “A Gothic novel set right here in the north of England. And why not? There’ve been witch trials on Pendle Hill, and priest hunters looking for Jesuits, and water mills, and who knows what else?”

“Water mills?” She could not for the life of her see what mills had to do with witchcraft or recusancy.

“Well, never mind that. But you see the potential, don’t you? All I have to do is finish writing it!” He paused and scanned the room. “But it’s causing problems for the household, isn’t it? My messiness?” His warm brown eyes looked at her pleadingly.

Arabella held his gaze and nodded. “It is causing problems,” she agreed, seeing no reason to sugarcoat the truth. George dropped his eyes, looking as guilty as Bowser did after chewing up one of Arabella’s pencils. “But,” Arabella continued, “I am sure we can find a solution to the problem if we work together.”

George stared at her as a doubtful line formed between his brows. “You think so?”

“Yes. I am certain.” If the confidence with which she spoke owed more to Arabella’s acting ability than to her real opinion in the matter, well, that was something George didn’t need to know. They would figure out a way to make this work. “You were always good at getting us into trouble when we were children,” she reminded him, “but I had a talent for getting us out, didn’t I?”

A grin lightened George’s face. “So you were! You were always better at solving problems than me. I’m sure we’ll think of something.”

“To start with,” Arabella said, “you are going to have to let a maid in here sometimes, so the place isn’t littered with crumbs.”

His face fell. “I hate it when people move my things about. I have enough trouble finding my things even if I’m the only one moving them.” He looked down at the surface of his desk, already cluttered again.

She nodded. “I know. So let’s think about where we can put everything.” She rose to her feet and turned around slowly, studying the room. “When everything has a place, it will be easier to find what you need.”

George continued to look skeptical about this, but he listened as Arabella suggested some changes to the room. Maybe this was going to work after all.

And if it didn’t, well, they could get a cat to keep down the mice. Arabella preferred cats over dogs, anyway.