Chapter 24

CHAPTER 24

" S top the carriage!"

The shout came from outside on the road. Cressida had been dozing, exhausted with worry over her sister, but it jerked her back to full awareness, and she sat bolt upright, hands fisted in her skirts and wondering what this could mean.

Was it bandits? Were they about to break into the carriage? Her heart pounded with fear. She knew ladies could be carried away by bandits. She understood that that was part of the reason Matthew worried when he didn't know where she was—he thought something like that might happen to her. She knew it wasn't unreasonable—and now, a part of her wished she had stayed at home and waited for him to travel with her. She would be no use to Victoria if she was killed.

The door opened. Cressida pulled back against the far side of the carriage, ready to lash out and defend herself if necessary, ready to kick or fight or do whatever she had to do to get herself out of this situation…

And then she froze.

Matthew stood there. His face was as white as a sheet. His clothing was in complete disarray. His hair was windswept and his eyes were wild.

"What do you mean by running off like this?" he demanded, reaching into the carriage and catching her by the wrist. "We talked about this, Cressida! I thought you understood. I thought you weren't going to do this sort of thing anymore!"

"Matthew—"

"And where the devil do you think you're going? This is not the way to your father's house! This is not the way to—to anything ! Where are you going without even bothering to let me know about it? If I hadn't come home early and gotten that silly note of yours, you would have been long gone by the time I realized anything had happened, and who knows whether I would have ever seen you again?"

She climbed down from the carriage and tried to take his hands, but he pulled away from her sharply. Cressida felt ill. This was different from the last time he had been angry with her. Last time, the crisis had been over, and they had been able to calm one another down. But this time, she still felt awash in panic over Victoria's circumstances. She needed to keep moving.

"Can we get back into the carriage?" she asked him.

"Oh, we're getting back into the carriage. We're going home immediately."

"No," she said.

He stared at her. "What do you mean, no ?"

"I'm sorry. I can't go home. You saw my note."

"That note didn't say anything! You wrote that there was an emergency and you would explain it to me later. That's no information, Cressida. What did you expect I was going to do with that? Did you think I would say to myself, oh, very well, she'll explain it to me later, I suppose I'll just have my supper and go to bed, then ? Did you think I could possibly rest knowing that you might be anywhere? You didn't even tell me in the note where you were going, and if it hadn't been for the carriage tracks leading from our home, I would never have found you. It's only pure luck that led me to you."

He stared at her for a long moment. Cressida didn't know whether he was about to slap her or embrace her—all she knew was that she felt no fear.

And perhaps that was the answer. He wouldn't slap her, because Matthew would never harm her. In all the ups and downs of their marriage thus far, that was the one thing she had always known. He wouldn't hurt her. He might be angry with her, but he had no violence of that kind in him.

But in the end, he did neither. Instead, he simply released her and stepped back.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry I didn't explain things more fully in my note. Truly, I am."

"Explain them now," he said, his voice tight.

"Can we please get back into the carriage? I want to keep moving."

"We're not going anywhere unless I understand where we're going and why."

Cressida nodded. The quickest thing would be to simply explain it to him. "I was going to Gretna Green."

His eyebrows pulled together, a blend of anger and confusion. "Why on Earth were you going there?"

"I wish I had brought the letter—it's my sister, Victoria. She wrote to me and told me she's running away to marry. I don't know what to think about it. I don't know why she would make such a rash decision. But I do know that I have to find her and speak to her about it before she does anything she's going to regret for the rest of her life. How could I live with myself if I allowed this to happen without interfering?"

"You should have waited for me to get home."

"If I'd known how soon you would be arriving, I would have waited. But you'll admit that you often work late hours and meet with people far into the night. I didn't know when I might see you, and I couldn't afford to take the chance. What if you weren't home until after dark? I don't know where Victoria is on her journey, but I don't think she can be in Gretna Green yet unless she arranged specifically for her note to be delivered to me days after it was written. That means I still have a chance of stopping her. But if I waited for you, that chance might have slipped away."

"I truly can't leave you alone even for an hour, can I?"

"It's an unusual circumstance, Matthew. You know as well as I that neither one of us could have predicted this. If I could have told you in advance, I would have done so. But what would you have done if you were in my position? Your sisters are taken care of, both of them in good marriages where they are happy and safe. But what if that wasn't true, and what if you received such a letter? Wouldn't you drop everything you were doing and hurry to their side at once?"

"It's different for me," he told her. "I'm a man. It's less dangerous for a man to be on these roads than it is for a lady."

"Of course you're right," Cressida agreed. "But what was I to do? There's no man to rescue Victoria. My father can't be relied upon for anything, and she has no brothers. I've had to be everything to her—mother, father, and all manner of relations. Today perhaps she needs an elder brother, but the closest thing she has is me, and so I have to be the one to do this."

"That isn't true," Matthew said.

"It is true!"

"It's not. You say you're the closest thing she has to an elder brother—but you're forgetting about me."

Cressida opened her mouth automatically to continue the argument—but then his words registered more fully, and she paused. "You?"

"We're married," Matthew reminded her. "That means your sister is now my sister too. My responsibility too. If something has happened to her, if we need to intervene to protect her, that's my duty as well."

Cressida felt choked with sudden gratitude. "Do you mean it? You'll really help me with this?"

"Of course I'm going to help you. You couldn't honestly have imagined that I would make you do it alone. Why do you think I'm telling you that you should have waited for me? I would have been by your side if I'd had the opportunity."

"So then…you're not going to force us to go back home and abandon any hope of helping my sister?"

"Of course I'm not. I wanted you to go home because I didn't know what you were doing, Cressida. And I don't want you out on the road by yourself. Now that you've explained it to me, now that I'm with you, things are very different. Of course we can go."

He held out a hand to her, clearly wanting to help her up into the carriage.

She regarded him for a moment, taken aback by how easy it had been in the end—but only for a moment. The important thing, she knew, was to get on the road again. She took his hand and allowed him to help her into the carriage, and he climbed up after her.

"You haven't any of your things," she said as they settled into their seats and pulled the door closed. "I packed a bag, but you don't have one. What are you going to do for clothes?"

"I'll sort it out," he said. "Don't worry about that. You were right—the most important thing now is that we get to your sister as soon as we can. If the marriage is finalized before we can reach her, there will be nothing we can do."

Cressida shivered at the thought, wondering what that would mean for Victoria. She couldn't stand the thought of her sister in an unhappy marriage—it was the very thing she had tried to prevent by marrying Matthew so that Victoria wouldn't have to.

Maybe that had been a mistake. Maybe she should have allowed her father's original plan to take place. Matthew hadn't been Victoria's first choice, but he was a good man, and Victoria would have been safe and provided for. Cressida didn't know that either of those things could be said about the man she had chosen for herself. She had been willing to consider a marriage to a baron's son for her sister in the abstract, but that was much different from accepting that Victoria had run away to marry him. That he had been willing to separate her from her family. How could Cressida accept something like that? How could a man who had wanted such a thing for Victoria be a good man?

The carriage began to move again.

"Try to relax," Matthew said, his voice low and even. It was calming to hear him talk like that. "We have a very long journey ahead of us, and so does your sister. Just remember that. She left ahead of us, it's true, but there's no possibility she's already in Gretna Green. If we hurry, we may yet catch her on the road. We may be able to stop this before it goes any farther."

"Do you really believe there's a chance?" Cressida asked anxiously.

"Of course there is," Matthew said. "We'll get to her as quickly as we can, and we'll intervene. We're doing everything right. You don't need to worry."

Not worrying seemed impossible—Cressida knew she wouldn't be able to do it. But still, he was right that they were taking all the correct steps, and she knew that too. The carriage was moving now, and that helped to put her mind at ease as well.

More than anything else, though, Cressida knew that what was making her feel more relaxed than she had since receiving that letter was the simple fact of Matthew's presence. Having him here beside her calmed her somehow, just as it had calmed her to have him with her during the thunderstorm. Now, just as then, she knew that he couldn't make the thing she feared disappear. He was incapable of stopping the storm, and he couldn't snap his fingers and make Victoria safe either.

But she felt more capable of facing what lay ahead knowing that he was beside her. She felt as if, whatever happened, she would be able to cope with it because she had a partner she trusted.

Perhaps that was what marriage truly was—having someone by your side that you trusted so innately, you simply knew that everything was going to be all right even when you couldn't see how it was going to happen.

If that was what it was all about, then she and Matthew did have a real marriage after all. And that thought was enough to send a wash of relief through her and calm some of her anxiety.

Everything was going to be all right.

Or, at the very least, she had reason to hope.