Chapter 29

For long moments after he had departed, Rufus sat on the edge of the bed, letting his mind somersault freely through everything that had just happened, for he felt neither hollow nor sad nor sullied. And he was not, he reflected, accustomed to partings that were performed in care. That carried with them no sting of shame or disregard.

He did not think Belle would join him—she had a bath and cheese to think about—but for decency’s sake he pulled on some garments and climbed beneath the covers. Had he been a fool to let Gil leave? Maybe. Maybe not. In some ways, it was a mercy to be alone with his thoughts and his churned-up feelings. No need to pretend or perform, for—as much as he liked Gil—there were still things he did not want to share.

And this was one of them. The terrible fragility of happiness.

He must have slept, dozed, closed his eyes for a minute because when next he stirred, Belle was doing her best to get under the bedclothes without moving them—a physical impossibility if ever there was one.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I was trying not to wake you.”

“Belle” was the only answer he had for her.

Which she seemed to take as the invitation it was to dive into his arms, her unbound hair spilling over him, her face tucked against his neck. She smelled and felt so familiar he could have wept. Everything he had done with Gil had been wonderful—exactly as brutally overwhelming and unremittingly considerate as he had needed—but he needed this too. Even if he couldn’t fully articulate the this .

He just knew it began and ended, belonged to and with Arabella Tarleton.

She plunged a freezing foot between his knees. “You are my favourite person to hug.”

And you are mine. “Did you come all this way in your nightgown?”

“Yes. All this way. Across the street and down the road. Gil lent me his highwayman cloak.”

“We must already be a scandal.”

“This is Gretna Green. We are tame . The innkeeper was telling me about a lord who wanted to marry his ... housekeeper, I think it was? Anyway, he came in disguise as a woman, and the family got into a huge fight in the street. How can some minor bedswapping hold a candle to that?”

She had a point. Say what you would about Belle, she always had a point. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said aloud.

“Are you sure? I was fully expecting you to spend the night with Gil.”

“I ... I wanted you. I like”—he attempted a gesture, but for such a tiny person, Belle had a way of pinning you down—“this. Though I suppose it will not be necessary when we are not living from inn to inn.”

“Is necessity the only reason to do it?”

“Men who fuck their wives rarely sleep with them.”

“Bonny and Valentine sleep together every night.”

“Yes, but they are fucking.”

“If there are rules here, they seem very inconsistent. Perhaps we should just abandon them and do what we please? In fact, perhaps that should be our rule.”

“That we do as we please?”

He felt her nod.

“We are embarked on a very unusual marriage.”

“It was always going to be.” Her voice was a little muffled. “Better to embrace it, don’t you think?”

The cottage was quiet but for the fading crackling of the fire Gil had lit earlier. Rufus twisted a lock of Belle’s hair around his finger—so like her, in its fairy-tale abundance, and its ridiculous resilience, springing back into coils the second you let it go.

“When I was drunk”—the words came out of nowhere, but did not surprise him, for he often felt them lurking—“did I, by any chance, mention my uncle?”

Belle lifted her head briefly. “Oh yes,” she said cheerfully. “You told me you murdered him.”

“Once again I am compelled to ask: And you still thought it was a good idea to marry me?”

“Well, if you literally murdered him, I’m sure you had a good reason. But I assumed it was more that you blamed yourself for his death.”

“I do.”

“While I am not privy to the details, I do not feel I need them to assure you that you should not.”

“It is not a matter for should s and should not s.”

Her eyes sought his, softened by the firelight. “What do you mean?”

“That some things move beyond questions of what is right and what is wrong, and all that’s left to navigate them is how you feel.”

“What was your uncle like?”

He knew she had altered course as a kind of strategy. In that moment, however, he welcomed it, for he would not have been able to speak without her spur. “Not like my aunt. To be fair, she was somewhat different when he was alive. She was still hard and self-righteous, but I think he must have made her happy.”

“I feel compelled to remind you that she cared less than nothing about your happiness.”

“I did not intend to take him from her.” He tried to state it calmly. A simple case of fact. But his entire self betrayed him, and it emerged as a desperate whisper, seeking an absolution it was not Belle’s to grant.

“Of course you did not,” she said firmly. “You were little more than a boy.”

“I was not a boy. I was nearly a man grown.”

“Then let us not lose sight of the nearly , shall we?”

“My aunt has always disliked me. I have never known why. When I came to discover my inclinations lay towards other men, it almost made it easier. It pointed to something specifically wrong with me. Something that deserved her ire.”

Belle’s fingers curled into him so fiercely that her nails pricked him.

“Irrespective of your nature, Rufus, I cannot fathom why she should take against you so violently. You were a baby when you came to her.”

“I know.” He lifted a shoulder in a supine approximation of a hug. “She has always told me she felt it from the very first, the stain of iniquity in me, the moment she beheld my hair as unrepentant as hellfire. Perhaps it was because I was only her child in name.”

“There is no such thing as a child only in name . If a child is your child, they are your child.”

“Dear heart, do you mean to draw blood?”

With a little eep , Belle pulled her hand away. “I’m so sorry. I am just so very unhappy with your aunt.”

“I was not trying to ...” Rufus broke off, scenes from the past swirling behind his eyes, muddy through a memory of tears. “It was not perversity or vengeance. My uncle treated me ...” He broke off again. “I would once have called it kindly , but my definitions are shifting. He treated me decently. And I would have done damn near anything for the barest scrap of affection. I did , in fact.”

The pillow, this time, took the brunt of Belle’s reaction. Which was to say, she sat up and punched it soundly. Then laid herself back in his embrace. “It was unbelievably wrong of him to do that to you, Rufus. Unbelievably.”

“He did not. He is not the villain of this story. His greatest crime was probably incompetence.”

“I despise incompetence,” retorted Belle. “I sometimes think it is worse than malice.”

It was not a situation in which Rufus could ever have imagined laughing. But he laughed now.

“I mean it,” she insisted. “At least when someone hurts you out of malice they’ve put some effort in. When someone hurts you because they didn’t know better or because they didn’t care enough—urgh. There should be a special circle of hell for such people, where they spend eternity giving themselves paper cuts.” She paused, flushed and breathless. “Giving themselves paper cuts in the webbing between their thumb and their finger.”

With an effort, Rufus controlled himself, and wiped his eyes of the tears that had sprung to them beneath the protection of mirth. “My uncle was simply a man who did not understand who he was. I almost pity him sometimes, living his whole life that way, content yet miserable, and never quite knowing why.”

“I do not pity him in the slightest,” said Belle, with neither hesitation nor mercy.

And Rufus kissed her brow, touched, in a strange way, by her conviction. It had not occurred to him that anger could have been something he deserved or was allowed to feel. Too late now, of course. The past had carved its grooves into him, and time had only deepened them. But here was Belle, absurd, irritating, relentlessly loyal Belle, and she was furious on his behalf. It poured over him like cool water, like rain on a summer evening. It could not cure him, it could not change him, but it eased his long-borne pains and washed him gently clean.

“In any case,” he told her, “my aunt found out. He took his own life. And that was the end of it.”

“It was the end of it for him. You have lived with it.”

“I have certainly had the better bargain. Though I do wish I’d been able to see that sooner.”

“I am sorry”—Belle threw herself protectively across him—“for everything that happened. For then and for after and for anything that has made you believe, even for a second, that you are not worthy of all the good things in the world.”

“Oh, shush now,” he whispered, abashed and overcome. “You do know, don’t you, dear heart, that you are the only person who has ever truly seen an iota of good in me.”

She was still clinging, despite the fact she probably couldn’t have stopped a reasonably aggressive mouse. At last, though, she looked up. “I would love to take credit for that, truly I would. But it’s really less to do with me and more to with the fact other people are so terribly, terribly stupid .”

And, once again, somehow, impossibly, Rufus was laughing.