Chapter 3

The elopement of Arabella Tarleton and Sir Horley Comewithers did not get off to the most auspicious start, given it almost resulted in the immediate demise of one of the participants. Belle had always known Sir Horley’s indolent manner was, to some degree, artifice, but she had not counted on his lack of sobriety. He didn’t so much climb out of the window as fall out of it, landing—fortunately for his continued existence, though less fortunately for his arse—in a gorse bush below. Even without Belle’s shriek of alarm at witnessing his abrupt auto-defenestration, the crash would have been household-rousing. As Belle vaulted over the balcony and began scrambling down the ivy, she heard windows opening around her and caught the gleam of lamps and candles.

“I’m too drunk to tell,” remarked Sir Horley, still embedded in a gorse bush, “but I think I’m in quite a lot of pain.” He paused, meditatively. “Physical pain.” He paused again. “From a certain perspective, it’s a pleasant change.”

With no-one to help, Belle landed in a heap upon the grass. Perhaps it was just the shock of Sir Horley nearly plummeting to his death or the indignity of her own descent, but the oddest sense of loneliness surged up out of nowhere and threatened to swamp her.

She was no stranger to (mis)adventure, but this was the first time she had embarked on one alone. In the wake of their disastrous attempt to kidnap Sir Horley for his own good, Bonny had declared himself officially retired from further antics. And Peggy—once upon a time Belle’s other companion in chaos—was now too in love with Orfeo to let her love for Belle embroil her in scrapes against her better judgement. Of course, Belle theoretically had Sir Horley on her side for the present endeavour. But she suspected his combination of drunkenness/hollowness/sitting-in-a-gorse-bush-ness made him a liability rather than an ally. Gritting her teeth, she went to assist him. Which mostly entailed trying to drag him out of the gorse bush.

“Ow,” he said, rather plaintively.

From above them came the rattling of a window casement, and someone called out, “Horley? Is that you?”

“Come on.” Trying not to think about what would happen if Sir Horley’s aunt caught them eloping—barely pre-elope though they were—Belle pulled at his arm. “We have to go.”

“Who’s that with you?” demanded the same voice as before. And then, since it was the sort of voice that didn’t seem as though it would be contented with a single demand: “Are you drunk again?”

“ Again ,” declared Sir Horley, “implies a return to a previously entered state. Whereas I have not ceased to be drunk for quite some time.”

“This isn’t the time for a semantic debate.” Belle finally managed to heave Sir Horley out of the bush, only to have him flop into her arms like ... well. Someone larger and heavier than her who had flopped into her arms.

Gravel crunched and skittered beneath her boots as she tried to brace him. There was, however, to put it bluntly, no fucking way . With Belle trying to cling to Sir Horley and push him upright, they ended up staggering about on the path like a pair of exceptionally inept dancers, trapped in a cursed waltz. Their steps took them through a herbaceous border and round a piece of topiary that had probably not been intended to look like a phallus, then finally sent them tumbling backwards into a stone birdbath. It rocked beneath them but did not topple, apparently having been designed for extremely rambunctious sparrows. This, Belle thought, was a principle that seemed to underlie the whole estate. Not that the sparrows were expected to be rambunctious. But that things should be built ... solidly. Practically. Unbeautifully. Walls to define and contain. Stone to last, unchanging.

Still, it was no more a time for architecture than it was a time for semantics. And besides, her bottom was getting wet from being partially dunked in a pool of standing water. She shoved at Sir Horley’s shoulder and flailed one foot in the air by way of encouragement to get off her as a matter of urgency.

Another window opened, and at it appeared Sir Horley’s fiancée—beautiful even like this, in an unflatteringly demure nightgown with her hair in a long braid. “What is happening?” she asked, all sweet silver bells and certainties. “Sir Horley, what are you doing to the birdbath?” Some of those certainties were fading rapidly. “What are you doing with that boy in the birdbath?”

Sir Horley levered himself back to his feet, Belle wrapped around him like a soggy monkey. “You have the most extravagant imagination for depravity, my dear. I can never tell if it means you’re wasted as a Christian, or if it’s what makes you such a good one.”

“Stop disrupting the household.” The initial speaker—presumably Sir Horley’s aunt—had now progressed from demanding to commanding. “Go back to bed at once.”

Leaning against the phallus, Sir Horley squinted upwards at the house. “You seem to be labouring under the misapprehension I was in bed to begin with.”

“You are to be married tomorrow,” returned his aunt, implacably.

“And,” Miss Carswile added, with measurably less plac , “you will imbibe less after we are wed.”

“Will I?” asked Sir Horley.

She gazed at him with the bewilderment of the unshakably virtuous. “You cannot want to be like this?”

“Indeed no.” He seemed to be sober, just a little, his sudden half smile stark in the moonlight. “But I fear it is not to be changed. We have tried, have we not, Auntie?”

There was a long silence.

“You sicken me,” Sir Horley’s aunt said at last, the words teeth-worn, as though she had spoken them often.

Since Sir Horley offered no reply of his own, Belle called up, “I don’t think I like you very much either.”

“And I,” returned Sir Horley’s aunt with indifferent regality, “have no notion who you are.”

“Mrs. Greenleaf?” Ignoring Belle’s interruption, Miss Carswile leaned out of her window. “You promised you would not say such things.”

Sir Horley’s aunt—it struck Belle belatedly that she had never before even thought to ask her name—was not the type to lean wantonly out of windows. If anything, her spine grew even stiffer and more rigid. “The truth, you mean?”

“Surely truths,” said Miss Carswile softly, “are the most deserving of compassion.”

“Well, I don’t want your fucking compassion.” Sir Horley’s words exploded across the not-particularly-quiet garden.

Belle stared at him in shock. Maybe there was something to be said for drunkenness.

“I just,” he continued, at the same sky-cracking volume, “I just want to drink myself senseless and fuck boys. Well, not boys. Men. Like the filthy beast I am.”

Mrs. Greenleaf still barely reacted. Her face was stone, framed by stone. “I always knew there was the devil in you, child.”

“That wasn’t the devil.” Sir Horley’s defiance was only mildly impeded by his staggering into the topiary phallus. “That was me. That was all me.”

This time, Mrs. Greenleaf’s only response was a huff of air.

“Your precious husband was mad for me, Auntie. I gave him more than your vicious tongue and your cold god ever could.”

“And you killed him.”

Sir Horley had already expressed the same sentiment to Belle. But she knew very well that saying terrible things about yourself, out of bravado or some other nonsense, was not the same as hearing them said about you. The boldness fell from him like a cloak from a beggar. And the way he flinched she recognised too. A kind of heartsick shiver.

“What do you expect to accomplish,” Mrs. Greenleaf asked, “with your little scenes?”

“I ... I don’t know.” Sir Horley put a hand dizzily to his head.

“Return to your room,” his aunt told him. “Sober up. Act like a man for once.”

“Oh, but”—even though she had found him in tatters, there remained in his smile a trace of the Sir Horley that Belle had once believed she knew—“that has never been a priority of mine.”

Belle went to him, taking his hand in hers. “That is one of the many reasons I like you,” she whispered. “May we leave?”

He glanced at her, almost as though he had forgotten she was there. “Leave?”

“Yes.”

“Of course.” He barked out a sudden laugh. “We’re eloping, aren’t we?”

“And doing an appalling job of it,” Belle pointed out.

Mrs. Greenleaf took a step forward, though not enough of a step forward—unfortunately—to send her toppling into the garden. “You’re what?”

“Eloping?” Sir Horley called up to her.

Belle kicked him in the ankle. “You’re not supposed to tell them.”

“I’m not?”

“No, we’re supposed to escape discreetly in the dead of night.”

“You’re eloping?” repeated Miss Carswile. “With that boy? I don’t think you can elope with a boy, can you?” Something a little wistful crept into her voice. “Can he?”

It didn’t seem relevant in that moment for Belle to correct the misapprehensions surrounding her identity.

“No,” declared Mrs. Greenleaf. “He cannot. And he shall not.” Her gaze fell upon Sir Horley like an executioner’s blade. “If you take another step, I am done with you.”

“You’ve been done with me for a while, Auntie.”

That Sir Horley’s aunt would be a fairly unpleasant person, Belle had prepared for. That very occasionally, perhaps as some cruel trick of the uncertain light, there might be some traces of familial resemblance she had not. There in the curve of cheek and jaw, the shape of a nose, elusive as an echo. A flash of blue-green from a stranger’s eyes. “I pay for you, don’t I?” she was saying. “For your lifestyle . Your ridiculous clothes and your trips to the opera and that disgusting hunting lodge you keep. Without me, you’ll have nothing and you’ll be nothing.”

“I think,” said Sir Horley, resigned rather than regretful, “I already am.”

Belle tugged at his hand. “Not to me.”

“Arabella ...” He offered her a strained and distant smile. “What can we possibly be to each other?”

If she had been Peggy or Bonny, she would have said something like Whatever we want to be and believed it. But she was not her twin, and she was not her friend, and all her pretending had never truly solidified into conviction. “We can ... work it out?”

He lifted one shoulder in a clumsy shrug. “I’ve had less appealing offers.”

“Please come on.” She escalated from tugging to yanking. “This is already the worst elopement in history.”

“The very worst?” asked Sir Horley, as he allowed Belle to lead him towards the gate, only staggering through three more herbaceous borders en route. “In the whole of human history? That feels a vainglorious claim.”

“Perhaps we could discuss it further when we are not actively fleeing?”

“Oh, so we’re actively fleeing now?”

“We were meant to be actively fleeing all along.” Belle indulged in a little squeak of frustration. “It’s just you’re very drunk and bad at it.”

“Horley Rufus Grandison Comewithers.” Sir Horley’s aunt was not the sort of woman who had to raise her voice to be heard. It was almost admirable, Belle thought, the way she could slice through air and starlight. “If you take one step beyond my gates, you will never set foot across them again.”

Sir Horley’s hand was sweaty in Belle’s, shaking slightly, but holding tight nonetheless. “And here I thought you didn’t care.”

“You are my heir, and you will act like it.”

The path seemed to weave and lengthen before Belle’s eyes. She had not thought the garden so large when she had infiltrated the estate. But with Mrs. Greenleaf’s words raining down on them like burning pitch, and Sir Horley’s stumbling at her side, she wondered if she would ever escape it.

“You owe me a child.” Apparently Sir Horley’s aunt had thrown a vase from her windowsill, for it shattered behind Belle—a miniature city of petals and porcelain, fallen to ruin, and partially submerged beneath brackish water. “It is the least you owe me, after what you did.”

“And we are pledged to each other,” added Miss Carswile, imploringly, “in the eyes of society and the eyes of the Lord. I cannot understand what you must be feeling to drive you to this, but I promise—”

Miss Carswile’s promises were no match for Mrs. Greenleaf’s fury. For the sort of pain that had carved itself into her, year on year, like water weakening rock. “I am your family.” Another object, an ornament this time, possibly a shepherdess, or some other pastoral figure in the midst of being wooed, crashed to the ground. “Your sole remaining family since your own worthless parents were only too glad to hand you over to me. From the moment I laid eyes on you, I knew you were vermin. But I still took you in.”

Sir Horley paused, half turning, though whether it was shame or pity, or anger, Belle could not tell. A piece of vase or shepherdess had opened a shallow cut upon his cheek; in the moonlight, the blood fell like slow tears.

“You recall what I said about active fleeing?” Belle yanked him back to face her and the gates and the world that lay beyond them. “Now would be an absolutely wonderful time for it.”

To her surprise, he nodded. “Let’s go.”

And so they ran. Or rather, Belle ran. Sir Horley wobbled with greater alacrity. His determination, at least, was to be admired. Less so his tendency to collide with garden furniture and drag her into topiary.

“If you run like a cur,” his aunt cried after them, “I will have you hunted down like one. I will have you dragged back and horsewhipped.”

It was not, Belle thought, the sort of pronouncement one wanted to have hurled after one in the dark. “She’s not actually going to do that?”

Sir Horley wheezed out a laugh. “You’ve met the woman. Of course she will.”

Belle risked a glance back at the house. Its mistress had, indeed, abandoned the window—although the light from her candle illuminated enough of the room beyond to present the ominous tableau of Mrs. Greenleaf instructing her servants and rousing her household.

“Oh fuck,” said Belle.