Chapter 5

Talking to Valentine was not one of Belle’s favourite pastimes.

“This,” she said, “is not one of my favourite pastimes.”

Valentine gave her a tight smile. “I’m aware, Arabella.”

They had withdrawn to the upstairs private room, away from listening ears, prying eyes, and the solicitousness of a newly minted five-star innkeeper. Despite having spent over a year in the same house, it was still fairly rare for them to be alone together. They didn’t precisely avoid each other, but usually there were friends between them or, at least, around them. Now they kept their distance in the most literal sense possible: Belle by the window, gazing abstractedly down at the stable yard, Valentine in a chair by the smouldering ashes of the fire.

When, not being sure what she could say, Belle did not reply, he sighed. “You’re never going to forgive me, are you?”

“I think,” she said finally, “I find it hard to forgive the world. All the ways it is set up for you that half the time you do not even notice.”

“I cannot wed the man I love. How set up for me, as you put it, can the world be?”

He had offered the words mildly. And, truthfully, she could not muster much irritation for them. Just a certain stale weariness. “So it does not give you one tiny piece of what you want. Boo-hoo.”

“Then what is it you want, Belle?”

“That’s just it. It’s not simple for me.”

Caught in the glass, she saw his reflection raise a brow. “Boo-hoo?”

“You know,” she remarked, “for someone apparently seeking my forgiveness, you are making some bold choices.”

His expression smoothed immediately. “As ever, I simply hope for peace between us.”

“We are,” she tried, “not not at peace. I am happy you make Bonny happy. And as for what has happened between us ...” Her mind drifted to the earnest, awkward Valentine she had known as a girl. And then to the cold man who had tried to force her into matrimony. It was like looking down a well or from a great height: whatever she saw, distorted by distance. “I find I no longer care. Can that be forgiveness enough for you?”

“Is it truly the best we can manage?”

Belle shrugged. “I find ideas of forgiveness rather abstract and exalted. It seems more meaningful to me simply to grow past hurt.”

“I am trying to be someone you can trust. Someone you can believe you matter to.”

“If I matter to you, it is because Bonny matters to you more than anything.” She smiled to soften the truth of it. “I think perhaps I would like to have something of my own for once.”

“And you believe that could be Sir Horley?”

It was a question that would once have struck at Belle rather deeply, carrying as it did the implication that nobody could independently wish to be connected to her. But she’d offered Valentine not-caring for a reason. If she’d tried to bear the weight of every heedless thing he’d ever said or done to her, she’d have been crushed into dust. “I mean,” she tried instead, “he is my friend.”

Valentine frowned. “Right now, I’m not sure he’s anyone’s friend.”

“Least of all his own,” Belle agreed. “But we ... I ... cannot abandon him.”

“We did not abandon him. He has refused all contact with us since we ... you ... kidnapped him.”

Kidnap someone once , and you never heard the end of it. “I will be the first to admit kidnapping him was an error.”

“And yet you have done so a second time.”

“This is not a kidnapping. This is an elopement.”

“An elopement to which one party barely seems capable of consenting is a kidnapping.”

“It is so interesting,” said Belle musingly, “that you have become such a proponent of consent in matrimony.”

The look Valentine cast her was mostly sad. “I did learn from you, Belle. Or I tried to.”

“And yet you continue to oppose me at every turn.”

“I’ve only asked to talk.”

“As ever, I find little pleasure in your conversation.” Belle knew she was needling him. She also knew it wasn’t entirely fair of her. It was just ... easier. Easier than trying to trust him again. Easier than having to risk hurt. Easier than having to face for herself all the ways she, too, had changed.

Valentine’s patience visibly wobbled but, surprisingly, did not crack. “I have seen to everything you’ve asked for. A bath for Sir Horley. My carriage, should you need it. I’m not standing in your way. I simply question why you’re doing this. Whether it is right for you?”

“You seem mostly concerned about whether it’s right for Sir Horley.”

“I am concerned,” he growled, “about both of you.”

“Do you believe us so incapable of managing our own happiness?”

“Frankly”—Valentine’s fingertips were pinching the bridge of his nose, his whole attitude redolent of despair—“yes. But you don’t have to tell me it is none of my business. Nor remind me that until I fell in love with your brother, I was hardly a great advocate of happiness for myself.”

Belle shrugged. “Oh, you did all right. With your great wealth and influence.”

“I cannot change what the world has given me.”

And maybe it was just because they’d had this conversation, or some version of it, what felt like a thousand times before, but Belle relented. “I know. And I know you want to help. But, for once, could you help by ... helping instead of the opposite of that?”

“I am,” Valentine protested, faintly wounded. “But will you not at least allow me to care a little?”

“I have not cared much for you caring in the past.”

“You did once.”

“Yes, but I am no longer that girl. I will not give my faith so lightly nor forget how readily I may be dispensed with.”

A trace of the old Valentine—the one who had done the ready dispensing—flickered into being as he briefly dropped his face into his hands. “Must you always be so damnably dramatic? Nobody is dispensing with you, nor have they. That makes it sound like you are regularly murdered.”

“You are with Bonny?” she asked. “And I am the one you find dramatic?”

“It’s different when—” Aware, as ever belatedly, that he wasn’t helping himself, Valentine shut his mouth with a snap.

“When he’s Bonny?” Belle finished for him. “If it’s a man in general?”

“If the person in question hasn’t shot me.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “I’m sorry that I shot you, Valentine. Don’t make me change my mind about that.”

“Can I at least make you change your mind about marrying Sir Horley? For your own sake?”

“My own sake,” she repeated, unable to entirely keep the contempt from her voice. “You have tried to make me do many things I have not wanted, ostensibly for my own sake. Forgive me, but I don’t think your judgement in this area can be trusted.”

“You are running away”—Valentine’s voice, by contrast, was surprisingly gentle—“against the wishes of his family, a few hours before his wedding, with a very unhappy man who, at the present moment, thinks little of us and, as far as I understand it, has no romantic or sexual feelings for women. This does not seem like a recipe for contentment.”

“Whereas Sir Horley marrying Miss Carswile is a recipe for contentment?”

“That is a matter for his future and hers. Not yours.”

“Well, his future is important to me,” Belle retorted. “And some friend you are that it is not.”

Valentine rose abruptly, in a swirl of dressing gown. “Of course it is important to me. But Sir Horley has made it overwhelmingly clear that he does not welcome our interference.”

“He’s here now, isn’t he?”

“Because he is drunk, and I have witnessed firsthand how persuasive you can be when you are set on some foolish course.”

“He was sober when he banished us from his life. I think his decision-making has been suspect in several directions lately.”

“Belle.” Valentine made the sort of sound he often made in her presence: exasperation and resignation in unhappy harmony. Bonny would, on occasion, inspire him to make similar sounds, but then they would be leavened by affection, as things so often were where her twin was concerned. “We cannot run roughshod over people’s lives just because they do things we do not believe it is in their best interests to do.”

“And when Bonny—seeing how miserable you were making yourself—rode roughshod over yours and made you chase me nearly to Dover? You had to get out of bed before noon. You spent a night trapped in a cellar. You were without your valet for days .”

These horrifying memories of mild inconvenience made Valentine shudder. “Yes, but Bonny was ... Bonny is ... in love with me.”

“Why is that significant in this context?”

“It just is,” Valentine declared unhelpfully. “Everything changes when you’re in love. The rules ... the rules aren’t the same.”

“So what you’re saying is that you can behave in as unreasonable a fashion as you like as long as somebody feels something that can be called romantic? But it’s wrong for me to try and help someone I care about?”

“How is marrying Sir Horley going to help him? It’s the last thing he needs.”

“I did not offer lightly,” Belle protested, aware she had indeed offered lightly. “It seemed the simplest solution to our mutual difficulties.”

“His difficulties being?”

“The fact he is financially dependent upon his aunt. His conviction that she is his only family.”

“And your difficulties being?”

“The fact I do not know what is to become of my life. Am I to spend it as some adjunct to you and Bonny?”

“You know you are welcome in our home.”

“And what of my home, Valentine?”

He looked blank. Which would have been comical had it not also been infuriating. “Your home?”

Belle ground her teeth to control her frustration. “Yes. The one I lived in until my parents died. The one you’ve had unofficial stewardship over ever since you took up with my brother.”

“Oh.” Valentine’s blankness gave way to mildly abashed apathy. “That home.”

“I know it legally belongs to Bonny, and I assume we have accrued considerable debts to you, but—”

“I refuse”—Valentine cut her off loftily—“to discuss business with a woman while I am in my dressing gown.”

Belle’s teeth creaked in her jaw. She rather doubted it was the dressing gown that was truly the issue here. “I do not mean to interfere. I’m not sure I could, even if I wished to. I have not been educated in estate management.”

“There is nothing to worry about in that regard. I have appointed an excellent man to take care of such matters.”

Of course he had. “Even so,” Belle persisted, “surely it is better for the house to be occupied than stand empty. Bonny will not mind me staying there.”

“With Sir Horley?” asked Valentine.

“Why not with Sir Horley?” asked Belle back.

“Well, not to return us to the issue of legality, but once you marry him, everything you have will become his.”

“And you as good as own my brother’s estate.”

“But . . . ,” began Valentine.

“But you are in love with him,” Belle finished. She put a hand to her brow and then realised Valentine would likely condemn the gesture for its theatricality—despite it being the sort of thing he did all the time. “I’m tired, Valentine.”

“If you will go running around at night, breaking into other people’s houses ...”

“More tired than that. I just want to go home.”

His handsome, haughty face softened. “You could have gone any time.”

“I suppose,” she said, “I didn’t want to go alone.” And promptly hated herself for admitting that to Valentine of all people.

“We would have accompanied you.”

It was the sort of offer best made in the subjunctive. Bonny—who had been only too glad to leave the future of the Tarleton estate first in Belle’s hands, then Valentine’s—would not have thanked his lover for the reminder of the responsibilities he had been born to or the memories he had buried with their parents. Memories Belle had, instead, carried round with her like a stone in her pocket. “And how,” she tried aloud, “would that have helped me feel less like an adjunct to your lives?”

“I think what you are calling an adjunct to the lives of others, we would call part of our family .”

It did not seem the moment—or rather it did very much seem the moment, but it would not have been helpful—to remind Valentine that Bonny was very literally her family. And had been so before he had ever been Valentine’s.

“Besides,” Valentine went on, “if this is how you feel about us, are you not in danger of going from an adjunct of Bonny’s and mine to an adjunct of Sir Horley?”

“Perhaps. But I hope he understands me well enough that we can be adjuncts to each other.”

“I still think—”

Whatever Valentine thought, which was probably the same thing he had been insisting all along—that Belle was making a mistake, did not know her own mind, that Sir Horley would prefer a self-destructive marriage to a stranger than a self-destructive marriage to a friend—Belle was spared having to argue with it because Bonny entered at speed and struck a pose of consternation.

“Belle,” he cried. “You must fly.”

Caught by his urgency, she startled. “What? Why?”

“Because there’s an angry woman and some dogs in the taproom asking for you. I mean, the angry woman is asking. The dogs are just sort of barking and snuffling.”

“Oh God.” Belle struck a pose of consternation of her own. “You’re right. I must fly. Where is Sir Horley?”

“Asleep in our bed.”

“I’m sorry,” said Valentine, who, as ever, had his own set of priorities, “I thought you said Sir Horley was asleep in our bed.”

“Yes, flower,” returned Bonny. “That’s because he is. He sort of fell into it, and now I can’t get him out.”

“Tell me”—Belle did her best to channel the conversation in a useful direction—“he is at least washed and dressed.”

Bonny nodded. “As best could be managed. I think he’s still drunk beyond the dreams of wheelbarrows.”

Knowing what she did of Sir Horley’s feelings towards Bonny, Belle felt a pang of shame at having abandoned him to her brother’s care. Then again, the chances of his remembering any of this by tomorrow were surely slim to none. “Valentine,” she said, “you must retrieve Sir Horley. Bonny, please stall the angry woman and the dogs.”

“What?” they said almost in unison. “How?”

“Use your initiative. I, meanwhile, will knot some sheets together in order to form a makeshift rope which we can then use to descend from the—”

“Or,” suggested Valentine mildly, “you could sneak past the visitors and out the back way through the kitchen?”

Belle stared at him.

He blushed slightly. “You told me I ought to be helpful by helping. This is me helping.”

“Oh but,” protested Bonny, looking quite woebegone, “a rope made of sheets is a classic .”

“And Sir Horley, or your sister, could classically break their necks.”

Normally Belle would have defended her right to throw herself out of whatever windows she damn well pleased, but one window-centric exit per night was probably more than sufficient for most reasonable people. Or, indeed, unreasonable ones. Plus, they were in a hurry, and there was the tiny matter of Sir Horley nearly plunging to his death last time to consider. “Let’s try the door,” she said.