Chapter 7

Sir Horley, who had taken to waking only reluctantly, awoke with even more reluctance than usual. He felt, despite some stiff competition, worse than he had ever felt in his life before.

The whole world was rocking monstrously.

And it was his wedding day.

Oh fuck, his wedding day.

He knew—had known all along—it was a terrible idea. Unfair to Miss Carswile, for all she believed otherwise. But the alternative was what? To be cast aside by the only person who had not done so? A woman who knew him, and hated him, and yet had stuck by him. When her husband had professed such love, supposedly the opposite of hate, and fled him into oblivion. Not everyone, of course, had fled quite so fast, nor quite so far, but he had lost them nonetheless: to respectability, to God, to a bigger dick and a prettier face. What did it matter, really, what he lost them to?

He had thought, at first, it was the consequence of his nature. The price for desires that did not run as they ought. Except no; his aunt had the right of it as, in her own dreary fashion, she tended to. It was him. There was something about him. He was not worth staying for. His own parents had set the pattern.

These, though, were old thoughts. Blunted by time, by repetition, by familiarity.

Sir Horley’s head throbbed and his gut churned and still came that ceaseless, soul-tilting swaying. The light that swam behind his eyelids felt ominous somehow. Shark fins upon the ocean. He would have to face it at some point. The light, like his marriage, was not something that could be avoided, hidden from, or even drowned a thousand bottles deep. But it could wait. The whole fucking world could wait. He would hold it at bay, for a few more moments at least, in this private grey nowhere. Neither sleep nor wakefulness, and not devoid of pain, but peaceful in its own way.

He had long envied Valentine his talent for slumber. Lazy mornings that lingered past midday, afternoon naps that spilled into evening, endless nights in his lover’s arms. The man had the soul of a cat. An endless capacity for contentment. Whereas Sir Horley preferred not to contemplate the state of his soul and spent his nights accordingly, fretful as the devil, or finding rest at the sword’s point of exhaustion. Yielding to it in desperation and defeat.

Last night, his dreams had been strange and vivid. The drink did that sometimes. It had brought him Tarletons, unbearable in their compassion, flaunting the love he had won from them under false pretences. Love for a man they thought they knew. Who had always been a serpent, whose smile was a mask, and all his laughing lies.

Miss Carswile could not save him. No more than her God could or Bonny’s heart could, even if that had not belonged irredeemably to Valentine. But his had been a life of parts, some cast upon him, others adopted for expediency or desire. Disregarded son, burdensome child, traitor and thief, soldier and whore, dandy and jester. He had even played at friend for a while. And so he could, he supposed, be a good husband. Well, an adequate husband. At least, he could imagine worse husbands. There were duties he would not want from his wife once he had an heir. He had no wish to control her, financially or otherwise. He would allow her all the freedom he knew how to give, even if she squandered it on piety and good works. As futures went—and, really, what others were there—he told himself that his was not so dire. Marriage would give him a home, family, fortune, security. Some shreds, perhaps, of self-respect in having, for once, done his duty. Been a man. Given, instead of taking away. As for the cost? Well. He could drink at home. And what could sodomy provide that his own tight fist did not? There was even a kind of freedom in it. The future. Not the tight fist. Though he supposed they both had him by the tender parts. In any case, freedom. This could be freedom. The freedom of choosing one’s cage.

He opened his eyes, wincing as the light seemed to pierce his pupils, through aqueous and vitreous humours alike, and straight into his brain. His surroundings smeared in and out of focus.

And he did not recognise them in the slightest.

“So,” said Arabella Tarleton, “you may be somewhat alarmed. But there’s nothing to—”

Sir Horley lurched violently from the spine-bending, neck-twisting slump in which he’d been sleeping. A couple of his joints crackled like gunfire, feeling, in that moment, almost as painful. “Where the fuck am I?”

“I would say somewhere to the north of Leamington Spa?”

“Why”—his throat was as raw as if he’d spent the night servicing sailors—“am I somewhere to the north of Leamington Spa?”

Arabella Tarleton looked about as abashed as it was possible for a Tarleton to look. Which, by normal person standards, was not very. “Because you’re on your way to Gretna Green.”

The world reeled afresh. Sir Horley’s brain and stomach both felt worryingly liquid. And not a pleasant liquid: a kind of grey sludge that sloshed back and forth with the carriage. “I can’t be on my way to Gretna Green. I’m getting married today.”

“You were getting married today,” Arabella corrected him, less than helpfully.

It was slowly beginning to dawn on him that he wasn’t surprised. His emotions were mostly buried beneath a pervading sense of absolute physical disintegration, but, on excavating them, he discovered mostly exhaustion—the kind that had nothing to do with how much you’d slept—and resignation. “Take me back. Take me back at once .”

“It’s a little late.”

“Take me back anyway. This ... whatever this is, it can be undone.”

“I do not think it can, Sir Horley.” Arabella’s abashedness level reached an all-time Tarleton high. Or low. Depending upon what scale abashment was measured. “Our departure left an impression.”

“ Our departure?” he repeated. “What is that saying? ‘Kidnap me once, shame on you; kidnap me twice, shame on ... still you’?”

“I didn’t kidnap you. You agreed to come with me.”

He stared at her in pure incomprehension. Into eyes that were the same blue as her brother’s eyes, but still, strangely, her own. Bonny was summer skies, long days and warm nights, and the hope of dreams come true. Belle was a glacial lake, full of depths and secrets, and too-clear reflections. “Why in God’s name did I do that?”

“It’s a longish story, but what it came down to was that I told you I cared for you, that I could offer you the same security of future and fortune you would gain from marrying at your aunt’s direction, that I believed we could be happy together, and”—she paused, gathering that Tarletonian intensity the way most people paused for breath—“that you deserved to be happy.”

“I was obliteratingly drunk,” he retorted, trying not to wonder how he’d responded to her last night. If it had been needy and shameful. “I would have to have been to accept such childish, sentimental pap.”

Her lips pulled into a censorious little bow. “Being obliteratingly drunk is clearly not good for you.”

“Is that so? Because I was saturating myself in ethanol for the health benefits.”

“The fact you could only countenance marriage to Miss Carswile by saturating yourself in ethanol, as you put it, does not, to me, speak strongly in favour of the match.”

“And the fact you had to drag me into an elopement against my will says nothing but good things about our current predicament? Fucking hell.” Sir Horley pressed a hand to his head, partly as an expression of distress, and partly because he thought his skull might be about to split down the middle. “What am I saying? Five minutes in your company, and I’m carrying on like a character in a badly written melodrama.”

“Oh, Sir Horley.” Belle’s voice was deadly sweet. “You don’t need my help with that.”

He stifled a groan. “Touché, little cat.” Then he tried to stifle a second groan and failed because the groan appeared to be his entire body. “Stop the carriage.”

“I told you, it’s too late. You missed the wedding hours ago.”

“Stop the carriage,” he said, with terrible precision, “or I cast my accounts into your lap. Your choice.”

Belle knocked with gratifying haste upon the roof. And Sir Horley, barely waiting until they had come to a standstill, thrust open the door, not so much climbing out as tumbling down. He couldn’t tell if this was emotional upheaval running riot through weakened flesh or weakened flesh surrendering to the inevitable. Either way, it felt like dying. All viscerality and human mess. A battlefield he’d created from himself. Or of himself.

Fresh air should have helped. But it barely registered upon his senses, his throat seizing as he tried to breathe. He took a few staggering steps forward, anticipating both the shame and the release of the drunkard. His stomach was a bed of snakes. His mouth an abattoir. Dropping to his hands and knees, he braced for the imminent abandonment of dignity and control and other rudiments of grace. An inescapable erosion of the line between higher being and helpless beast.

Except even this was beyond him. Denied him. There was just a racking, wretched, impotent nausea that rose up from his guts and found no relief at all beyond what spit remained upon his tongue and some unsightly fluids that he disgorged into a patch of otherwise blameless wildflowers. And still his body struggled until his temples pulsed with fire and his mind was blank with weakness.

He had not realised there could be something worse than vomiting. How naive. There was always something worse. Always lower to fall.

A hand touched his shoulder, cool even through the fabric of what was blatantly a borrowed coat. “I am increasingly concerned,” said Belle, “at the destruction our escape has wrought upon the local flora.”

Sir Horley choked on air, his muscles spasming helplessly, sweat dripping from his brow, sticky sweet and pungent. “Leave me alone, dammit.”

“Never.”

For something comprised almost entirely of gasps and shudders, whatever ailed him took a miserably long time to run its course. He did not want to be grateful for her touch—for the way she scraped the hair from his eyes, or how tethering it felt when her palm moved to the back of his neck—but he was, and mortifyingly so. Because he had always been easy to comfort. He took to it like a starving dog, cringing and desperate, only too glad to call scraps a banquet. All it needed was a look, or a word, or the hint of a smile, and he was anyone’s. For anything. Just for the moment when bodies met, or occasionally—rarely—mouths, or afterwards in the dark, listening to a stranger’s heartbeat.

This was not that, though. It was not the shadow of some stolen thing. He hardly knew what it was, the pattern of Belle’s breath upon the air, the velveteen of her fingertips. Only that it—that she—asked for nothing. Simply gave.