The Reluctant Countess

Chapter Ten: In the Dark

The intruder came four nights later, and it was only the estate’s new watch — doubled since the fire, on Aniya’s insistence, over the objections of a household budget that could barely spare the wages — that meant anyone caught him at all.

James woke to shouting in the garden below and was out of bed and down the stairs before he’d fully registered what had pulled him from sleep, Aniya close behind him despite his half-formed instinct to tell her to stay back, an instinct he’d learned by now not to bother voicing. By the time they reached the garden, the estate’s two watchmen had a man pinned against the garden wall — young, frightened, clearly hired rather than devoted to whatever cause he’d been paid to serve, and entirely willing, once James arrived white-faced and furious in his nightshirt, to talk.

He’d been paid, he admitted, to search the study for papers — any papers, he hadn’t been told which, only to bring back whatever looked official. He didn’t know the name of the man who’d hired him, only that the money had been good and the instructions had come through an intermediary in the village. He hadn’t been told to hurt anyone. He swore to that particularly, as though it mattered to him that they believe it, and James, looking at the man’s shaking hands, found that he did believe it, which somehow made the whole thing feel dirtier rather than less frightening — Charles hiring desperate men to do a coward’s work at a safe distance from his own hands.

They sent for the local magistrate. The man would answer for the break-in regardless of who’d paid him, though James suspected the trail would go cold well before it reached his uncle’s door — Charles was many things, but careless wasn’t among them.

It was well past three in the morning by the time the household settled again, and James found Aniya in their bedroom not shaking, not frightened in any way he could see on the surface, but very still, sitting at the window with her knees drawn up in a way that reminded him, suddenly and sharply, of how young she still was beneath all that composure — twenty-four now, married not even two years, facing down hired intruders in her own garden in the middle of the night.

He sat beside her without speaking at first, simply present, and it was Aniya who broke the silence — admitting, in a voice smaller than he was used to hearing from her, that for one terrible moment in the garden, hearing the shouting, she’d been afraid it was him hurt, or worse, and that the fear had been unlike anything she’d felt in her whole carefully guarded life. She said she hadn’t understood, until that moment, quite how much of herself she’d handed over to loving him — how much there now was to lose.

James took her hand and told her he understood exactly that fear, because he’d felt its twin the instant he realized she was behind him on the stairs instead of safely upstairs where he’d wanted her. He told her that a year ago, before any of this — before the marriage, before Wentmoor, before her — he’d had considerably less to lose, and considerably less reason to be afraid of losing it. He wasn’t sure, he admitted, whether that made loving her a mistake or the best decision of his life. He suspected it was both at once, and that he wouldn’t undo either part of it even if he could.

Aniya turned to him properly then, some of the stillness finally breaking, and told him that if this was a mistake, it was the only one she’d ever made that she intended to keep making, over and over, for the rest of her life. She kissed him with a kind of fierce urgency that had nothing gentle in it at all — not the slow, unhurried certainty of Bath, but something rawer, born of fear and relief and love tangled together too tightly to separate — and James met it with the same intensity, both of them holding on as though the night itself might still try to take something from them if they let go.

In the morning, over a breakfast neither of them had much appetite for, Calloway arrived early with news that gave them, finally, something like solid ground. The intermediary who’d hired the intruder had been traced — sloppily paid, as it turned out, through an account that led, however indirectly, back to Charles’s own solicitor. It wasn’t proof enough to hang the man outright, Calloway cautioned, but it was proof enough to force his solicitors into a very uncomfortable negotiation, and proof enough, more importantly, to bring before a magistrate.

James felt, for the first time in weeks, something that might have been hope. Aniya, beside him, laced her fingers through his under the table and said nothing at all — but she didn’t need to. He understood, by now, exactly what her silence meant, and it meant, this time, that they were finally winning.