“It cannot.” Rowena glanced away. “Not with Braden.” Isabelle shivered at the dull finality of the words. “Then we must both protect her from becoming involved any more than necessary. I will go with you to Liverpool.”
They stared at each other. Isabelle smiled unevenly. “I know how you feel about me, Lady Rowena. But I also know that as a respectable young woman, you will not wish to travel alone. I fancy myself a rather good actress… no one outside Greyburn is likely to suspect my true identity.”
Rowena turned to the window, her profile pinched in the rain-filtered light. “I grant,” she said, “that you are most talented.”
“And you’re afraid that my talents will rub off on you.” Isabelle laughed. “You already feel soiled by your inhuman abilities, which Cassidy would sacrifice anything to gain. Well, Lady Rowena, if my assistance is so repellent, you may still take the coward’s way out and kill yourself. Whatever my faults, and my mere humanity, that was the one recourse I never considered.”
With a sharp indrawn breath, Rowena jerked around in her chair. The hectic flush of her skin paled to white. Her mouth opened and closed again. Little by little her aristocratic mask lost all its sharp edges. It seemed to crumple as Isabelle watched.
“You are right,” Rowena whispered. She covered her eyes. “I would be… grateful for your assistance.”
Pride was a difficult medicine to swallow. Rowena’s gratitude was strained, but genuine. And did you wish to feel triumphant at such a victory? Isabelle asked herself. Do you feel superior now? Have you not both sacrificed honor for survival?
“We cannot expect any of the servants to accompany us,” Rowena said. “Someone must drive the carriage to the station.”
“I shall think of something. I suggest you set aside the minimum of what you will require for the journey, and restore your strength by eating what you can.”
Rowena looked up. “Braden may return at any time—” “Then we must be prepared to act upon a moments notice.” She had turned to leave when Rowena’s voice stopped her.
“You don’t care about me,” she said. “Why are you doing this?”
“For Cassidy’s sake. There is little enough Lord Greyburn can do to me.” At the door she hesitated and turned back. “And because… I believe, in the end, that we must be free to shape our own destinies.”
She fled the room with relief and found Cassidy waiting as promised. If the footmen stationed in the corridor were disturbed by all this coming and going, they gave no sign.
“I believe Lady Rowena will consent to eat now,” Isabelle said. “Would you see to that, and help her select what she’ll need for the journey? I must make my own preparations.”
“Then you are going with her?”
Isabelle touched Cassidy’s cheek. “Only as far as Liverpool. There is business here I must attend to.”
She hurried off before Cassidy could ask questions or witness her tears. There was one more hurdle to face, if she were to see that Cassidy remained out of this imbroglio as much as possible. It was the one gift Isabelle could be sure might do some good.
And it meant that she, too, must swallow her pride and forget everything but Cassidy’s welfare.
She changed into a skirt suitable for walking, left the house through the rear garden doors and climbed the fell rising from the park. She’d never actually been to Matthias’s cottage, but she’d seen it from the top of the fell, nestled in a tiny valley below. She knew that Matthias—no, she must think of him as Matthew, now—had returned to Greyburn after an unexplained absence.
No. Not unexplained. He’d left because of her. Because he hadn’t been able to accept the truth of her transgressions.
But he’d seemed well disposed toward Cassidy, in both his incarnations. At heart, he was a kind man. And he was relatively free of the machinations of the Forster clan. If anyone at Greyburn would help, he might.
Isabelle descended the other side of the fell, scraping together her courage. Beg she would not—but everything short of that, for Cassidy.
She didn’t know who to expect when she knocked on the door. Would a man in quaint armor answer, or the stranger she’d last seen under such humiliating circumstances?