‘They had thought I would pay them a few hundred pounds to shut their mouths and go away, I’ll wager that was the sum of their ambition. And then they found that you believed you had killed your lover. I have to give Arthur Prior credit, the man can think on his feet. With a brain like that he should be a lawyer. It was a gift to him and he knew what to do with it at once: tell the big lie, ask enough money, and it all becomes that much more convincing. And you, my darling, could not but help them because you believed it and I, knowing you were still hiding a secret, had believed the very worst of you.’
‘How could I have been so mistaken?’ Julia felt her mind clearing, her strength returning. Perhaps, like Will, she was having to come to terms with the fact that she had a future. The certainty she had lived with so long like a leech on her conscience had been disproved. It was hard to believe she was free. ‘Jonathan looked so...dead.’
‘All head wounds bleed dreadfully. You saw an unconscious man lying face down, his head laid open by an iron poker. He must have sprawled as still as death amidst scattered fire irons on the hearth. There was blood everywhere. You had experienced betrayal, fear, violence, all within minutes and you had done something utterly alien to you—struck another person. The room was suddenly full of cries of Murder! from an ignorant, excited crowd. I can see it as plainly as if I had been there.’
‘If I had not assumed the worst and fled—’
‘You might have been taken up for assault, for it would have been his word against yours and he was the one with the cut head. And besides, I would never have met you,’ Will said as the carriage came to a halt. ‘Of course, you may well say that all these years of anxiety and guilt were not worth it, but selfishly I hope you will come to think they were.’
Julia looked at him sharply, but Will was already on the pavement handing up money to the driver. ‘Now, to get ourselves back up to our room without setting the entire place on its ear. If the manager gets sight of me, we will find ourselves and our bags out on the pavement, I have no doubt!’ he added as he tried to cover the worst damage on his face with the linen square.
‘I do not think I look much better,’ Julia confessed as a page, trying hard not to stare, came to take her small valise. Mercifully, although there were hotel staff a-plenty to negotiate, they did not encounter the manager or any guests on their way up to the room.
‘Oh, my lady! My lord. I was that worried, I didn’t know what to do!’ Nancy, started to her feet as they entered their sitting room. She had a basket of mending at her feet, but it did not seem she had been doing much to it.
Julia did her best to calm her down, although for the life of her she could not think of a convincing explanation to offer the maid other than a rather garbled story of family emergency and footpads.
Her head spun with suppositions and hopes and fears, but she allowed Nancy to lead her away to bathe and to change, leaving Will to deal with his own toilette in the minuscule dressing room. She suspected they both needed time before the full meaning of these revelations could be faced and she sensed that her husband did not want wifely fussing over what he was trying to dismiss as minor injuries.
* * *
‘You are a pearl amongst wives,’ Will said. He laid down his knife and fork after what she supposed was a cross between breakfast and luncheon and lifted his wine glass in a silent toast to her.
‘I am?’
‘You do not prattle and cling when the sensible thing to do is wash and change and eat.’
‘Now I may do more than prattle,’ Julia said. ‘I do not know where to start.’
‘At the beginning,’ Will suggested. ‘We have our lives back, both of us. Do you want to live the remainder of yours with me?’
‘Of course.’ That was the last question she had expected him to ask. ‘I love you—do you not believe me?’
‘I was just getting used to the idea when you ran away from me.’ But he was teasing her, she could see. All the darkness was gone from his eyes and his mouth curved in a smile despite its bruising.
‘I could not let you suffer for what I thought was my crime,’ she said.
‘I know. I am not sure what I have done to deserve that you should put me first, before your own safety, your own life.’
How do I explain to a man why I love him when I cannot even analyse it myself? ‘Will, you do not even seem angry with me after all I have put you through.’
Will stood up, took her hand and led her through to the bedchamber. ‘That must be because I am in love with you,’ he remarked as he closed the door.
‘What?’ Julia spun round so fast she lost her balance and sat down on the end of the bed. ‘Did you say—’
‘I said I was in love with you.’ Will sounded thoughtful. ‘Actually, I should have said I love you because I believe there is a difference. I have never felt like this for any other woman. Nor will I,’ he added. ‘I suspect I have been lamentably slow in realising it, my love.’
‘When did you? Realise it, I mean.’ After he realised I was innocent—or before?
Will turned the key in the lock. ‘The sooner we are back in our own home and our own bed, the better,’ he grumbled as he began to undress. ‘When did I realise? I will tell you in a minute, but let me try to recount this as it happened. None of it was a blinding revelation, more a piecing together of pieces. After I had left you in this room, after I had said those things to you that I hope you have it in you to forgive, I sat and drank brandy and realised that you could never have killed a man in cold blood, or even intended to kill him in hot blood either. I realised that it must have been an accident and once I saw that I could understand how it all followed on—your flight, why you had kept it a secret.’
He trusted her. He had trusted her even when he believed she could bring his world crashing down around his ears. How could she not love him?
‘When I found that note I believed it, at first. You frightened me half to death with that tarradidle about suicide and the Thames.’ He heeled his boots off with scant regard for scratches on their glossy finish and tossed them across the room. ‘Hell, woman, I was on Blackfriars bridge before I started to think straight and remembered what you said about throwing yourself in the lake when we first met. And then I looked at the letter and saw it was so very carefully constructed not to tell any lies.
‘I did not think you would risk trying to hide in London, so the next thing was to see if you had taken a stagecoach out of town. I had men checking every ticket office. They drew a blank so I knew you must still be in town, but I didn’t understand why.’ Will sat on the bed beside her to roll down his stockings.
‘I knew then that if I lost you nothing would ever matter again. Not my own life, not an estate, however much I loved it. Even a block-headed male can put two and two together faced with that realisation. I went to sleep despite the shock of realising that I loved my own wife and woke to the realisation that the Priors knew Dalfield was alive.’
He rubbed one big hand over his face, betraying in that gesture the hours of anxiety, the lack of rest. ‘I still had no idea where you were, but I thought I had best deal with the Priors first, so I told Neil Frazer all about it and enlisted his help as a magistrate in case I needed more than brute force. And there, thank God, you were.’
Julia stroked her hand down his cheek, gently over the bruises, feeling the morning stubble prickling under her palm. He loves me and he would love me even if the worst had been true. She supposed it was possible to feel this happy and for it not to be a dream. ‘You found me. I think you would always find me.’
Will pulled off his shirt and stood to unfasten his breeches. Julia scrambled out of