What Happened at Midnight(18)

“Divorce.” The other woman said the word viciously. “Who is granted divorces? A handful every decade, and then only to the most wealthy, the most powerful. I have nobody who would even introduce a bill on my behalf in Parliament.” She spoke in low, vehement tones. She punctuated the last by spearing a piece of kipper with her fork. But she didn’t eat it; she just stabbed it again and again.

“Lady Patsworth.”

“Don’t try to help,” the other woman snapped. “He’ll only send you away if you do.”

Lady Patsworth’s shoulders were rigid, her eyes focused on something far away. She took a deep breath, and then another, and then another. Mary knew all too well what it was like to be trapped, to dread every coming day. She’d been on the verge of breaking when John appeared. If he hadn’t come…

“There must be something I can do,” she finally said. “Something to make your life bearable.”

Lady Patsworth let out another ragged breath. “Yes,” she said finally. “You can help me to design my own gowns.”

Chapter Seven

“DID I EVER TELL YOU about the time my mare stopped sleeping?”

Mary had not expected John to start with such a question when she met him that next night. She wasn’t sure what she expected from him any longer. They’d walked. They talked of old times. Sometimes, they touched—glove to glove, glove to sleeve. It was welcoming, to be able to forget for a few minutes every day what waited for her back at Doyle’s Grange.

“I thought of it,” he said, “because this is the fifth night when we’ve foregone sleep, and I was wondering if the effect on humans would be much like it was on horses.”

“I don’t understand,” Mary said. “Aren’t horses always sleeping? Every time I walk by one, it seems to be dozing off on its feet.”

“That’s just napping,” he said, with a wave of his free hand. “Horses sleep curled up on the ground, too. Like dogs. They don’t need much sleep, but they do need some. I first noticed something was wrong because she had a scrape on her front fetlock. The next morning, another.”

“Poor thing.”

“And then there was her personality. She was always a placid, sweet thing. But she began to shy from shadows. I thought the stable manager was abusing her, actually. So that night, I silently climbed into the hayloft to observe.”

“And?”

He guided her around a tree, keeping her in the shade of its branches. “I stayed up half the night watching for my hapless employee, nursing my wrath. And what I saw was this: around two in the morning, she started to collapse.”

“With nobody there?”

“With nobody there,” he confirmed. “She fell where she was standing, striking her fetlock against the stable floor. Then she scrambled to her feet. Precisely as if she had nodded off while on watch duty.”

“Oh, goodness. But why did she not just sleep?”

“That took a little longer to determine. You see, I had just built a windmill to pump water from the south field. The noise it made was different, and it was frightening her. She was waiting for whatever was making those odd creaking sounds to catch up to her and devour her.”

Mary gave a little laugh. “I’m sorry. That shouldn’t be funny.”

“I moved her to a pasture where she couldn’t hear the carnivorous windmill, and she was good as new after that. So I understand the dangers of not sleeping. You risk your knees—and your dignity. Tell me if your knees suffer, will you?”

She laughed again.

“There,” he said, “Now that’s what I like to hear. You have the most beautiful laugh, Mary.”

She pulled away. “Save your compliments for your horses.” But she was smiling.

Deep inside, she knew that she was only setting herself up for a fall. He would leave. He would remember that he hadn’t really forgiven her. And having tasted friendship once again, having remembered how sweet it was to trust someone else, it would be all the more bitter to have it wrested away. But even knowing that she was being foolish—knowing that this would end, and she would be hurt—she couldn’t make herself push him away.

She’d been right. She’d missed him—missed the life she had once had—too much to be anything other than very foolish when it came to him.

“So,” Mary said, as lightly as she could manage, “why did you build a windmill?” As she spoke, she rested her hand against his arm.

He started walking. “I was sixteen,” he said. “And my father had given me a piece of land.”

“A gift?”

“A threat.” He sighed and turned his head to look out over the valley. “He didn’t want me to think so much about farming. There was no money in land anymore, he said. We had some wealth remaining, and he was throwing it all into investment—that, he said, was where all the money lay. But I kept coming to him with my head in the clouds, spouting ragged bits of advice I was learning from books and farmers’ magazines. He was sick to death of my hopeful burbling, and so he told me that I could make all the changes I wanted on the farm, if only I could do one thing.”

Next to her, he smiled in memory. It was a deep, dark smile, one that drew her in.

“He gave me a piece of land where all the water for miles drained. What wasn’t fen in the plot was taken up by bulrushes. And he told me if I could make a crop of rye grow there, I could do as I wished, instead of going into business.”