“Yes, blast the cursed thing.”
I cleared my throat. “Mr. Thornfield, I came to tell you my things are packed.”
He scarcely seemed surprised, and soon I fathomed why. “Do you prefer to take a bite of breakfast with me first, or shall I carry ’em over to the cottage so you can dine with Sahjara? I’ll be glad of your company provided you can stomach mine, but you must wish to see her.”
I twisted my fingers together in my lap. “Mr. Thornfield, I am quitting Highgate House. I cannot stay here.”
Mere seconds had passed since he had called me a lamb he should have dreaded to see injured; even were I to etch the words I am now penning straight into the flesh of my arm, the slices would not cut me so thoroughly as his expression did. Far from protesting, Charles Thornfield froze in surprise, then seemed to crumple, as if taking a blow which was not unexpected.
“No, it isn’t that,” I pleaded. “It’s not your story, nor the distress I was caused—I want to hear all of your woes, and I’d wield a knife for your sake a thousand times over, but you honestly cannot want me to have charge of your ward.”
“Why the devil not?” he demanded hoarsely.
“Because . . . because you know me to be a murderer.”
“For Christ’s sake, Jane, that makes a neatly matched pair of us. We’ll set up snug as salt and pepper cellars and Sardar can give sermons to us in the garden of a Sunday.”
Mr. Thornfield’s shoulders bristled after this statement was hurled at me; but it was all bravado, for he searched my eyes as if all his many missed turnings were mapped in them.
“I . . . But of course, you were in two wars,” I stammered. “That isn’t the same thing at all.”
Charles Thornfield drew a stuttering breath—but instead of speaking, he brushed a hand over his lips, shutting his eyes in despair.
“This is why I cannot stay,” I cried. Rushing to the desk, I took both his gloved hands, which shook like the fine tremor in the bow after the arrow has flown. “You could tell me all and never diminish yourself in my estimation, but these half confidences are like Solomon’s suggestion of cutting a child in half. I understand what it is to feel so myself, for you know I have secrets, and it would never be enough, sharing fractions when I’m the greediest soul in shoe leather. I should blurt it all out, every sordid sin, and want the same of you, be petty and selfish and the most hateful person you’ve ever known when you deny me.”
“That is the most whopping pack of calumnies I have ever heard,” he husked, shifting my hands in his and studying them where they sat cradled. “Take ’em back this instant. You could never be hateful. And Sahjara will . . .” He shook his head, still not raising his eyes. “I hardly know what to say to her. Or to Sardar, either.”
“Tell them I ruined everything, that I always ruin everything.”
“Stop this,” he growled. “It was my own wretched fault. You are a young woman—intelligent, beautiful, vibrant. Why should you wish to live with a pair of ruined men in a house full of ghosts?”
“But I never minded that! Only you ought to be free to see ghosts without my demanding to know where the bodies are buried. I’ve always wanted too much, sir—your not wanting me back doesn’t make you culpable.”
“I never said I didn’t want you.”
“You could say it now,” I requested, heart hammering.
“No.” He glanced up at last. Whatever gnawed him, it had burrowed through to the bone. “I could not say that, Jane.”
“Heaven help me, this is madness.” I leant forward, half-seated on his desk and inches from his weathered features. “The whole truth, is that what you want—my truth in exchange for your own? It could quite literally cost me my life, I . . . You know what happened when Ghosh attacked me, and—”
“That was self-defence, you raving—”
“But I’d not care, I wouldn’t, not so long as you loved me. I should be the happiest woman on earth if you did. Anyone would be.”
“The last one wasn’t.”
I suspect something else would have happened there in that cosy study, our lips parted and eyes ablaze with both craving and restraint, had we not heard steadily approaching footfalls.
“Jane!” he protested when I pulled away, but I turned my back as he rose, composing myself, and so it was in the mirror above the hearth that I first saw the door swing open following a confident knock and Inspector Sam Quillfeather enter the room.
I did not scream; it was a near thing, however.
“Oh, gracious me, what was I thinking barging in so?”