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?”
Teeth set tight as a ship’s hull and eyes glued to the mirror, I took in Mr. Quillfeather. He had aged, but not diminished, and the perennial forward sweep of his spine and the exaggerated arches of his nose and chin and brow would already have imparted an impression of relentless momentum without the additional trajectory of his steel-grey shock of hair as he swept off his shabby beaver hat.
“Quillfeather.” My employer quickly forced his features into neutrality, but this only left him resembling a tattered shoreline after a squall.
“I’ll come back after surveying the cellar?” Mr. Quillfeather proposed, voice retaining the old questioning lilt. “I’m before my time, I see—yes, three full minutes! Won’t you forgive me? I’ll just—”
“No, no, it’s all right.” Mr. Thornfield coughed. “Inspector Sam Quillfeather, may I introduce Miss Jane Stone, Sahjara’s governess?”
There was nothing for it: I forced my fists to unclench and turned to face the gallows.
He might not recognise you, not after so many years and so much sorrow, I told myself.
Gallantly, he made a neat bow over my hand; and then his eyes met mine, variegated hazel and canny as ever, and a spark flared to life, and I was caught. For Highgate House had been mine before my disappearance and here I was again, and he could not help but know me.
“Mrs. Stone, I take it?” he clarified. “It is very good to see you again in these parts. A country