Chapter Eight

When she woke and Gerard was gone, Jane didn’t hesitate. Her movements were economical, protecting the arm that still needed to heal, silent in case he heard noise and came to look. He could very well be in the sitting room or somewhere else, but it didn’t matter. She was alone in a town big enough to find shelter.

Unless he stopped her.

She went through all the motions of her escape, gathering what food she could, the letter opener from the desk as the meanest sort of weapon, and then, in the darkness of the alley behind the building, her chest ached hollowly, her stomach hurt, and her eyes burned. The freedom to leave weighed down each step. He had let down his guard and now she would leave. She would never see him again.

Nausea sickened her as she stumbled through the shadowy cobblestone streets toward the edge of town and the posting inn that would surely be there. The farther she went, the more she understood he would not be stopping her. She had never felt more alone.

Yes, there was the physical aloneness, the awareness that she had traded the safety of his company for the dangers of a woman traveling alone. But there was also the emotional, the void that was so much greater and terrifying now that she understood what she was missing.

Resting against the cold stone of the nearest wall, she shook with silent tears. Until she wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, took a deep breath, and forced him out of her thoughts, focused on logistics. She would not cry over him again. Nor would she let him find her the way his tutor had found him all those years ago, which is what would happen if she showed up at any inn in the middle of the night alone and penniless. But the moon was only a sliver, and without light, the darkness near complete. She did not dare to ask directions, to leave a trail so easily followed, or to speak to the sort of strangers like to be out at this hour of the night. Perhaps the best course of action would be to hide near his apartment. He would not expect her to be so close. But the idea of going backward, of being near him yet apart, was impossible to bear.

Instead, wrapped tightly in the warm coat Gerard had purchased for her, Jane snuck through the town, avoiding lights and people, toward the cathedral whose spires she had noted when they first entered the city. In the shadows of the graveyard, she found a place to hide for the night, but she didn’t sleep. It was possible Gerard would find her and she was wracked by her own duality of emotion. In some way, she wanted him to, wanted to cede her will to his, give in to his warmth, his love, the impossible life he suggested. After all, the road between her hiding place and Vienna was long and surely fraught with danger. There was no guarantee she would make it. Or that, still healing as she was, she had the strength to endure whatever obstacles she might face.

But she would not have made her escape if she did not have a plan, and here in Frankfurt she had the best chance of survival. When the first light of dawn broke the sky, she righted her appearance and ventured into a shop, knowing even as she did so that if Gerard searched for her, with each contact she was leading him to her.

Tired and wary of the stares that accompanied her foray into the Jewish quarter, she finally located the Rothschilds’ banking offices and as she had met one of the Rothschild sons in London, and they recognized her father’s name, she was able to obtain credit. She would have sold her necklace, been fiercely happy to be rid of its reverence of reason, and managed some other way if she had had to, but the bankers were sympathetic to her plight. They had heard of the accident and Lord Powell’s death and seemed inordinately interested. Unease sent gooseflesh down her skin and Jane carefully did not mention Gerard.

The rest of the journey passed relatively peacefully. She hired a coach and a woman to act as her maid, and arrived a week and a half later in Vienna. Most of this she imparted to her father, who listened over a stack of papers, as if the fact that his only child had turned up alive was of little importance. Yet she knew it was. This was simply her father’s way—to focus on matters at hand.

“Did anyone search for me?” she asked abruptly, stopping her own narrative.

For an instant, there was only the sound of paper crushed in his grip and to her ears it signaled a pause, an indication that her father was deliberating his answer. What was there to deliberate about that question?

“I was told that there was. Naturally, by the time the news reached me, I had grave doubts about the success of any further search. Still, I sent Patrick.”

Patrick. One of his grooms. The man could barely speak English, let alone German or French.

“We are sorely understaffed, Jane. And the chances of you being alive…” He was making excuses. Her father never made excuses.

“What did you think happened to me?”

“The carriage was ransacked, goods stolen…”

Not by Gerard. Her heart hitched at the sound of his name in her head, and her eyes stung with unshed tears. She, who had rarely cried before that fateful day nearly a month earlier. So opportunists had come upon the carriage and taken what they could. She could hardly blame them after seeing the wreckage of the countryside even months after the last battle had ended.

“Everyone accounted for except for me.”

She tried to imagine being in her father’s place, eminently practical—assume the most likely thing to have happened. After all, who would imagine that Jane wandered off looking for help? Her father knew that she was as practical as he. She would have stayed near the road, if possible, and waited for the other coach. Of course, her story was far from the truth. And the truth was just as fantastical.

Her heart constricted. Her chest ached. The room felt painfully small. Her eyes stung again, and she quickly looked down to hide from her father the upwelling of emotion. Not that distress would be remiss after an ordeal such as she had gone through—even the watered down version she had presented to him.

“I was…distraught.” Her father’s voice caught on the word and she glanced at him quickly, catching the tortured expression on his face, the first indication that he had truly cared if she lived or died. That expression undid her. The tears burned her eyes and dampened her skin.

“It was too much to expect that there would be more than one survivor,” he said.

Jane froze and she blinked away the tears rapidly. “More than one? Who else?”

Images of that day flew through her head like a shuttle on a loom and she struggled to remember exactly what had happened and who had been where. Lord Powell for certain had died. Lady Powell had certainly looked dead, and Gerard had confirmed the coachman’s death.

“Lady Powell.” Her father’s gaze was sharp upon Jane again, watching her reaction. “Her injuries were great and I am told she has no memory of the accident. She is recuperating in Darmstadt until she can be moved to Paris.”

Did Gerard know? Had he let two people live? And if so, why? Jane’s stomach felt as if it had been caught in a vise and it was difficult to breathe deeply.

“That is wonderful,” she managed to say, and yet, dread seeped through her. If Gerard did not know, if Lady Powell had witnessed her husband’s murder as well, then Gerard was in danger. Which was a ridiculous thought. It was a danger of his own making. No matter how she still hoped his actions had been honorable in some way, a secret mission for France or England, he had denied that idea.

She wanted to see him, demand answers, know if he had intentionally let Lady Powell live. He was not infallible, but she could not imagine he would miss such a detail.

“Tell me again what happened.” Her father’s expression was stoic once more, determined.

She shook her head, struggling to bring her thoughts back to the present moment, to her father’s demand. She should tell him the truth. She could do so without revealing what she knew of Gerard’s identity. The fact that Powell had been assassinated might be significant politically for England. Her act of silence might be one of treason. Yet instinct held her back.

Her father doubted some element of her story, but what reason would he have for that? Unless he thought her compromised by brigands and ashamed of it. Or he doubted the accident was an accident, in which case he must know more about Powell than she. Know that he’d had enemies who wished him dead. Or one enemy.

Perhaps Lady Powell remembered more than her father admitted to. But if so, why lie? Unless there was more to this intrigue, something far more complicated than she could even imagine.

“I do not wish to recount it again.”

“You will have to,” he said. “If not now, when you reenter society.”

He was right. People would be curious and the death of the Powells and Jane’s disappearance and subsequent reappearance would not have gone unnoticed. But their motivation would likely not be the same as whatever her father’s unspoken one was.

“I need to rest,” she said, letting her very real exhaustion show. “I am not yet myself.”

It was the truest statement she had said to him that hour, but she wasn’t certain if she would ever again be herself. Now she had secrets, ones she kept from her father. Now she had known something very like love, and had chosen to leave it behind, and that knowledge settled as a constant ache in her chest, in her stomach, and in her throat. Any ideal she had thought she might have had, she had discarded in lieu of something else that she could not yet fully understand.

“Jane.” Her father stopped her as she was halfway out the door. “I should never have let you travel without me.”

His pain hurt her and yet it was such a relief to have seen his agony, to know that her father loved her no matter how frugal he was with affectionate words. Again, she considered sitting by him, revealing all that had occurred, but the words stayed swollen in her chest. Instead, she offered her father a smile and shook her head. “Hindsight.”