Page 14 of The Beloved Escapade

She said nothing. She could not promise it. He knew she could not.

She left the study with her hand on the door and the cold reaching in at her back. She stopped in the hall a moment to breathe before she went to look for Bessy.

The corridor was colder than the study. Early spring light came through the window at the far end, and Bessy was in the linen cupboard turning out the summer sheets. She had a pile of lavender bags in her apron and a duster over her shoulder and a smudge of dust across her cheek that Lucy would not have pointed out for the world.

Bessy was fifty-two now. Her hair was going gray at the temples, and she was a little rounder about the middle than she had been the morning of Lucy’s fourteenth birthday. But her eyes were the same and her hands were the same, and she was the person in the world Lucy trusted best after her parents.

Bessy looked up when Lucy came into the doorway, and put the lavender bags down.

“What has happened, Miss Lucy?”

“Uncle Henry has been declared dead. And he has left me everything. And it turns out he owned rather more than we had known. Grey House is mine along with a considerable fortune.”

Bessy went still.

“I am one-and-twenty, Bessy.”

“I know that. I have been counting the years myself.”

“I am going to Grey House. To live.”

Bessy nodded slowly. She did not appear surprised, as if she had known that Lucy would one day leave her parents’ home.

“When?”

“Within the week.”

“Your mother⁠—”

“I know.”

Bessy folded a sheet with brisk hands. She was thinking.

“You will want me with you?”

“If you will come.”

“I will come.”

“You have not asked what I mean to do there?”

“No, Miss Lucy, because I know what you mean to do there. You have meant to do it since you were a bairn. You will have an adventure.”

Lucy could not answer, so she smiled and nodded, her throat thick with emotion.

Bessy set the folded sheet on the stack and dusted her hands on her apron.

“I will begin the packing today. Discreetly. Your mother is at her devotions until eleven. That gives us an hour before she comes out of the chapel and takes a turn about the drawing room. We can have most of what you will want out of your dressing room before then. The rest can go tomorrow. Do you mean to travel by post or by your father’s carriage?”

“Papa’s carriage, if he will lend it.”

“Mr. Carroway will lend it. He would put the horses to himself if you asked. Which of the trunks?”

“The two flat ones from the box room. And the leather one Uncle Henry brought me from Constantinople.”

“That one for what?”

“His things. The trinkets on the shelf. All of them. I am not leaving them here.”