Katherine shifted the conversation to a far safer topic. “If you’re too tired from your journeys and you’d rather wait until tomorrow to leave…”
Aldora sighed. “Michael has seen the carriage readied. Though I’d not imagined we’d spend Christmas traveling back to London.”
Nor had Katherine.
Tears blurred her vision yet again. She blew her nose noisily into the soiled linen.
“Does he know?” Aldora asked gently.#p#分页标题#e#
Katherine shook her head. “I will speak to him. He’ll be relieved, I’m sure of it.”
“No gentleman cares to be abandoned by his wife,” Aldora said with a wry twist to her words.
A frisson of guilt spiraled through Katherine, but she brushed it aside. Jasper couldn’t have been clearer in his feelings regarding their marriage.
And Katherine? Well, she found herself a bigger coward than she’d ever believed, because she could no longer share the same walls with Jasper and the ghost who would forever hold his heart. The pain of unrequited love would slowly destroy Katherine until she became the same empty shell of a person Jasper had become after his wife’s death.
Her eyes shifted to the reticule atop the pile of white and ivory gowns. She reached for the delicate purse, and made to place it inside the valise. Something gave her pause. She set it back down on the mountain of white.
“Michael said if you’re determined to journey with us to London, then we’d be wise to leave within the hour.”
Katherine nodded.
Her sister opened her mouth, as though prepared to say more, but then gave her head a sad little shake, and took her leave.
Katherine stared at the closed door a long moment.
She would leave within the hour. She’d resided within the walls of the castle not even a full week, and yet it felt as much a home as her childhood cottage in Hertfordshire.
Within the hour, she’d leave and Jasper would remain, and continue on the solitary existence he’d dwelt within for the past four years since Lydia’s death.
She rubbed a hand over her chest to ease the dull ache where her heart beat.
With a sigh, Katherine started toward the door.
The sooner she made her goodbyes, the sooner she could attempt to put back the small pieces of her broken heart and resume living.
A knock sounded on Jasper’s office door.
He frowned, and picked his head up from the ledgers. “Enter,” he barked. Jasper returned his focus to the neat column of numbers. “What is it, Wrinkleton?” he snapped. His servant knew not to enter the private sanctuary of Jasper’s office without good cause.
And Jasper had made it abundantly clear through the years—there were no good causes.
The delicate clearing of a throat, jerked his head up. Katherine stood with her arms folded behind her. She leaned against the door. “Jasper,” she said quietly.
Ink spilled from his pen, and he glanced down distractedly at the now mussed row of numbers, then back to his wife. Jasper dropped the pen down, and rose. “Katherine.”
His stomach twisted. He’d not seen her since last evening when she’d marched from his chambers draped in nothing but a white sheet. He’d tortured himself by sitting with his back against the walls separating them, the bitter sound of her tears reached to him through the plaster walls, until they’d faded from great, gasping sobs to small, shuddery gasps, and then nothing, indicating she’d at last slept.
Not Jasper.
In the end, though, his own fear of loving her had frozen him to the spot outside her chamber doors.
Rooted as he’d been to the door, he’d focused on the ormolu clock atop his fireplace as it had ticked away the minutes of the late morning hours, ushering in a new day.
Katherine caught her lower lip between her teeth as she was wont to do. She shifted on her heels but remained fixed at the entrance of the door, as though one wrong word from him and she’d take flight.
“What is—?”
“I’m leaving,” she blurted.
He blinked, certain he’d heard her wrong.#p#分页标题#e#
“I’m leaving,” she said again, this time stronger. Her gaze slid to a point past his shoulder. “Michael has seen the carriage readied. I…we, leave within the hour.”
Jasper’s whole body froze. He feared if he moved in the slightest, he’d splinter into a million tiny pieces of fragmented nothingness. “Leaving,” he repeated, the one word utterance hollow to his own ears.
Katherine stepped away from the door and glided toward him. “I am so very grateful to you for everything, Jasper,” she said softly. “You wed me when you didn’t need to, or want to.”