My Wealthy Boyfriend Bragged About Using Me—He Had No Idea Who I Really Was

Part 2

By noon, he would know who I was.

By evening, he would know what I had done with what I learned in his house.

And by tomorrow morning, if I had measured him correctly, he would be standing in a doorway somewhere.

He would have his hat in hand.

He would be asking, in a voice he had never used in his life, for me to come back.

I allowed myself, just for the count of three, to wonder whether I would.

Then I lifted the case.

I crossed the marble of the entrance hall on the soft soles I had chosen for this hour.

I let myself out by the side door that opened onto the kitchen garden.

The front door creaked, so I avoided it.

The latch made the smallest sound.

It was a single click, like the sound of a clock being wound.

I closed it behind me without looking back.

The gravel of the path bit into the leather of my boots.

The air outside was colder than I had expected.

It carried the smell of bruised mint from the bed I had brushed against.

I thought, irrelevantly and with great precision, that the gardener had not yet been told to cut it back.

I walked.

The lane beyond the kitchen garden ran along the lower edge of the park.

It met the post road a quarter mile down.

If my letter to the city had been read by the right person at the right hour the previous afternoon, a hired chaise would be waiting for me.

It would be under the alder trees.

If it was not, I had been prepared to walk to the village.

I had counted the miles.

I had counted also the coins in the inner pocket of my cloak.

They were enough for a meal and a bed and a ticket onward, and not a penny more.

I had been many things in my life.

I had been, briefly and unwillingly, a wealthy man’s diversion.

I had never been a woman who traveled without knowing the price of her next loaf of bread.

The chaise was there.

I saw the shape of it first, dark against the slightly less dark of the trees.

I heard the horse blow softly through its nose.

The sound formed a small white cloud of breath in the cold.

The driver was a thin man wrapped to the eyes in a muffler.

He did not greet me.

He did not need to.

He inclined his head a quarter inch.

In the language of men hired by the granddaughters of dangerous grandfathers, it meant only one thing.

It meant he knew who sent me, he knew who I was, and I should get in.

I got in.

The door shut.

The chaise rocked once on its springs as the driver climbed to his seat.

The wheels turned.

The alder trees fell behind.

The great house, three stories of pale stone set into a hollow of beech and oak, fell behind also.

It fell behind with its long gallery and its painted portraits and its glass of half-poured water on a bedside table.

In the dim interior of the chaise, I sat very straight.

I folded my hands in my lap.

I did not permit myself any expression at all until the road turned and the house was gone from the window.

Then, briefly, I allowed one.

It was not a tear.

I had been raised better than that.

It was a small movement at the corner of my mouth, downward.

It was the kind of movement a person makes when she has tasted something she had not expected to taste and is deciding whether she will swallow it.

I swallowed it.

The post road ran along the top of a long, shallow ridge.

In the dark before dawn, I could see only the lamp at the front of the chaise.

It was swinging on its iron arm, throwing a yellow wedge of light onto the verge.

I watched the wedge of light.

I thought about the order of operations, because thinking was the only currency I had left myself.

The packet of papers in my case would go first.

It would go to Craig Davis in the city.

He kept an office above a printer shop on a narrow street whose name I had memorized as a child.

Craig had loved my father in the careful way men of that profession allowed themselves to love anyone.

He owed my father a debt that had never been paid in coin because it could not have been.

I had written ahead.

He would be expecting me by midmorning.

The papers would be in his keeping by noon.

Copies would be made by two.

By three, the copies would be in the hands of three other people whose names I would not write down even now.

The ledger pages would go by an older route.

They would go to a woman in a house on the canal whose name I also did not write down.

The letter on the candle dish would, by the time these things were done, have been read four times by the man it was addressed to.

Once in confusion.

Once in disbelief.

Once in something that resembled anger.

And once, finally, in a stillness I would have given a great deal to witness and would not.

He would be coming.

Would I be there to answer?