Page 93 of Bargaining with the Devil

“It does my heart good to find you lost in your music again,” Isobel said softly. “Which is why I hated to intrude.”

It did her heart good too, although it had brought more pain than joy at first.

Once her burned forearm was healed enough that she didn’t risk a setback with movement, she began playing again an hour here or there. Now she played every day. It was emotionally draining some days in a way it had never been before, but she was also finding her center of joy again. Quinn had challenged her to find the light and she had.

She wished she could tell him that. She wished, the first time that she brought her own fiddle to the Arms and played during a cèilidh, that he’d been along the back wall, half in shadows, smiling at her. Almost, she could see him there.

But of course he was gone. And she missed him with an ache that refused to dull with time.

She’d tried at first not to think of him, but that was both pointless and foolish. Pointless, because of course she was still thinking about him. Foolish, because she knew better now than to push down painful memories.

Although it wasn’t all painful, her memories of him. But missing him was painful.

There were so many things that she wished she could tell him, not only that she was playing again. Sometimes it was the ugly feelings that still roiled up, because he’d have listened without judgment. Some of what she wished she could share were vibrant, happy memories, ones she had repressed or hadn’t allowed herself to remember. She’d shared so few of those with him when he’d been here, and she wished she’d shared more.

The burn healed well. She would likely always have a scar across that forearm, but it was a scar she’d decided she would own with pride, as she did the crease from the pistol shot, although that was little more than a pink scar by now and might, with time, fade mostly away. But both were evidence of her survival. Lymington had tried to kill her—twice—and failed, twice. Thanks in part to Quinn, both times.

She had, of course, a third scar, the one left by his knife. No trace remained of the gunpowder mark. Quinn had excised it completely. And though his knife couldn’t excise the memory of the man who’d caused the mark to be put on her, she was healing from that too. Finally.

She and Isobel were talking through everything, bit by bit. Some days she couldn’t manage more than a few words, but it was getting easier to find them, and it was getting easier to sit afterwards with the emotions that came up. It wasn’t the same as her confessions with Quinn’s arms around her—it was somehow both harder and easier. But she was getting better for it, and just as importantly, she and Isobel were reforging the close relationship they’d had as children. Changed now, both of them grown women who had endured tragedy, but as strong as before. Perhaps stronger.

She told Isobel about Teddy. She told her about Cuvelier. And she told her about Compton. Not everything, not parts of what he’d done on the ship to Boulogne. But Isobel and Nathaniel both now knew the third scar’s origin and what had been on her arm in its stead, before Quinn.

She still had trouble sleeping, but she didn’t drink whisky for it. She still walked by the shore, but she never walked out onto the mudflats. The shingle, sometimes, but never the mudflats.

Lymington’s death still bothered her at times. It wasn’t the necessity of it that invaded her thoughts periodically, nor the reason she’d done it; she’d do it over again in a heartbeat under the same circumstances. But his death was inarguably at her hands, and no matter how evil he’d been, how immoral and scheming, he’d still been a man whose life was ended violently by her actions. His blood still splattered her face if she closed her eyes and let those memories in. She sometimes imagined how his face appeared in that moment. Was it better or worse, that it had been obscured by smoke? But she talked it through with Nathaniel, which helped. He understood intimately the strange mixture of profound relief and lingering guilt that came from killing a man in that way.

The loss of Maman and Da still grieved her deeply, but she was talking about that now with Isobel, finally mourning them openly. And she told Isobel about the guilt tainting her grief: guilt from the belief that running off with Teddy had hastened Maman’s progressive weakness. Guilt that she wasn’t there to say goodbye, to either Maman or Da. Guilt she hadn’t even said I love you before she left. Guilt that Isobel was left all alone afterwards and driven by the burden of finding her wayward sister.

Apart from her guilt—and she was working to forgive herself where that was concerned—she and Isobel were bound together by the shared sorrow of losing their parents. The corollary, of course, was that they were equally bound by years of beautiful shared memories that came before. They talked about those too. Sometimes crying, sometimes laughing, sometimes both at once . . . but together. She’d hurt not only herself by pushing everything deep; she’d hurt Isobel as well.

Nathaniel enjoyed hearing stories of their girlhoods. It was as well he did, Isobel remarked one day, as father to two daughters himself. Their second daughter had been born in mid-April. They’d named her Isolde, after Maman. Although most babies’ eyes were hazy blue at birth, Isolde looked already to have Maman’s deeply cornflower-blue eyes, which were also hers and Isobel’s.

She was . . . happy. She found moments of joy, more each week. Both sought them out and accepted others as they came. And she was grateful for them, truly deeply grateful.

And she began, for the first time in years, to consider what the future might truly hold for her. Not as she had at nineteen, naïve and starry-eyed, but as a woman who’d been frozen by winter’s chill and come through fire and was now, finally, living again.

“Do you remember when we were young, we used to argue over the princesses in Maman’s copy of Histoires ou contes du temps passé?” Isobel asked one day in early July. “I had it out the other day, reading to Rachel.”

“Of course. Although we weren’t so very young the final time I recall us doing so.”

“No, I suppose not. It wasn’t long before I left for Flanders with Jamie.”

And widowed only a few months after that, when Jamie died at Waterloo. After Isobel returned from the Continent, deep in grief, there were no more lighthearted discussions of fairy tales.

And then Teddy Garnewood came along.

“I’m far too old for fairy tales now,” she said softly to Isobel.

“Are you?” Isobel tilted her head. “Because I was thinking that perhaps both of us chose correctly. I favored Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre, and it strikes me that my love story with Nathaniel has a few parallels to it. Odd ones to be sure”—she laughed—“for my fairy godmother was the madame of an exclusive brothel, and my transformation landed me in gambling clubs and . . . other places.” Isobel tactfully didn’t say aloud that they’d reunited in a hedonistic club catering to sexual liaisons. “But it was during that rather whirlwind week of dressing as someone else, in finery not my own, that I met Nathaniel.”

She smiled at Isobel, grasping at her sister’s bid for lightheartedness. “Should you not all the more claim that your princess’s story was superior, since your own romance echoes hers?”

Isobel laughed. “Possibly . . . Except I do not believe hers was the only valid path to love. More glamorous, perhaps, in its way, but your favorite was La Belle au bois dormant. Cursed to sleep until the one man able to break the hex found her.”

“You never enjoyed that tale as much because the princess wasn’t actively involved in her own rescue.”

“I did not understand, as a younger woman, that there are things in the real world wicked enough to curse someone into sleep as deep as death.” Isobel’s eyes glistened. “I do now. And perhaps,” she added softly, “you are no longer sleeping.”