“It’s not hard to be faithful for a month,” I said, more to myself than to Silas.
He heard anyway. “Don’t be so suspicious. He would have been loyal to both of them until the end of his days. But it cuts both ways: he expected the same loyalty of Violet and she so blatantly refused. Yes, this understandably hurt and angered him very much.”
Silas might have been trying to reassure me, but I felt anything but reassured in that moment. All he had conjured in my mind was the image of jealous wrath, of a black bitter hurt that might not have thought twice about cutting a strap on a saddle.
“What I’m trying to say is that despite his anger and jealousy, Julian still searched everywhere. He still worried about her. And when we couldn’t find her, he sent a servant to Scarborough to notify the constables and mobilize a larger search. We agreed to sleep for a few hours, and then resume looking at dawn.”
“But she was dead by dawn.”
“Yes.”
Mr. Markham was stirring now, and the sound of his long limbs moving in the sheets made me drop my voice and step closer to Silas. “So you were apart from him for part of the night?”
“Yes, but Ivy, he couldn’t have murdered Violet. What man searches for a woman in the frozen dark for hours, sends for the police, and then decides to kill her a couple hours later? What kind of man would do that?”
I didn’t know. Because part of me didn’t know what kind of man Mr. Markham was at all.
The rest of our sojourn in York was largely uneventful. Mr. Markham took me to the silk warehouse and then to a fashion house, where all manner of dress styles were presented to me. Shoes, a veil, jewelry, new underthings—the process of attiring a wealthy man’s bride was as arduous as it was overwhelming, and I found myself deferring to Mr. Markham’s choices because I simply did not care.
The only thing out of the ordinary that occurred was running—almost literally—into a strange man in our hotel lobby, where we had stopped to offload several hatboxes and other sundry items. Mr. Markham had been directing the porter to our room and I had been searching for the gloves I wanted to wear to dinner that night, when I felt legs brush against my skirt. I turned to see a short man, quite old, with clouds of white hair around his head.
“I beg your pardon,” he said softly.
“No apology is necessary,” I said and then went back to my search, assuming the encounter was over.
“Are you Ivy Leavold?”
I straightened, quite surprised. No one here in Yorkshire could possibly know me by sight, outside of the residents of Stokeleigh and Mr. Markham’s circle of friends. “Yes,” I answered hesitantly. “I am she.”
He nodded, a serene motion that indicated he had already known the answer, but was genuinely pleased to have heard it just the same. Everything about him seemed gentle, inoffensive. “Miss Leavold—”
And then as abruptly as we’d made contact, he bowed and left, not finishing his sentence or giving me any gesture of farewell. I was still staring after his surprisingly agile figure as he descended the hotel steps when Mr. Markham came up to me.
“Who was that man?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I’ve never seen him before in my life.” The man in question was now completely gone from sight, having merged with the bustling sidewalk traffic. “But it was the strangest thing; he knew who I was. He knew my name was Ivy Leavold. Isn’t that odd?”
Mr. Markham didn’t answer. But a frown creased his face and he wrapped a tight arm around me. He didn’t let me out of his sight for the rest of the day, and several times I caught him glancing over his shoulder, as if he were worried that we were being followed.
“Let’s elope to Gretna Green,” I begged as we came out of yet another store. “Let’s marry abroad. This is too much.”
He turned to me then and caught my chin in his gloved fingers. “Ivy,” he said, looking both amused and pained. “Must we have this fight every time I give you something? I’m not above taking you to the bank and showing you what is in the accounts there in order to stop this fretting about money.”
“It’s unnecessary,” I said, but he moved his fingers to my lips.
“It’s necessary to me,” he said, voice gravelly. “Think of how generous you are being right now, indulging my selfish whim to dress you like a queen.”
“But I’m not a queen,” I protested.
“You are, wildcat,” he said, and then I was pressed against the wall of the store we’d just left, his hips and chest pressing into me. “You are the queen of my mind.” He moved his hips, and even through my dress, I felt his arousal. “Among other things…”
And then his mouth moved over me, kissing my lips and my nose and my jaw and the shell of my ear, and my protests melted away.
But I didn’t forget that I wasn’t the first bride to be purchasing silks and lace for a wedding to Mr. Markham. Two women had done the same before me, one of them perhaps in this very city, at these very shops, and I sensed her, a ghost trailing her fingers over unraveled bolts of fabric and over the sweet-smelling leather in the shoe shop.
If she could speak, would she warn me away? And why was she following me, even from the streets of York, to Markham Hall? I felt her weighing on my mind as we jostled home in the carriage, as we slid our bodies together in Mr. Markham’s bed.
He had loved her, Silas had said.
