Untamed by Anna Cowan

her, soaking into her boots and hem and closing her away from the world. These trees had been bare and exposed not four months ago. They were strong enough to survive a winter.
    She pulled her hair out of its hasty bun and opened the neck of her gown to the cold air.
    Darlington fetched the candle – one stubby candle! – and put it on Miss Sutherland’s antique dresser. He sat himself before it and his fingers tightened erratically into fists, without the consent of his brain.
    Breathe.
    He amused himself by looking through Miss Sutherland’s things. The marble surface wasn’t covered with face paints and jewellery, as such dressers usually were. He opened one wooden box expecting the usual gewgaws.
    ‘Huh.’ His hand stilled. The box was full of what looked like small pieces of machinery. In another were various bits of paper – old shopping bills and dress patterns. In yet another was a collection of buttons, a piece of dried honeycomb and some white heather. In the very centre of the dresser, before the mirror, sat the perfect shell of a beetle, metallic blue and no larger than a button. And in that blue glass pot —
    The maid entered the room with an embarrassed ‘Milady’.
    Could she not have waited ten seconds more? He forced his fingers away from the unopened pot.
    The maid placed a basin of hot water on the dresser before him and laid a nightgown – from his own luggage, he presumed – on the bed. She spent an age unbinding him, the ripe smell and heat of her body an unbearable intrusion. When all the laces were loose he excused her.
    He took his time washing his face free of make-up – the movement of cloth to face a familiar thing from his childhood, when he had performed all his own ablutions.
    He wrestled himself out of his dress, threw it over the back of the room’s one stuffed chair, and pulled the nightgown over his head. It was exquisitely made from the finest lawn, and a multitude of lace fell from his breast – whether for Mme Soulier’s private amusement, or as a further disguise, he couldn’t say.
    He had never been comfortable sleeping naked and the garment was something clean and fine to wrap about himself in this strange place.
    He approached the tatty bed, cautiously peeled back three or four layers and slipped in between the sheets. They smelt faintly of lye soap. The mattress wasn’t down, but neither was it straw. Wool, he thought, as he sank slowly into it. In fact . . . he moved about a bit until he found just the perfect spot between blankets and mattress, his face buried in the pillows. It was, in fact, bliss. Like being wrapped up in a dense English cloud. His heart slowed. He was so very tired. He sighed, and breathed right in.
    And a scent, so faint it barely existed, of Kit surrounded him.
    His eyes opened again. He rolled over and stared at the ceiling.
    He’d snuffed the candle – between two spit-wet fingers, no snuffer in sight – because his desire to keep it alight had seemed childish.
    He could do nothing but listen for Miss Sutherland’s tread on the stairs.
    The first thing she saw, when she entered the room hours later, was the Duke slumped against the wall beneath the window. He looked small in the candlelight, his shadow looming. The curtains were open.
    He looked up at her – no, not at her, at the candle. She looked quickly away from him, unsettled.
    ‘It’s kind of you to leave me the bed,’ she said, placing the candle on her dressing table beside the other cold stub. She frowned. Nothing was precisely out of place, but she knew to her bones that he’d fingered her things. ‘Have you —’
    He pushed himself up the wall and the movement made her flinch. He shook so badly the layers and layers of lace at his chest rippled like water down rocks.
    ‘You’re here,’ he said.
    She turned back to the dresser and tried to shrug, but her muscles were ungainly and slow. It was bad enough coming back and finding him awake, without this. He was so