She held the papers out to him.
He took them both, eyeing the top first. It was a letter of recommendation for a “Kate Mitchell.” That made no sense. The second even less so. “Who’s this doctor that’s declaring you dead, Gemma?”
“He ain’t real, I’d wager. Someone said to be away fromLondon so folks here won’t sniff out that he’s about as real as the wax figures I’ve been looking after.”
A forged declaration of death. “It even has a seal.”
“Right and tight. No one’ll question it.”
“If your family sees you walking around London after hearing you’re dead, that’ll give away the—” In a flash, he understood. “That’s why you’re so set on leaving. You get away from London, have this sent to the right office, and, for all intents and purposes, Gemma Kincaid Milligan is dead.”
“And Kate Mitchell gets to live a life free of resurrectionists and violent family members.”
“And unwanted husbands?” he asked quietly.
“More you bein’ rid of an unwanted wife. You’d be free, Baz. You could marry someone you wanted to be married to.” Though her voice didn’t waver, something in her eyes told him she wasn’t as content with that outcome as she sounded.
He folded the papers and handed them back to her. “Why is it you’re so certain I don’t want to be married to you?”
She turned away, taking the two steps back to the pallet.
“Gemma?”
She knelt and put the papers back where they’d been.
He stepped over to her, sitting on the pallet she knelt beside. “Why do you think I don’t want to be married to you?”
“I heard you talking to Fletcher and Elizabeth. You told them there weren’t anyone else to help me, so you felt you had to. And that if there’d been any way to help me besides marrying me, that’s what you would’ve done.”
Blimey. He hadn’t realized she’d overheard that. He couldn’t even entirely remember what he’d said. “Marrying a stranger is a drastic thing, Gemma. For both people involved.”
He heard her take a deep breath. “Now, you can get out of that drastic thing.”
He set a free hand on her back, gently urging her to look up at him. She didn’t.
“I wished there had been another way because your family had already forced you to live a life you didn’t want. I felt like I was doing the same to you, taking away your ability to choose your own path. I have regretted that for three-and-a-half years, Gemma. Regrettedthat. Notyou.”
Without looking at him, she sat beside him on the pallet. He slipped his hand around her far shoulder, a one-armed side embrace.
“You never seemed happy being married to me,” she said. “You was kind, and you cared how I were faring, but love never seemed part of the arrangement, and you said it weren’t never meant to be.”
“I—I don’t—”
Gemma leaned against him, her head resting on his shoulder. “You sometimes have trouble talking with me.”
“I stumble over myself with you,” he said. “I’ve never had any deep connection to anyone aside from my mother. And she had no connections to anyone but me. I don’t know how to be—how to make it work when ... Marrying you meant we were connected, and I don’t know how to not make that a disaster.”
“My family life didn’t teach me that either,” she said. “The Kincaids are held together by greed and fear.”
“So is this all we have to hope for?” he asked. “Two people looking for a connection but who can’t possibly forge one themselves?”
“I don’t know.” Her tone sounded very near to exhaustion.
His first instinct was to shrug it off, to tell himself that if it couldn’t work, he’d best not set his heart on it. But he’d come with the hope of courting her and the knowledge that he loved her. She didn’t seem entirely opposed to the possibility.
“We weren’t able to get to know each other much after wewere first married,” he said. “I should have tried harder so we wouldn’t be such strangers to each other.”
“The past often comes with regrets, don’t it?” she asked softly.