Money won the argument, but not in the way Gideon Pike later claimed. He did not sell Eleanor Whitcombe; he accepted a payment to stop asking for paperwork he could never legally produce. Nathaniel Cross's driver cut the ropes while two hired men watched with hands close to their coats.
Eleanor Whitcombe could barely stand. When Nathaniel Cross offered his arm, she recoiled, then forced herself upright without it. That single gesture told him something important. Whatever had happened to her had not erased pride.
He wrapped a traveling cloak around her shoulders and placed her inside the carriage. Before climbing in, he looked back at Gideon Pike. “If riders follow us, I will assume you sent them.”
Gideon Pike smiled. “You think wealth makes you untouchable.”
“No,” Nathaniel Cross said. “I think witnesses make you nervous.”
They left the yard beneath a sky the color of old brass. For the first mile Eleanor Whitcombe said nothing. At the second, she asked whether the carriage doors locked from the inside. At the third, she asked where they were going.
“My house,” Nathaniel Cross said. “Until you choose somewhere safer.”
Only then did she study him properly.
“You paid too much for a stranger.”
“I paid to remove a woman from men who could not explain why she was bound.”
Her answer came after a long silence. “Then you have purchased trouble, Mr. Cross.”
That fear told him the bargain had not ended anything. The carriage wheels began moving before anyone in the yard understood what had truly been purchased: time. The woman did not thank him; trust was still far beyond her reach. He noticed how often she looked behind them, as if expecting riders at every bend. Still the road ahead held questions that none of them could answer.