by Mary Balogh
They had discussed a possible courtship between her and Sydnam, Anne was thinking-all the Bedwyns, that was, at Glandwr. They had tried to matchmake.
She had had no idea.
She would have died of embarrassment if she had.
She turned to catch Sydnam’s eye and surprised herself by exchanging a smile with him.
Had he known?
Had he minded?
Had he wanted to court her? When he had asked her to marry him at Ty Gwyn, had he meant it? Had he wanted her to say yes?
It would make all the difference in the world if he had.
But if he had, why had he asked in such a way?
If you wish, Anne, we will marry.
But she would have said no anyway, she supposed. Just as she ought to have said no in Bath. But how could she have refused then?
They were indeed going to have a new baby in their family, and that child was of far more importance than either she or Sydnam.
They did not stay long at Lindsey Hall though they were well received there. Indeed, the duchess was beside herself with delight. And even Bewcastle stayed in the morning room to take coffee with them.
They were back home in time for luncheon, and Sydnam felt that at last he could put into effect what he had made up his mind to yesterday. When he had told Anne out at the temple folly that they both needed to go back before they could move forward, he had not known just how that could apply to himself. He had thought it would mean merely allowing himself to remember-to look back upon what had excited him about painting and to try to remember exactly what it was he had tried to capture and accomplish with his brush. It would have been painful-for many years he had not allowed himself to remember.
But there was more than memories.
When they had been walking home after the rain stopped, largely in silence, he had said one thing as he made his way ahead of her through the woods and held back a branch that would have deluged her face with water as she passed, as it had just done to his.
“I wish,” he had said, “I could see just one of my old paintings. But they were all destroyed.”
“Oh, no, they were not,” she had said, taking the branch from his hand so that he could move ahead. “They were put up in the attic. Your mother told me.”
He had turned away without a word, and he had not spoken a word on the subject since. He had convinced himself when they arrived back at the house that it was too late in the day to see them properly. And this morning he had felt it necessary to make the visit to Lindsey Hall.
But now the time had come-and he would have grasped at any excuse that offered itself not to do what he must do, he thought.
Anne was sitting at the other side of the luncheon table, listening to his mother’s account of the duchess’s first visit to Alvesley, before it had dawned on any of them that Bewcastle was courting her.
“We had so given up all expectation that Bewcastle would marry,” she said, “and Christine was so very different from any bride we might have imagined him choosing that we did not dream of what was about to happen. But though he is as dour as ever, I do believe he is content with her.”
“Oh, more than content, Mother,” Lauren said. “He adores her.”
“I would have to agree,” Anne said. “One night when I was at Glandwr, I saw them from the window of my bedchamber strolling together toward the cliff top above the sea. He had his arm about her shoulders and she had hers about his waist.”
She turned her head to smile at him.
“I am going upstairs,” he told her when the meal was over, and they left the dining room together.
“To rest?” she asked him.
“No,” he said. “Not to our rooms.”
“To the nurs-” But there was sudden awareness in her eyes.
“No. Not there. You are going up to the attic, Sydnam?”
“Yes,” he said. “I think I will.”
She looked searchingly at him as they stood alone together at the foot of the stairs.
“Would you rather go alone?” she asked him. “Or may I go with you?”
He was not sure he had the courage to go alone, though that was what he had intended.
“Come with me?” he said. “Please?”
She took his hand in hers and they went up together, their fingers laced.
One half of the attic floor was taken up with servants’ rooms. The other half, in a quite separate wing from them, was used for storage. He had come up here frequently as a boy. They all had-he and Jerome and Kit. They had rummaged through old boxes and devised stories and games from what they had discovered. It was Jerome who had most frequently worn the old bag wig and skirted, brocaded coat and long, embroidered waistcoat of an ancestor from the past century, since he was the eldest. But it was Sydnam who had donned them one day after painting his face from the old pots of rouge and kohl and placing black patches in provocative places. He had minced about the attic floor in the high, red-heeled shoes they had found with the outfit, the tarnished small sword at his side. They had all agreed, after rolling about with laughter, that men in those days must have been very confident in their masculinity if they were prepared to dress with such apparent effeminacy.
But today he was going up there for a grimmer purpose.
He found what he was looking for in the third room he tried. It was, in fact, he discovered, a room devoted to him-and he wondered fleetingly if there were similar rooms for Jerome and Kit.
His military kit and his dress uniform were at one side of the small room, behind the door. The scarlet of the coat had faded somewhat to pink. But he did not pay them much attention. He could smell paint. All his old easels and supplies were arranged neatly. They were not even covered with dust, leading him to the conclusion that these rooms must be cleaned occasionally. They all looked shockingly familiar, as if he had walked into someone else’s life and made the disorienting discovery that it was his own. It all seemed so very long ago.
Unconsciously he tightened his grip on Anne’s hand and she winced almost imperceptibly. He looked down at her and released her.
“It is not easy,” he said, “to look back into one’s own past, especially when one believed that all traces had been obliterated.”
“No,” she said.
He looked at everything without touching anything. He breathed in slowly the smells of his former life.
He was terribly aware of the framed pictures and the canvases stacked against the far wall, face-in.
“Perhaps,” he said, “it is as well to leave it all in the past.”
She closed the door behind her back and he noticed that the window too was clean and was letting in a great deal of light from the sunny day outside.
“But then,” he said, “I will be haunted by it forever. I think perhaps I spoke the truth yesterday. And they are just paintings, when all is said and done.”
He walked forward, touched one of the picture frames, hesitated, drew in a breath, and lifted and turned it to set against the wall to one side.
It had been his mother’s favorite-it had hung in her boudoir. It was of the small humpbacked bridge that spanned the stream at the foot of the formal gardens to the east of the house and depicted bridge and water and overhanging trees. He turned another and set it beside the first. It was of the old gamekeeper’s hut in the woods south of the Palladian bridge, showing the weathered wood of the building, the worn path to its door, the shining, smooth old stone that formed its door sill, the trees surrounding it. He turned another.
By the time he had finished he had them all turned over, the heavier pictures in their frames at the back, the canvases propped in front of them in such a way that he could see all of them. There were the temple folly painted from across the water, one of the boats moored in the reeds, the rose arbor, and numerous other scenes, almost all of them within the park of Alvesley. There were watercolors and oils.
He had no idea how much time had passed since he began. But he became aware su
ddenly that Anne had not moved from her position against the door and that she had not spoken a word. He drew a deep breath and looked at her.
“They really were quite good,” he said.
“Were?” She gazed steadily at him.
“I could see,” he said, “the essential oneness of all things. I could see that the bridge connected the cultivated park and the wilder wilderness walk but that really they were all one. I could see that people had walked across the bridge, that water flowed beneath it, essential to all. I could see that the boat in this other picture had been rowed by people but that it was only a part of everything, not in any way making the people superior. That old hut was part of the woods and would return to them eventually when people were done with it. The roses were carefully cultivated, but their power was stronger than the hand that planted and pruned them-and yet that hand was a part of it all too, creating order and beauty out of wildness, which is what human nature impels us to do. Am I babbling? Am I making sense?”
“Yes,” she said. “And I know that this was your vision, Sydnam. I can see it in the paintings. They throb with something greater than themselves.”
“They were really quite good,” he said with a sigh.
“You have said it again,” she said. “They were quite good. Are they not good in the present tense? They amaze me. They smite me here.” She touched her hand to her heart.
“They are the work of a boy,” he said. “What amazes me is that they are not nearly as good as I remember them.”
“Sydnam-” she said, but he held up his hand.
“People change,” he said. “I have changed. I am not this boy any longer. I had not realized that about artistic vision. I have thought it a static thing. What was it you said yesterday? Something about the vision adapting?”
Perhaps you have allowed the vision to master you instead of bending it to your will. He could remember her exact words.
“Yes,” she said. “I thought perhaps it would if you gave it a chance.”
“You were talking about my physical condition,” he said. “But it applies to age and time too. My age and experience would have exerted an influence over the vision.”
“How would you paint differently now?” she asked.
“This boy,” he said, indicating the paintings with one sweep of his arm, “was a romantic. He thought that it was beauty that bound everything together. And for him it was true. Life had been beautiful for him. He was very young. He knew very little of life. He saw beauty but he did not feel any true passion. How could he? He did not know. He had not really encountered the force of beauty’s opposite.”
“Are you more cynical now, then?” she asked him.
“Cynical?” He frowned. “No, not that. I know that there is an ugly side of life-and not just human life. I know that everything is not simply beautiful. I am not a romantic as this boy was. But I am not a cynic either. There is something enduring in all of life, Anne, something tough. Something. Something terribly weak yet incredibly powerful. God, perhaps, though I hesitate to use that word to describe what it is that holds all together since the mind immediately creates a picture of a superhuman being. That is not what I mean.”
“Love?” she suggested.
“Love?” He frowned in thought.
“I remember something Lady Rosthorn said that day she and David were out painting on the cliffs when you came by,” she said. “It struck me powerfully at the time and I committed it to memory. Let me see.” She closed her eyes and thought for a moment. “Yes, this is it. The real meaning of things lies deep down and the real meaning of things is always beautiful because it is simply love.”
“Simply love,” he said. “Morgan said that? I’ll have to think about it. Perhaps she is right. Love. It is terribly tough, is it not? I could not have lived through all those days in the Peninsula had it not been for love. Hatred would not do it. I came very close to crumbling when I concentrated upon my hatred for my captors. I thought of Kit instead and the rest of my family. And in the end I thought of the mothers and wives and children of the men who did those things to me. We are in the habit, I think, of believing that love is one of the weakest of human emotions. But it is not weak at all. Perhaps it is the force that runs through everything and binds everything. Simply love. I like it.”
“And what will you do about it?” she asked Sydnam now.
He turned his head to look at her.
“I certainly am not satisfied with these paintings,” he said. “I cannot leave them as my sole artistic legacy. I am going to have to paint, I suppose.”
“How?” she asked.
Terror gripped him for a moment and a terrible frustration. With his left fist and his mouth?
Perhaps you have allowed the vision to master you instead of bending it to your will.
“With a great deal of willpower,” he replied, and moved to stand against her. He leaned forward so that all his weight was against her. “I do not know how. Somehow. What fate brought you into my life, Anne?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and he could see that there were tears in her eyes.
“You were there and waiting,” he said, “even before all this happened to me, your own experiences preparing you to come to my rescue. And even before all this happened to me I was being prepared to come to yours. Tell me I am right. Tell me we can help each other.” He set his mouth lightly to hers.
“You are right,” she said. “All the experiences of our lives have brought us to this moment. How strange! Lauren said something very similar just yesterday.”
He pressed his mouth hard against hers.
But the greatest miracle, he knew, was not that he was going to paint again-mad and insane as the idea sounded-but that he had met this woman, whose own experiences had equipped her to understand his pain and give him the courage to face it instead of suppressing it as he had not really realized he had done in all the years since the Peninsula. And his own experiences had equipped him to understand her pain. Ah, let him find some way of helping her to healing. Let him find some way.
“Let’s go down and walk outside, shall we?” he suggested. “It is such a lovely day despite the chill.”
He opened the door and stepped out of the room with her, lacing their fingers together again after he had closed the door. He left his paintings and his former self and vision behind him, still spread out against the walls, where dust motes danced against them in the light of the sun streaming through the window.
Strangely, now that he had decided to paint again, he understood that painting could never be the single-minded, all-consuming passion of his life that it had once been. There were so many more important things.
There was his wife. There was his stepson. There was the unborn child.
His family.
Simply love.
Trust Morgan to think of a phrase like that.
There was still an autumn chill in the air the next day, but Anne could feel some heat from the sun. She lifted her face to it and gave up all pretense of reading. She had brought a book outside with her only so that neither David nor Sydnam would feel self-conscious about her being there. But neither of them even knew she existed. She set the book down on the blanket she had spread on the grass to absorb any lingering dampness from the night dew and clasped her arms about her knees beneath the warm cloak she wore.
David and Sydnam were painting-both of them.
Painting with oils outdoors was not the most convenient of activities, since so many supplies were needed. But David had wanted to come outside-and so had Sydnam.
Anne had also buried her nose in her book earlier, she admitted now, because she was almost afraid to look at Sydnam. His easel was set up on the northern bank of the lake, but far distant from the house. She recognized the place from one of the paintings she had seen yesterday. There were reeds in the water. An old rowing boat was moored to a short wooden jetty. There was a small island in the middle of the lake, not far away.
The sun was shining on the water, as it had been in that old painting. But there was also a breeze blowing today, and it ruffled the surface of the lake into little waves. It had been glassy calm in the painting she had seen.
David had asked for help several times, and each time Sydnam had offered it without complaint at the interruption to his own work. But for most of the time-all of an hour-he had been laboring at his own easel, his brush clenched in his left fist like a dagger, its end steadied in his mouth as he painted.
Anne could not see the results from where she sat. But whereas at first she had half expected signs and sounds of frustration and even worse, she was now able to entertain the hope that she had not made a terrible mistake in urging him to try what might well be impossible.
She tried to relax, afraid that any tension or doubt she felt might convey itself to Sydnam. But she knew he was unaware of her existence.
She wondered what was happening right now at school. Was Lila Walton doing well enough with the geography and mathematics classes to be permanently promoted to senior teacher? But she was still so young! Had Agnes Ryde settled into life at school and realized that she belonged there without having to fight for acceptance? Who was going to produce the Christmas play this year? Was Susanna missing her? Was Claudia?
She was missing them. For a few moments she rested her forehead against her knees and felt a wave of homesickness for the familiar surroundings and smells and atmosphere of the school. Did all new wives, no matter how basically happy, feel somewhat bereft at first from having been snatched from their families?
Susanna and Claudia were her family.
And you need to go home, Anne.
To Gloucestershire.
Sydnam had dared to hope, to dream again. He was painting.
But there was no similarity between their situations.
When she could see that he was cleaning his brush in his characteristic awkward yet efficient one-handed way, she got to her feet and approached him rather warily. But he saw her come and stood wordlessly aside so that she could see his canvas.