by Mary Balogh
“But you are not?” she asked him.
He smiled ruefully.
“Are you?” he asked in return. “Because you have an illegitimate child?”
People did not usually state that fact quite so bluntly in her hearing.
“I asked first.” She stooped to pick up some loose pebbles and lifted one hand high to drop them one at a time with a plop into the water.
“I have learned,” he said, “that humans can be remarkably resilient creatures, Miss Jewell. I thought my life was over. When I realized it was not, I wished it were for a long time. And I could have gone on wishing it and feeling sorry for myself and drawing the pity of others, and so lived miserably ever after. I chose not to live that way. I took my life in a totally new direction, and have been rather successful at it. I have avoided having anything to do with painting and painters until this morning. It was painful to accept Morgan’s invitation to view her painting-excruciatingly so. Even the smell of the paints…Well, I survived it, and even felt rather proud of myself as I walked home. I brought all the account books up to date when I got there and wrote a few letters that needed writing. Life goes on, you see.”
“And are you happy most of the time?” she asked him. But he had admitted to being lonely.
“Happy? Most of the time? Happiness is always a fleeting thing,” he said. “It never rests upon anyone as a permanent state, though many of us persist in believing in the foolish idea that if this would just happen or that we would be happy for the rest of our lives. I know moments of happiness just as most other people do. Perhaps I have learned to find it in ways that would pass some people by. I feel the summer heat here at this moment and see the trees and the water and hear that invisible gull overhead. I feel the novelty of having company when I usually come here alone. And this moment brings me happiness.”
She felt an unexpected rush of tears to her eyes and turned her head away. He was happy to be here with her. A stranger-a man-was happy to be with her.
“Your turn,” he said.
“Oh, I am not fragile,” she said. “My life changed when David was born, and it is sometimes tempting to think that it was a dreadful change. But he brought a love into my life that was and is so intense that I know myself to be one of the most blessed of mortals. And then, like you, I turned my life in a new direction, with some help, and made a meaningful life for myself at Miss Martin’s school. You are right, Mr. Butler. We adjust our lives to circumstances and take happiness where it is to be found, even if only in fleeting moments. It is either that or miss our chance to welcome grace into our lives. This is a happy moment. I will remember it.”
“To welcome grace into our lives,” he said softly. “And I will remember that phrase. I like it.”
She rubbed her hands together to rid them of the particles of soil she had picked up with the pebbles and lifted her head to smile up at him.
“Did you love his father?” he asked.
She felt an almost physical shock at the words. She closed her eyes and felt slightly dizzy. Now he had intruded upon her private world-her private pain. Perhaps it was a fair exchange.
“No,” she said. “No, I did not. I hated him. God help me, I hated him.”
“Where is he?” he asked.
“Dead.”
She had never ever been able to feel one moment’s sorrow over that fact-or one pang of guilt over the fact that she may have been in some small way to blame.
“Shall we continue on our way?” he suggested, pushing away from the tree.
“Yes.”
It was a relief to walk again, and she could see the bridge and the end of the valley ahead and the grassy dunes that separated it from the beach.
They admired the three stone arches that supported the bridge as they passed beneath it and a few minutes later waded over the grassy sand dunes to the harder, more level sand of the small beach, which was enclosed by cliffs that drew the eye ahead to the blue, foam-flecked sea and upward to the paler blue of the sky. The stream had separated into many strands around the dunes and flowed in little runnels down the beach to the sea.
Yesterday, Anne thought, they had admitted their loneliness to each other. Today they had denied their fragility. Yesterday they had spoken the truth. Today, she suspected, they had both lied.
They were both fragile. He would never again paint. She would never have a husband and home and more children of her own.
“One cannot dwell upon what is forever lost,” he said as if his thoughts had been following a parallel path to hers. “I cannot grow back my eye and my arm just as you cannot get back your innocence or your reputation in the eyes of society. I have gained something that was possible for me, though. I have made myself into the best steward in all of Britain. Have you made yourself into the best teacher?”
He turned to look at her and she could see that his lips were drawn up into that strangely attractive, lopsided grin again.
“In Britain?” She set one hand over her heart and looked at him in mock horror. “I would disdain to set my goals so low, Mr. Butler. I have made myself into the world’s best teacher.”
They both laughed at the silly joke-and she felt a sudden, totally startling sexual awareness of him.
She turned and ran lightly down the beach, stopping only when her feet threatened to sink into the wet sand left behind by the receding tide. She was seriously discomposed by her feelings. She usually had far better control over them. And to have such feelings for him-for Mr. Butler! She still found it hard to look directly at him.
He had come after her, she realized. She turned her head to smile at him.
“Listen!” she said.
“Some people do not even hear it,” he said after a few silent moments. “The elemental roar of the sea can easily be mistaken for silence.”
They stood side by side listening intently.
But after a while it seemed to Anne that it was her heartbeat she heard.
Or his.
And she was terribly aware that she was alive. Not just living and breathing, but…alive.
Sydnam found her company both exhilarating and disturbing.
She asked some very direct questions, ones that his family and close friends carefully avoided, and ones that even in his thoughts he skirted around whenever possible. But he had asked her some rather personal questions too. He supposed that those who knew her avoided asking about the father of her child.
She had hated the man.
Had she been raped, then? Or did she hate him because he had refused to marry her after impregnating her?
She was beautiful beyond belief, especially when she smiled or was lost in the loveliness of her surroundings. Yet she was with him. He had asked her to come walking and she had said yes. When he was with her he almost forgot what she had to look at when she looked at him. With her he felt…undamaged.
Looking at her, it was hard to realize that in her own way she was as damaged and as vulnerable as he. He turned his head and watched the waves break into foam at the edge of the beach and then get sucked back by the force of the ebbing tide.
Was he vulnerable, then? He had spent the past six or seven years making very sure that he was strong in every way possible. But in some ways he knew very well that he had not fully succeeded and never would. He had admitted to loneliness, had he not? Despite fulfilling work and several good friends, he was essentially lonely. Just as she was. And one reason why he liked living here was that he met very few strangers. Looking as he did, it was impossible not to cringe from the look in the eyes of strangers when they saw him for the first time.
While he was enjoying feasting his eyes on a lovely woman, she must look at least occasionally at monstrous ugliness. He had never been conceited about his good looks, but…Well.
“When the tide is fully out,” he told her before he could be consumed by the dreaded self-pity, pointing to their right, “it is possible to walk around the end of those jutting rocks to the main beach. But as the t
ide is now, this area is cut off and secluded.”
“All this reminds me very much of Cornwall,” she said. “Every mile of the coastline reveals a new and quite different splendor. If we were to climb up on those rocks, would we be able to see the other beach?”
“Yes, but they are high and rather rugged,” he warned.
She laughed.
“That sounds like a challenge,” she said, and strode toward them.
He always enjoyed clambering over the rocks, sometimes with the sea on three sides of him while he gazed at the panoramic view or searched the pools the high tides had left behind for shellfish and other marine life. He liked to challenge himself, climbing out where the absence of one arm and eye and the presence of a somewhat weak knee made progress difficult, even hazardous.
Some things were now impossible to him. But they had to be undeniably impossible, and not just improbable, before he would give up on them.
Painting was one impossibility.
Rock climbing was not.
“Oh, look!” she said when they were up on the rocks, well above the level of the small beach but not yet high enough to see over the top. She had noticed a cluster of seashells in a small sandy indentation at her feet and was stooping to examine and pick up a few of them. She set one on her palm and held it out for him to see. “Could anything possibly be more exquisite?”
“I cannot think of anything,” he admitted.
“Is not nature a marvel?” she said, sitting down on a flat-topped rock and arranging the shells on her knee.
“Always,” he agreed, “even when its effects are catastrophic to the humans who have tried to control or defy it. It is the quintessentially perfect artist and can also produce something as fragile and exquisite as these.”
He seated himself on a rock close to hers and looked down at the beach with the valley above it. Why would anyone choose to live inland when they could live close to the sea?
They sat in silence for a while, the sun warm on their heads, the breeze cool on their faces. How lovely it was, he thought, to have a companion here with him. And it struck him that though he had friends in the neighborhood, he never went walking or even riding with any of them. Whenever he came here, he was always alone-until now.
But in the future he would always remember that she had been here with him. He would remember her as she was at this moment, the brim of her bonnet fluttering slightly in the breeze, her posture graceful but relaxed, her long, slim fingers touching one of the shells almost reverently, the rocks behind one of her shoulders, the sea beyond the other, one shade darker than her dress-the same dress she had worn yesterday.
She lifted her head and met his gaze.
“How did it happen?” she asked him.
The question could have referred to any number of things. But he knew exactly what she was asking.
“I was an officer,” he said, “in the Peninsula Wars.”
“Yes,” she said. “I knew that.”
He looked away from her.
“It was torture,” he said. “I was on a special mission with my brother and we were trapped in the mountains by a French scouting party. There was the possibility that one of us could escape with the important papers we carried if the other acted as a decoy and courted certain capture. Kit was experienced while I was decidedly not. And he was my superior officer. I volunteered to be the decoy so that he would not have the painful duty of ordering me to do so. We were not in uniform.”
And that fact had made all the difference, of course. If he had been wearing a uniform, he would have been treated with courtesy and honor as a British officer by his captors.
One of her fingers was smoothing over the shell she had held up for his inspection.
“They wanted information about Kit and his mission,” he told her, “and they set out methodically over the next week or so to get it from me. They started with my right eye and worked their way down. Kit and a group of Spanish partisans rescued me when they had reached my knee.”
“They were still torturing you,” she said. It was not a question. “You had not given them the information they needed, then?”
“No,” he said.
Her fingers curled about all the shells and held them enclosed in a white-knuckled fist on her knee.
“You are incredibly brave,” she said.
Her praise warmed him. He had been expecting her to say something like-oh, you poor man. It was the usual reaction. It had been his family’s reaction. Kit had spent years tormenting himself and blaming himself.
“More stubborn than brave,” he said. “I was the youngest of three brothers, the quiet, sensitive one among two vigorous, boisterous siblings. I wanted to prove something when I insisted that my father buy my commission. Sometimes we get more than we wish for, Miss Jewell. I was indeed given the chance to prove something and I did-but at rather a high cost.”
“They must be proud of you,” she said. “Your family.”
“Yes,” he agreed.
“But you did not stay with them?” she asked him.
“Families are wonderful institutions,” he said. “I value mine more than I can possibly say. But each of us has an individual life to live, our own path to tread, our own destiny to forge. You can imagine, if you will, how my family wished to shelter and protect me and do my living for me so that I would never again know fear or pain or abandonment. Eventually I had to step clear of them-or I might have fallen into the temptation of allowing them to do just that.”
She opened her hand to reveal the shells again, and he reached over to take them from her and set them carefully in a pocket of his coat.
“Do you have a family?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said.
“Ah, then you know what I mean,” he said.
“I have not seen any of them for more than ten years,” she told him.
Had she not said her son was nine years old? There was clearly a connection.
“They rejected you?” he asked her.
“No,” she said. “They forgave me.”
There was a silence between them while a pair of gulls cried loudly overhead and then landed on the rocks not far away and pecked at something they found there.
“Forgave?” he asked softly.
“I was with child,” she said, “but I was unmarried. I was a fallen woman, Mr. Butler. And an embarrassment, at the very least.” She was clasping her raised knees now and gazing off at the horizon.
To her family? Their own embarrassment meant more to them than she did?
“But they must have wanted you to come home if they had forgiven you,” he said. “Surely?”
“They have never once mentioned David in any of the letters they have written,” she said. “Presumably they understand that if ever I were to go home he would go with me. They have never extended an invitation.”
“And you have not thought of going anyway?” he asked. “Perhaps one does not need an invitation to go home. Perhaps they would be pleased if you took the initiative.”
“I have no wish to go there,” she said. “It is no longer home. That is just a habit of language. Miss Martin’s school is home.”
No. A workplace, no matter how pleasant, could never be home. Glandwr was not his. He doubted the school was hers. Like him, she had no home of her own. But at least he had hopes of acquiring one and the wherewithal to do so.
“What happened?” He almost reached across to set his hand on her arm, but he stopped himself just in time. She certainly would not appreciate his touch.
“I was governess to Lady Prudence Moore at Penhallow in Cornwall,” she said. “She was the sweetest, sunniest-natured young child anyone could hope to meet-living in the body of a growing girl. Her brother was doing his best to-to interfere with her, and I knew there was no point in appealing to the marquess, her father, who lived in a world of his own, or to her mother, who doted on her son and hated her daughter for being simple-minded. Her sisters were powerless though they l
oved her. And Joshua-the present marquess, her cousin-was living in the village some distance away and came only once a week to visit Prue. I lured Albert away from her. I wanted desperately to save her. I thought I could deal with him myself. But I could not.”
For a few moments she rested her forehead against her knees and stopped talking-though really she did not need to say any more.
“David was the result,” she said, lifting her head. “I wish…oh, I wish he had not come of such ugliness.”
Again he wanted to touch her but did not.
“I will say what you said to me,” he said. “You are incredibly brave.”
“Just foolish,” she said. “Just one of numerous women who believe they can reason with such men and change them. Some women even marry them believing that. I was saved from that fate at least.”
And yet, Sydnam realized, if the bounder had married her, her son would now be Marquess of Hallmere, and she would be the widowed marchioness, someone of considerable social significance and wealth.
“But the child was saved,” he said. “Lady Prudence Moore, I mean.”
She smiled rather wanly out to sea. “She married a fisherman a few years ago,” she said, “and has two sturdy sons. She writes me sometimes, helped by her sister. She writes with impeccable correctness in a large, childish hand. And if there is a type of happiness that is prolonged, Mr. Butler, then she is living it.”
“Because of you,” he said.
She got abruptly to her feet and brushed sand off her skirt. He got up too, but his preoccupation with her painful story had made him careless. His right knee gave out from under him and he had to twist sharply in order to use his left arm to save himself from falling. It was an awkward, undignified moment that embarrassed him. And even as he straightened up he was aware of the hand she had stretched out to steady him-though she had not actually touched him.
They gazed into each other’s eyes, uncomfortably close together.
“Clumsy of me,” he said.
She lowered her hand to her side.