by Eloisa James
“I see that,” Josie said, after a moment. “But why shouldn’t you merely inform him that you are raising the child here? That way, he knows of the child, and you stay with Tess.”
“Life isn’t always so simple,” Tess put in. “Annabel’s baby may be the next earl. Ardmore would be well within his rights to demand that the child be wet nursed in Scotland, if Annabel refuses to return to his house.”
Annabel shivered at the thought of a wet nurse. “Never!” she said.
“I’ll impress silence on Gregory again,” Josie said. “But I have to tell you that he’s turning into a little Father Armailhac. He keeps babbling about children being a blessing, and Ewan being cheated of his blessing.”
“Ardmore deserves to be cheated,” Tess said. She hadn’t forgiven Annabel’s husband one iota. In fact, as the months wore on with no news from Ewan, she grew sterner.
And as for Annabel . . . she just loved him. With a bone-deep, aching love that didn’t seem to be going anywhere, even after the months of silence.
Her hope was gone, that was true. She had foolishly nurtured the fantasy that he would write. That he would come to himself and think of her. That he was merely grieving for Rosy in a solitary way, and that—
But too many months had passed. Summer had faded into fall while she slept, and now fall was turning into winter.
There had been no word from Ewan, even though she knew that Gregory received regular letters. Yet Ewan never even sent word through Gregory.
A hello, a mere courtesy, would have been nice, she thought forlornly.
She looked up to find Tess staring at her hands. She was pleating the sheet again. Hastily she dropped it.
“Don’t even think about him!” Tess said fiercely.
“I’m not,” Annabel said. “How is the dancing practice going, Josie?”
“It’s the most annoying thing,” Josie said, with the readiness of a sixteen-year-old to discuss herself at any moment. “I simply can’t dance. I don’t understand it!” She looked stunned.
Annabel laughed. “What do you mean, you can’t dance? I thought you were just having trouble counting the beats in your head?”
“I’m terrible,” Josie pronounced. “Monsieur Flibbert despairs of me. And here’s the worst of it—Gregory is flawless!”
“That is a cruel twist of fate,” Tess said, grinning. Gregory and Josie were just apart enough in age so that she wished to govern him in everything, and he wished for the same of her.
“He glides about the floor as if he knew instinctively what to do next,” Josie said, her mouth turning down at the corners. “Whereas I try to think about what’s coming next, and I get twisted up, and then I panic—and then it’s all over and Monsieur Flibbert is shrieking again.”
Annabel let Josie’s complaints fade out of her mind. If Ewan meant to save their marriage, thought to take her back to Scotland, he would have come for her by now.
She had imagined him coming so many times. There had been days when the mere sound of a coach in the drive leading to Bramble House had set her heart thumping.
These days, she didn’t pay attention. By this time of year, snow must be coming on in the Highlands and traveling wasn’t practical, anyway.
He would have come, if he wanted her. The whole question of wanting . . . She had long ago admitted to herself that she would have returned to Scotland with him, had he asked, even knowing that he felt only desire.
She would have gambled on her love and his desire being enough to carry them through a marriage.
But now she wasn’t even desirable. And ironically, although it felt as if her tie to Ewan was broken, the fact still made her happy. All her extra flesh felt safe and warm. She no longer dreamed of ruffians grabbing her and pressing themselves against her.
She was a mother now. Men bowed or doffed their caps respectfully. They didn’t look at her with desire.
What’s more, their wives didn’t look at her with the hidden fear that she might dally with their husbands. They crowded around and told her stories of births and predicted her child’s gender and even patted her tummy.
Even if Ewan had wanted to resume their marriage on the basis of the one thing they had shared—desire—it wouldn’t work.
So the marriage was truly over, and it was time that she accepted that. Certainly, her family thought she had made great strides in forgetting Ewan.
Lucius had obtained a vast sum of money from Ewan, again sent without a word to her. She could have the baby and return to a brilliant life in London.
The last time Imogen visited, she had great plans. “You can leave the child—or not,” she had amended, seeing Annabel’s face. “You can bring the child and its nurse to London. And you and I will reign over London. We will give parties that people will cry, beg, and plead to attend. We will be kind to all the women who are less fortunate than ourselves, and cruel to all the men. I will keep Mayne, of course, and you must take a cicisbeo as well.”
Annabel had smiled weakly.
But now she thought that perhaps she would have to take a lover at some point. Just so that there was some other memory, some other image, to intervene between her and her dreams of Ewan.
Sometimes it felt as if the pain actually increased rather than lessening. Who knew that love was so uncomfortable? She had parroted it, without understanding what she was saying.
Love wasn’t just uncomfortable. It was burning, grievous pain.
She found she was pleating the sheets again and looked up. Tess was smiling wryly at her. Josie had hopped off the bed and was inspecting a pink spot on her chin.
“It’ll take time, darling,” Tess said softly. Even though she loathed Ewan, she never underestimated the depth of Annabel’s feelings for him.
“Of course,” Annabel said, summoning up a smile. “It’s already much better.” Liar, she thought to herself.
Liar.
Harvesting was over. The barns were full to their rafters with sweet-smelling hay and piles of grain. October left, taking with it the last of the golden leaves hanging on the lime trees to the side of Ardmore Castle.
The firs turned darker and looked more sturdy, as if they’d spent the summer thickening and bracing themselves against the howling winds that would come from the north.
One day Father Armailhac searched him out in his study. Ewan had hardly seen him in weeks.
After he deeded a plot of land to the three monks and their Benedictine order, they spent most of their time there, supervising the building of a monastery, dealing with the legalities of it all. Since the Catholic Relief Bill, it was certainly possible to be a monk in Scotland, but it still wasn’t easy.
But now building had stopped for the winter, and his three monks had returned home like wintering birds.
Armailhac poked his head in the door, his gentle inquiring face covered with a smile. “May I enter, Ewan?”
He had been sitting, staring out the window. The sky was a pearly gray color that made him think, irrationally, of Annabel.
Who the hell was he kidding? Everything made him think of Annabel: the last few red leaves hanging on to a lone chestnut reminded him of her hair; the chicken at dinner the night before reminded him of their picnic; in the last few weeks their bedchamber had stopped being a mere bed and had become a haunt of ghosts.
“Of course,” he said, rising and leading the old man to a comfortable seat by the stove. They had stoves going in every room, fighting off the winter that was already putting its chilly fingers on the stone floors.
Father Armailhac took his time, settling down in the chair with a rug over his lap, accepting a glass of whiskey (recovered from a nearby farm, although Mac despaired of the port ever returning to excellence).
“What can I do for you?” Ewan asked, controlling his own restlessness.
“I want to talk to you about Rosy,” Father Armailhac said, his quiet eyes resting on Ewan’s face. “And about your wife.”
His wife . . . It seemed so
odd to hear someone say that.
All the castle servants had tacitly lapsed into silence on the subject of Annabel. No one ever mentioned her name or even indicated she had existed, although there were days when he longed just for the sound of her name.
“Speaking of Rosy,” Ewan said, choosing the easier of the two. “I had a letter from Gregory yesterday and he sends his best. He has engaged in a study of Plutarch with Josie. I think I shall write to Rafe and request that he get him enrolled in Eton. We neglected him shamefully, allowing Uncle Tobin to tutor him since his nurse left.”
“I think Tobin enjoyed the exercise, and Gregory certainly learned a great deal from him. He reads Latin and Greek fluently, you know.”
“Yes, I suppose,” Ewan said, getting up and striding about the room. He felt like a caged lion these days, trapped by the lack of physical exercise. He had grown accustomed to it, to the oblivion and deep sleep brought on by exhausted muscles. Without constant exercise, the days stretched into hours of thought.
“Does Gregory say anything of Annabel in this letter?”
“Nothing. He has never said a word.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as odd?” Father Armailhac said, sipping his whiskey as if he were considering a philosophical problem.
“No. I asked him to say nothing to Annabel.”
“But you didn’t ask him to say nothing of Annabel to you, did you?”
“The two follow,” Ewan said impatiently. “I know nothing of Annabel, Father. I’m sorry if you were hoping for news of her.”
“I was hoping for news of you,” he said serenely, looking at the fire, not at him. “How are you feeling about Rosy’s death now?”
Ewan grasped the change of conversation with gratitude; anything so as not to talk of Annabel. “I feel less—less reproach,” he admitted. “I think about her often, of course.”
“She is happier where she is,” Father Armailhac said.
“I suppose I have come to believe that.”
“I would not have wished you be the instrument of her death, of course. But she achieved two great things before she died. The first is that she defended herself, something she was not able to do when she was thirteen years old. And the second is that she spoke. And when she spoke, she acknowledged your love for her. I think both of those things were very important to Rosy.”
A lump in his throat made it hard for Ewan to speak immediately. “Yes,” he said finally. “I see what you mean.”
“And now,” the monk continued, smiling at Ewan, “you must let her go. And you must forgive yourself.”
Ewan spun away and stared out the window at the darkening evening. “I think I do,” he said. “I feel . . . forgiven.”
“Good.” Armailhac waited, and Ewan knew why.
“You said once that there is no unforgivable sin,” he said, leaning his arm against the window and bracing his forehead against it.
“Yes.”
Ewan felt as if he were poised midway between the warm room with the glowing fire and the frigid, wintry outdoors. “I miss my wife,” he said, his voice stifled.
“You love her,” the priest said, his voice allowing no compromise.
“Love is not always enough,” Ewan tossed back at him. “God may forgive all sins, but humans are not so generous. Even if—” He took a breath. “Even if I begged her to come back to me, she would never be able to forgive me, inside, for not saving her.”
“But she saved herself,” Father Armailhac said.
“It is I who should have saved her. Apparently that man touched her . . . he handled her. I didn’t know; I didn’t see it happen. I didn’t help.” His voice shook with the rage he felt. If only he hadn’t already killed Nisbit, he could search him out and kill him slowly now.
“What were you doing while this happened to Annabel?”
He tried to think. All he’d thought about for months had been what Nisbit might have done to Annabel while he didn’t notice—what the man could have done that would scar her so quickly and so devastatingly. “I was talking to Black Haggis,” he said haltingly.
“For how long?”
“It didn’t seem long to me . . . I don’t know!”
“Tell me what you remember.”
So Ewan did. It was emblazoned in his memory, from the moment he entered the cottage, to the moment he shot Nisbit.
“That’s a matter of two minutes,” Armailhac said. “Two minutes, perhaps three. There was no time for Nisbit to do more than fumble at Annabel. And she saved herself from his groping, did she not?”
“She shouldn’t have had to,” Ewan said, swallowing audibly. “Her husband was there, and he didn’t even notice.”
“And you think that Annabel will never forgive you for focusing on Black Haggis, the man who, after all, was threatening both your lives?”
“How could she? You didn’t see her, Father. I came up behind her and she screamed. There was such terror in her scream . . . she slept curled up, as if she were fearful in her sleep.” His voice died in his throat. “What have I done to her?”
“You have once again underestimated love,” Father Armailhac said. “When your bullet killed Rosy, you decided that God’s mercy did not apply to you. That He no longer loved you. And then when you failed Annabel, you again decided that mercy was not a possibility. In essence, that Annabel did not love you.”
“If she loved me, she loves me no longer,” Ewan said.
“Did she tell you that?”
He was silent. He remembered exactly what Annabel had said. She had begged him not to shut her out. She had said he chose his principles over her, that he wouldn’t have defended her if she hadn’t given him the pistol. And she had said that she loved him.
“No,” he said finally. “She said that she loved me, but that I only felt desire for her, and that was why I didn’t defend her. And she said my lack of love was why I wanted her to leave.”
“She was wrong,” the monk said serenely. “You love your wife very much, Ewan. Desire is a gift, as love is, and the two of you are lucky enough to experience both at the same time. But I think you decided at a very early age that the world would show you no mercy. I would guess this happened in response to your parents’ death.”
Ewan clenched his jaw.
“Which is odd,” Father Armailhac continued, meditatively, “because you were the one shown mercy. Your father saved you, out of love. And he did not save himself, out of that same love. You have been given tremendous love, Ewan Poley. You must stop discounting it.”
Ewan pressed his forehead hard against the cold glass. “She doesn’t want to see me. She thinks I only desire her.”
“Then you have a challenge before you,” the monk said, putting down his empty glass and rising. “I suggest you take it on tomorrow.”
Father Armailhac left without another word, with just a touch on Ewan’s shoulder that was enough to unman him.
The hot, empty grief he felt was his own doing, his own fault. He had taken his wife’s love and thrown it away as if it were worthless. He had undervalued Annabel’s loving, generous nature in assuming that she would never forgive him. He had thrown away a pearl of great price, merely to hang on to a pebble.
He pushed himself away from the window and turned to ring for Mac.
If he failed, he failed.
He didn’t let himself imagine success.
Chapter Thirty-five
It was midway through November and they were having an early snowstorm. Annabel lay on the chaise longue in her bedchamber, lazily looking out the window. At first the snow had danced from the sky, but now it was starting to hurtle down, darkening the window and weighing down the vines that climbed around her windows.
Perhaps it was time for a nap . . . Annabel curled on her side, her hand caressing her stomach.
She had felt her baby moving inside her, quickening into life as they called it. At the moment the babe felt as if it were dancing with the snowflakes. Smiling, Annabel pulled a lig
ht cover over herself and drifted off to sleep.
Ewan had a brief conversation with the butler and found himself in Lucius Felton’s study. Felton looked at him with his steady, calm eyes, showing no sign of resentment or anger. He put down his quill precisely on its stand. “I would gather that you’ve come to speak to Annabel.”
“Yes.” Ewan said. “I would like to see my wife.”
Felton looked at him for a moment longer. “She may be resting. I believe she is in her chambers. Second door on the right, top of the stairs.”
“Thank you,” Ewan said, his heart thumping so loudly that he scarcely heard Felton. Ewan closed the door behind him and ran up the stairs. Did Felton say second on the left? No, second on the right. Resting? Why would she be resting?
He paused outside the door and raked a few wet flakes of snow from his hair. It wasn’t too late—he could turn . . .
It was too late. It had been too late for him the moment that he saw Annabel surveying those great statues of an Egyptian god, looking so puzzled, intelligent, and altogether delectable. He reached out and turned the doorknob.
She was sleeping. She was lying on her side, facing him, her cheek resting peacefully on her hand. Her hair was bundled in a shining heap of curls on top of her head. She looked rosy . . . lovely.
He swallowed. She looked well. He had been imagining her wracked with grief and tense with horror, as she had been when he last saw her.
Now a million thoughts flooded his mind at once.
Perhaps she had found a lover, someone who made her look so happy and cared for. Perhaps the man was in an adjoining room. Perhaps the man just left her.
Ewan had seen her look so contented and happy, but only after they had made love.
His heart froze at the horror of it. What had he been thinking, staying in Scotland for so long? Even as he watched, her mouth curved into a smile that he’d seen only a few times. He looked away, as if he were desecrating her privacy.
Annabel was dreaming of Ewan. They were dancing around an empty ballroom, and music was playing, although there were no musicians to be seen. He was teasing her, asking her questions.