Tangled (35 page)

Except perhaps that a man who had been a stranger to Stedwell and its inhabitants since August should not have known about the weeklong visit to Craybourne. And yet it was, when all was said and done, a quite innocuous Christmas greeting.

David set the card back down on the tray without comment and accepted his cup of tea from Rebecca's hands. She took her own, and they seated themselves, as they usually did when they were without company, on either side of the fireplace with its blazing fire. Neither took any sandwiches or cakes from the plates on the tray.

Conversation eluded them. There was so much they could have talked about—the week they had just spent

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with his father and Louisa and Katie, the Christmas party they had held before they left for Craybourne, their plans for the spring, their son, but neither spoke.

The crackling of the flames and the clinking of cups against saucers became oppressive.

Rebecca set her cup and saucer down on the table beside her. Her tea was unfinished, but she knew she could not raise the cup to her lips even one more time. Her hands were beginning to shake.

Without looking up she was aware of David setting his own cup down too.

She knew at the same moment that the time had come. That there could be no more putting it off. Even so she tried.

"How did he know," she asked, her voice falling toneless into the silence, "that we were going to Craybourne for a week?"

"A lucky guess perhaps." His voice was taut with tension.

"He knew about the picnic and ball," she said.

"A coincidence," he said.

"No." She pleated the fabric of her dress between her fingers. "His wife told me that he knew everything about us. He even knew that Charles was born on May 15."

He said nothing.

She could feel her heart hammering, not only in her chest but in her throat and in her ears and against her temples. She knew she was going to ask it. The unaskable.

"David." Her voice came out as a whisper. "How did Jullian die?” She waited without hope for the reassertion that it had happened as he had described it on the evening of his return from the Crimea. She knew it would not come.

"What did he tell you?" he asked.

"Nothing," she said. She leapt to her feet suddenly as if she thought there was somewhere she could run, realized there was not, and turned away from the fire and away from him. She fixed her eyes on the pianoforte at the other side of the room. "And everything. He said nothing. He implied everything.''

There was a long silence. More than once she heard

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him draw breath as if to speak and shut her eyes very tightly. But the silence stretched.

"What is everything?" he asked at last. "What do you suspect?"

"That you killed him." The nightmare words had been spoken.

There was no recalling them. And still the silence stretched. There was no instant shocked denial. Just the silence. "Did you?"

A moment's silence could be an eternity. An eternity during which one knew life was forever changed, the past forever gone.

"Yes."

The single word. The single knife wound. The ending of everything.

She heard herself drag breath noisily and painfully into her lungs.

It came shuddering out of her again.

“The bullet was intended for Sir George Scherer,'' she said. "You were shooting at him and Julian got in the way. That's how it happened, isn't it? You did not shoot deliberately at him. You didn't, did you? Tell me you didn't. Tell me it was an accident that you killed him."

"Rebecca—" She could tell that he had got to his feet. His voice came from just behind her.

She spread her hands over her face.

"I loved him," he said. "He was as close as a brother to me. I wish it could have been the other way around. I wish I could have died and sent him home to you."

"It should have been the other way around." She wondered if there were any possibility that she would wake up and find this to be a vivid nightmare. But she knew it was not. She knew it was really happening. "You were the one who deserved to die, David."

She could feel him standing very still behind her. He said nothing.

"Why were you shooting at Sir George?" she asked. "Was it self-defense, David? Was he trying to kill you for what you had done with his wife? And was Julian trying to act the peacemaker? In the middle of a battle? Did it really happen in the middle of a battle?

Why did no one else see?"

"There was a heavy mist," he said, "and all the smoke from the guns."

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"So there were just the three of you." She could feel herself swaying for a moment but imposed an iron discipline on herself. If she stumbled or fell, he would touch her. "Was it self-defense?"

"It was a kill-or-be-killed situation," he said. All tone had gone from his voice.

"Over Lady Scherer," she said. "Her husband had just discovered the truth and was incensed."

"Yes."

"And Julian got caught in the middle," she said. "It was Julian who saved Sir George's life, not you. Julian took the bullet that was meant for him. My husband was taken from me because you could not keep your hands off another man's wife."

He said nothing.

"And so," she said, "you came home and married me." She laughed suddenly. "I was right about that, wasn't I? You felt guilty that you had not done more to save him, I said. How very comical. I was far more accurate than I dreamed when I said that, wasn't I? You married me to make up for the fact that you had murdered Julian." She could not seem to stop laughing. And her laughter suddenly seemed more horrifying, more grotesque than anything else that had happened in the past few minutes.

"Rebecca—" he said.

"Oh, don't worry," she said. "I am not going to do you any great injustice, David. I know that you did not rejoice in doing it and that you have carried around the guilt of it ever since. Your eyes and your face have told me from the moment of your return that you have suffered greatly. It must be a terrible thing to know yourself a murderer, however inadvertently it was committed. It must be a terrible thing to know that Julian died for your sins." She closed her eyes.

"Yes." There was despair in the single word.

She turned at last to look at him. His face was ashen, almost the color of his shirt. And if she had thought his eyes bleak before, now she would not have been able to find the word to describe them. Hell was mirrored in his eyes.

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"We have been friends," she said. "Lovers. We have had a child together.''

"Yes."

"Yet you killed Julian."

"Yes."

"I married my husband's murderer," she said.

His answer was a long time coming. "Yes," he said at last.

"I wanted to die, you know," she said, "when your father called me into the library and they gave me the news, he and that soldier who had come to bring it. I didn't know how I was to live without Julian.

But death will not come just by willing it. I wish I had died. I thought there could be nothing worse than learning that he was dead.

I was wrong."

He closed his eyes and lowered his head.

"Death in battle seems so pointless," she said. "But there is a certain logic to it. He died for his country. He died a hero. He died leading his men. There is very little comfort in such thoughts, but there is some. I have hugged it about me ever since his death. But his actual death was worse than pointless. He was twenty-four years old.

He would have been not quite twenty-eight now. I was twenty-two.

Two innocents destroyed by a sordid incidence of adultery. But I don't suppose you need my accusations to sharpen your guilt, do you?"

He shook his head without opening his eyes.

"It all must have happened so quickly," she said. "And I know you did not mean to kill him. I think perhaps, David, the time would have come when I could have forgiven you. Perhaps. I don't know.

But I'll never be able to forgive you for marrying me."

He looked up at her.

"I am married to the man who killed Julian," she said. "Charles's father. How can I forgive you for that?"

"Charles is a baby," he said, speaking at last in more than a monosyllable, "and in no way to blame for the fact that he is a product of my seed. He has no involvement whatsoever in all this, Rebecca. Your feelings toward him must not change in light of what you now know about me."

Her eyes widened. "Charles is my child," she said fiercely. “I bore him in my womb and delivered him in pain. He is the sunshine in my life. My love for him could never ever be diminished."

They stared at each other wide-eyed. The passion of her words had broken something in the atmosphere. They both realized with sudden blinding clarity that they were in a real situation with no apparent resolution.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked. "Where do we go from here?''

"I don't know," she said. She thought for a moment. "I don't know. He has had his revenge, though, hasn't he?"

"Scherer?" he said. "Yes, he has made our marriage as hellish as his own. Is it to be a marriage, Rebecca? Do you want me to send you away and settle you and Charles in another home elsewhere? Is that what you want?"

Was it? She stared at Julian's killer and saw David. And thought of leaving Stedwell and their neighbors and friends. She thought of giving up all her involvement in community affairs and all her responsibilities as lady of the manor. She thought of taking Charles away and bringing him up in a fatherless home. And of leaving David, of perhaps never seeing him again except very briefly and very formally on special occasions in Charles's life.

It was too late to go away. They had been married for a year and a half. Their lives were bound up together. He was her husband.

Perhaps she really would never forgive him for marrying her, but they were married.

"I am your wife," she said.

"Duty and submission and obedience." There was a hardness about his jaw, bitterness in his voice.

"Yes," she said. "You will always have them from me, David, because I can live only as I have been taught to live and as I have vowed before God to live. I am your wife and will be dutiful and obedient to you as I was to Julian before you. Our marriage should never have happened, but it did, and it has existed for a year and a half. We have a child who needs us both." Her tone was as bitter as his.

"We continue on, then?" he asked.

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"We have no choice," she said.

"As man and wife?"

"That is what we are, David."

There was something strangely anticlimactic about the moment.

Something dreadfully wrong about it. There should be no possibility of their going on. He had killed her husband and then come and married her himself. She had lived with and conceived a child with the man who had deprived Julian of his life and marriage and children. And now she was agreeing to continue their marriage.

Because there was no choice.

Because they were married.

And because there was Charles.

He reached out a hand and touched her arm tentatively. Her first instinct was to draw back in horror, but she was looking into his eyes—into his suffering eyes. And he was David. She did not move.

He raised his other hand and curled them both about her arms. He drew her against him and set his arms about her. Her face rested against his shirtfront.

"I could say I'm sorry, Rebecca," he said. "But the words would not begin to convey my sorrow and would sound like a glib insult. I can only say that though I loved him in a different way from the way you did, I loved him just as deeply."

"Yes," she said. "I know."

She tilted her head back after a while and looked up at him.

"David," she said, "I know that you wronged Sir George Scherer, but he has let hatred poison his life and his marriage. I don't want to let him extend that hatred and that poison to ours. There is nothing left hidden between us now, is there? We have touched the depths and can only stay there or move onward and upward."

"Onward and upward, then," he said, his eyes sadder than she had ever seen anyone's.

"There
isn't
anything left hidden, is there?" she said.

He gazed into her eyes for a long moment. "Nothing," he said.

"It is terrifying to see the pit open at one's feet," she said. "But it is better after all than knowing it is there and being afraid to look. We have both known for a long

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time that it is there. Now we have seen it. It is better so, isn't it?"

"Yes." He closed his eyes and lowered his head to set his lips, closed, against hers. "It is better so."

And yet, Rebecca thought, closing her own eyes and leaning her weight against him, she did not know quite how they would go on.

Except that they had no choice.

She did not know how she could bear to let him touch her.

Except that he was David.

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David had always wondered as a boy if it was a strength or a weakness in his character that made him cover up for Julian's misdemeanors and bear the punishment himself. It had not been easy to see disappointment in his father's face and to put up with the pain of thrashings he had not deserved. And sometimes he had felt horribly used despite Julian's gratitude.

Was it strength or weakness? He had concluded at the age of seventeen that it was weakness and had put an end to it—until Flora Ellis. After once more agreeing to be the scapegoat, he had come to the same conclusion. He had helped Julian out, but at the same time he had kept from Rebecca what she had a right to know before taking the irrevocable step of marrying Julian. Julian's subsequent behavior had shown David that she should have known. She should have been given the chance to make a decision based upon truth.