Dreaming (37 page)

There was an odd choking sound, and she began to sob.

Pitiable and aching, each sound she made was a fist in his belly. He started to turn around, telling himself he could not go to her no matter how hard she cried. Then he saw her.

She was bent over as if she’d been whipped, hair hanging freely, a curtain to hide the devastation on face, her arms wrapped around her waist, and her shoulders shaking with each breath she tried to take.

His hands tightened into fists and he wanted to drive them through something, anything. He forced his head up and stared at the dark ceiling. “Next time you get it in that idealistic little head of yours to tell some man you love him, remember this night.”

He heard her breath catch, then stood there waiting for her to leave. He needed her to leave. He didn’t know how much longer he could do this.

“I did love you,” she finally said in a voice as broken as her dreams.

“So you keep saying. You should thank me for the lesson, hellion. Don’t waste your time telling people you love them.”

“You think I don’t know what love is. You appoint yourself God, Richard, to teach me a lesson. To let me know that speaking of love is foolishness. I learned a different lesson long before I ever knew you.

“I was seven. A servant came to my room and told me my mother wanted to see me. She had been ill for so long and I had hardly seen her in weeks. I was so excited I ran down the long hallways. I remember someone opened a door for me and I charged into her bedchamber. But once inside I stopped.

“The room was dark and eerie in its quiet. It smelled of camphor and sulfur and
medicinals
. My papa stood nearby. At first I thought Mama was asleep and he would scold me for entering the room like a hoyden, but when I looked to him, he gave a nod of his head, a gesture that I should go to her. He didn’t smile, didn’t say a word.”

She took a breath, then continued. “I walked to her bed, confused, because something was different about the room and about them. Mama lay against the pillows, and she looked so tired and pale, and smaller than I remembered. I had always thought of her as tall and regal. She looked as thin and barren as the winter trees outside. Then she turned to me and smiled, brilliantly, as if she weren’t ill, but instead was healthy and calling me over to see some special thing for just the two of us to share.

“She patted the bed next to her, and I remember crawling up there. She only held me, and for the longest time. I felt safe, and it had been so very long since I’d been held by her or felt that security. It seemed too short a time when my father cleared his throat and said I should let her rest. I kissed her goodnight and started to climb down, but she stopped me and held my face in her thin hands, then she just looked at me as if she wanted to memorize my face.”

She had to stop then because her voice cracked. He heard her take two long breaths that labored in her chest.

“Papa walked with me to my room afterward. He was still quiet. I got into bed and I can remember lying there in the dark and I suddenly thought, what would I ever do if she died? She had been ill for so long I suppose I had accepted her illness as part of our life. I hadn’t thought about it as being a part of death. But I lay there shaking and afraid to think about it because by doing so I might make it happen. So I tried to think about something else. I remember that I listened to the mantel clock in my bedchamber. I concentrated on each of the nine chimes.

“The next morning I was told Mama died at nine o’clock.” She paused and in a choked voice added, “In my excitement the night before, because the child in me needed to be held, I never had the chance, once more, to tell her that I loved her.

“I can’t walk away from someone I love without saying ‘I love you’ one last time. I’ve known how very much I’ve loved you for a long time. You think I’m a child and I know nothing about the world or about love. But I know about love. I know about loss. And I know about loneliness, and goodbyes, and about never being able to voice those feelings again.

“Perhaps you’ve said those words, Richard, and don’t mean them. But I never have.”

The door clicked closed, leaving him standing alone in the bleakness of the music room. He still stared up at the ceiling, his shoulders straight, his back stiff. And tears streaming from the corners of his eyes.

Chapter 22

The next morning,
Seymour
found Richard in the music room. He was sitting on the bench, his head resting on his arms which were atop the piano keys. He was sound asleep.

“I say there. Rough night?”

Richard slowly lifted his head. “God . . . ” He squinted at the room in general, then rested his head in his hands. His eyes felt as if they were filled with sand. He groaned, waited a few minutes that seemed like hours, then asked, “What time is it?”

“Ten.”

“What time do you want to sail?”

“
Noon
.”
Seymour
stared at the floor, where shattered pieces of the decanter lay beneath the candelabrum. “Won’t be keeping hours like this soon, I’d wager. We’ll have better things to do at night.” He laughed. “Who would have thought we’d both be leg-shackled in the same year? Could have won a monkey on that one, wouldn’t you say?”

“What the devil are you babbling about?”

“Us.”

“What about
us
?”

“The vows, of course. Hanging our ladles, so to speak. What did you think I was speaking of? We’ll dock the sloop and ride to
London
to fetch the licenses. I assume you’ll want to be married by Special License, considering the circumstances. No doubt her papa will agree, and
Giana
doesn’t need a spectacle, although both Hunt or myself would cough up the blunt for whatever my angel wanted.”

“I think I might cast up my accounts.” Richard mumbled into his hand, then slowly lifted his head and scowled at
Seymour
. “What in God’s name ever gave you the idea that
I
am getting married? You’re the one besotted.”

“Don’t see how you intend to get around it, my friend. The chit’s compromised. Surely you realized . . . ”
Seymour
’s voice faded, then his jaw dropped. “Good God, man! It didn’t cross your mind after all those days alone with her?”

Richard couldn’t move.

“And you call me a slow top,”
Seymour
murmured.

“Hell and blast . . . ” Richard sagged back against the piano keys. They screeched a messy chord that rang through his teeth and throbbing head. “You’re bloody well right.”

“‘Course I’m right. Actually, I suppose I need to give
Belmore
credit. He was the first to bring it up when we were working out the details of the ransom drop. You look green at the gills.”

“You don’t know what I’ve done,” Richard said quietly. He took a deep breath, then closed his eyes and gave a cynical laugh. “And all for naught. Damn.”

“What’s this? Remorse? Never thought I’d see it.
Downe
remorseful.
Belmore
ought to be here,”
Seymour
said under his breath.

“I’m a stupid ass.”

“True, but we tolerate you in spite of it.”

“Aren’t you the wit this morning.” Richard stared dismally at the floor. “I hurt her.”

“Tell her you didn’t mean to do it.”

“She knows it was intentional. What she doesn’t know is that I did it for her own good. I’ve found I have no taste for crushing hearts.”

“Hmmm. Is that all hearts or just her heart?”

“I don’t know,” Richard said sharply.

Seymour
was abnormally quiet.

Richard glanced up.

Seymour
was staring at him from an eyeglass that hung on a chain around his neck.

“What are you looking at?” Richard snapped.

“I can’t believe what I’m seeing. Are those scruples coming from the infamous Earl of
Downe
?”

“What you’re going to see are the knuckles on my right hand if you don’t drop that bloody monocle.”

Seymour
dropped the glass and held up his hands in mock surrender. “I’m going. I’m going.
Giana
said to tell you breakfast is in the morning room. Third room down the hall.”

“Is the hellion there?”

Seymour
shook his head. “She wasn’t feeling up to snuff.”

The news only made him feel worse.

Seymour
clapped him on the shoulder. “It’s good to have you back, Richard.”

He looked up then. “Have I thanked you for all you did?”

“No need. You’d have done the same.”

Richard stared at nothing.

Seymour
stopped at the doors and turned. He eyed him speculatively. “Look at it this way: You’ll have the rest of your lives to resolve whatever’s wrong.” Then he left.

The rest of my life, Richard thought. After what he’d done to her, he wasn’t certain that a lifetime would be long enough.

The carriage rattled over the gravel drive to the Hornsby home. With one arm slung around Gus’s wrinkled neck,
Letty
peered out the window. She was coming home. It seemed a year since she’d been there; so much had happened, so much had changed.

To her clear eyes it was the same three-story stone house, with the same alder and chestnut trees along the drive. A blanket of grass spread as it always had toward the east, and those old familiar
craggy
cliffs lay just past the moors on the sea side of the house.

Auks and gulls flew through the sky and cried their everyday cries. The crunch of carriage wheels along the gravel was a sound she had heard more than a thousand times.

Everything was the same. Nothing had changed.

Except
Letty
. For her, nothing was the same.

In a matter of days her world had become different. She could remember looking at the moors so many times and imagining Richard riding across them, coming home to her. She and Gus had spent hours over the years running along the beach below those cliffs, where she had dreamed that someday she and Richard might walk hand in hand.

On lazy summer days she’d lain beneath a chestnut tree and painted a mind’s-eye portrait of their children playing on that blanket of grass. And deep in the night, when she was alone in her bed with nothing but those dreams of hers to light her thoughts, she had the fantasy of Richard’s carriage crunching over the drive on the day he came to speak to Papa of marriage.

Yes, she came home a different person. Her heart was emptier, and her dreams were dead.

The carriage halted in front of the doors.

“We’re home, Gus.”

The dog barked and panted, and his tail battered the leather squabs of the Viscount’s carriage. The door opened, and she looked into Richard’s face. He stood before her, one hand on the carriage door and the other held out to help her down.