Portrait Of A Lover (20 page)

Annabelle’s smile vanished instantly. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t wish to sound ungrateful, Annabelle, but do you think I would want what your brother is offering?”

She blinked a few times, and her voice revealed her surprise. “But you have always felt cheated out of your birthright…”

“Not any longer,” he replied angrily. “I am not the man I once was. How many times do I have to explain that to you? Did you not see it over the past few weeks? But I suppose you did not. You did not see deeply enough to truly believe I was not a monster. You had to go running around to hear it from other people. From strangers.”

Her lips parted as she stumbled over words, in the end saying nothing.

Magnus shook his head at her. “I came back here so you could see the man I have become, but you still see only the man I once was. The man who broke your heart.” He raised a hand, gesturing around the room. “And I don’t want this.” He turned his gaze to his cousin. “I beg your pardon, Whitby. I realize your intentions are honorable and I thank you for your concern, but you must understand that I do not wish to become a member of your club, nor do I want the house in the country. I want to go back to America where I can work and enjoy the challenge of it. I don’t want this life.”

“But you are entitled to this,” Annabelle said, her voice revealing shock and bewilderment, and Magnus felt the distance between them rise up suddenly like an ocean tide. Annabelle was entrenched in this world. Unlike him, she had not been born into it, but she had been raised within it, and her perspective was, in truth, very limited.

He was surprised and disappointed as he sat there staring across at her, because that was what he had always loved about her—the fact that she was not really one of them. He’d always admired her unconventionality, and had connected with her because she seemed to be an outsider, like him. She had not cared that he was a mere bank clerk when they met on the train so very long ago. He’d always believed they were similar creatures, and that she’d loved him for what he was on the inside.

But now, looking into her eyes and seeing her desire to pull him into this world with her, he never felt more disconnected.

He had been wrong. They were not the same, and she did not know the real man he was deep down.

Magnus stood. Both Annabelle and Whitby stared speechlessly at him.

“Annabelle,” he said, “I must thank you for finally discovering the truth about my father. I am glad to know it. And Whitby, I appreciate what you wanted to do here today, but I’m afraid I must turn down what you offer.”

He turned and started toward the door.

“But Magnus!” Annabelle said, rising to her feet as well.

He stopped and faced her, but she couldn’t seem to find any words. She merely stared at him, with eyes wide as saucers, looking utterly dumbfounded.

“Good day,” he said, feeling only a suffocating need to get out of that room. He bowed slightly at the waist before he turned again and walked out.

He had already received his coat from the butler and was making his way across the street to his coach when he heard Annabelle call his name again.

“Magnus! Wait!”

He stopped in front of his coach and shut his eyes, wishing she would just let him go. He didn’t want to talk to her right now. He didn’t want to explain himself, because he wasn’t sure he could. He didn’t even know how he felt about everything he’d just heard.

Nevertheless, he turned and waited.

She paused while a carriage crossed the street in front of her, before she picked up her skirts and dashed across. “Where are you going? Why did you leave so quickly?”

“Because I don’t belong in there, and I couldn’t sit and listen to Whitby offer me charity on a platter, as if what he was going to give me was the only thing that would make me worthy of your trust.”

“That’s not how it was,” she said.

“No? That’s how it looked to me. I’d never seen you so happy, Annabelle. All the reservations you had were gone because suddenly your brother approved of me and I was going to have social precedence as the grandson of an earl. I was going to be a respectable, honorable gentleman, sipping tea in drawing rooms—as if those things would erase what I had done to you. But nothing can erase it, Annabelle. It happened. I was that loathesome man who broke your heart, and that past we share is never going to disappear. What I need is for you to move past it and forgive me.”

“But you don’t understand. When I learned the truth, I wanted you to have what you should never have been denied.”

“I never wanted that when I came back for you, but you couldn’t believe it. You had to try to fix the past, when all anyone can do is live with it and learn from it.”

He turned toward his coach and stepped inside.

“Wait a minute!” Annabelle shouted. “You can’t blame me for not trusting you. What did you expect?”

He sat down, but couldn’t leave because Annabelle was holding the door open, preventing him from closing it. “I don’t know.”

She finally let go of the door and stepped back. “Will you go back to America?”

“It’s my home now,” he replied.

“When?”

He paused, staring at her. “Tomorrow. I’ve already handed my properties over to my solicitor.”

Rage found its way into her voice as she swiped violently at her tears. “So that’s it? You’re just going to leave? Why am I not surprised?”

He looked into her eyes, which glistened with tears, and realized with aching remorse that she was still so very angry with him over what had happened all those years ago, and she almost seemed to be taking some perverse pleasure in being right. That he was doing exactly what she’d predicted he would do. That she had been right all along not to trust him, or any other man, for that matter.

But how many times had he told her he was sorry, and why couldn’t it ever be enough? All his life he had felt unworthy, and now she was looking at him as if he were a disappointing wretch. It took him straight back to the loathing he’d endured in his youth.

So, he had been right. Annabelle solving the mysteries of the past had not changed a thing.

God, he couldn’t do it anymore. He couldn’t go on waiting for her acceptance and forgiveness. It was time he found his own pride, with or without Annabelle’s belief in him.

“I have to go,” he said, tightening his grip on the door handle. He just wanted to get out of there.

He shut the door and sat back in the seat, resisting the urge to look out the window at Annabelle, because God help him, despite everything, he still loved her.

“Y ou don’t think he’ll really leave, do you?” Annabelle asked Lily late that night while they sat on Annabelle’s bed.

“I don’t know,” Lily replied. “The only time I ever saw you together was the other day in the country, when he fought with Whitby.”

Annabelle slid off the bed and padded across the floor to the fireplace to warm her hands. “You must think me a fool, then. All you saw was the man everyone has always described—angry, vengeful Cousin Magnus.”

Lily sighed heavily. “I don’t think you’re a fool, Annabelle. You saw something in him that no one else did, and because of that, you uncovered the truth about this family’s past, and you proved that mistakes in judgment had been made. Even Whitby believes it now—that Magnus was not all bad, that he had been wronged and he had a right to be angry.”

“But despite what happened to his father,” Annabelle said, “Magnus is still Magnus. It doesn’t erase what he did to me thirteen years ago, or the fact that he just walked out on me again. Knowing the truth about the very distant past doesn’t change what exists today. He told me it wouldn’t. I should have listened.”

Lily merely shrugged at her. “I don’t have the answers, Annabelle. Only you can decide what you believe.”

“That’s the problem.” Annabelle returned to the bed. “What scares me is the fact that nothing he could ever do or say could ever have made me trust him, because I am simply not capable of it. I’m deficient.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Oh, what does it matter anyway? He left me standing there in the street today and told me he was going to return to America, apparently forgetting that he’d proposed marriage.”

“But did he officially withdraw his proposal?” Lily asked, running a hand over her swollen belly. “From what you told me, it doesn’t sound like he did. Perhaps in his mind you were just having an argument and he has no intentions of leaving England without you.”

Annabelle flopped onto the bed. “If he leaves on that ship in the morning, abandoning me a second time, that should answer the question.”

For a long moment Annabelle stared at the ceiling in silence, wondering what she should do. Should she wait and see if he would leave without her, or should she search for the courage to take that difficult leap of faith, and do whatever it took to try and stop him?

Through the night, Magnus wrote four letters to Annabelle, and in each and every one he apologized for something—for closing the coach door on her and driving away, for not taking the house her brother had offered, for saying things that hurt her—but when he read over each letter, he chastised himself for doing it again. For crawling back to her and pleading with her to accept him.

It was what he’d been doing all his life—longing for acceptance into a family that didn’t want him, until he had finally grown to hate them.

Would he grow to hate Annabelle eventually, if he spent his entire future striving to earn her trust? Never feeling good enough?

In the end he did not send a letter.

So it was with a heavy heart that he left his hotel room the next morning, traveled to the docks and boarded the ship, checking over his shoulder as he crossed the gangplank, gazing into the sea of faces on the dock, searching for her, wondering if she had come to stop him from leaving, or to tell him to wait for her, that she was coming with him…

When he stepped on board the ship, a porter showed him to his stateroom and saw that his trunks were delivered. Then Magnus sat down on the bed and held his gloves in his hand, tapping them upon his knee.

He felt rather nauseous, and the ship hadn’t even left the dock yet.

He checked his timepiece. They wouldn’t depart for another fifteen minutes. Perhaps he would go up on deck and look over the rail…

A minute later he was heading down the corridor and pushing through the doors to the sunny upper deck. He walked to the rail and wrapped both hands around it, leaning over to peer down at the crowd on the dock. People were waving to the others beside him, who were smiling and blowing kisses in return.

He experienced a burning panic suddenly, as if he’d just swallowed a red-hot lump of coal. Maybe he should get off the ship. It had been just an argument, after all. Perhaps he was being too hasty and stubborn.

Feeling his breath come short, he scanned the crowd again, then checked his timepiece.

Five more minutes.

Should he get off? he wondered again. Was there time?

He swallowed hard and leaned farther over the rail to see if the gangplank had been lowered yet. It had not. He could still change his mind.

Then he saw a movement in the crowd. Someone running.A woman. He sucked in a quick breath and watched her shoulder her way through the tight crowd toward the gangplank. He couldn’t get a clear view of her, but her hair was just like Annabelle’s.

Magnus was off like a shot, running for the upper deck doors and flying down the steps, taking two at a time, darting down the corridor that led to the outer door.

If it was Annabelle, he would tell her he was sorry. He would get down on his knees and thank God in heaven that she had come, and he’d pull her into his arms and never let her go again. Pride be damned. He would do whatever it took just to have her with him. What had he been thinking, leaving her again after he had come so far?

He stopped suddenly, however, when he reached the main door and found himself staring not at Annabelle, but at another woman. She was just stepping on board, flushed and apologetic for being late.

Then the gangplank was hoisted away and set down on the dock, the doors were closed behind the woman, and a whistle blew somewhere behind Magnus. He stood there breathing hard, feeling as if he were floating in a haze or a bad dream, staring at the ship door, tightly closed.

“Can I help you, sir?” a porter asked, blocking Magnus’s view of the door.

“I beg your pardon?” he replied.

“Is there a problem? Are you waiting for someone?”

Yes, he was. But she wasn’t coming.

He stared blankly at the young man and knew that this was one of those moments in life. It was a fork in the road. Should he get off the ship? Or should he return to his cabin and settle in for the voyage?

He imagined what would happen if he got off. He would return to the Whitby mansion in Mayfair and plead with Annabelle yet again…

The porter was still staring at him, waiting for his answer.

Magnus steadied his voice. “No. I’m not waiting for anyone.”

With that, he turned away from the door and headed back to his stateroom alone, fearing that in about an hour, he was going to be cursing himself and regretting his godforsaken stubborn pride.

IT WAS WITH A BURNING
sense of panic that Annabelle came running onto the dock with barely a minute to spare before the ship left.

She had awakened that morning determined to stop Magnus. She’d dressed at lightning speed, skipped breakfast, and dashed out the front door, terrified she was going to lose him forever because she’d been too afraid to take the blind leap he’d wanted her to take.

But when she arrived at his hotel, he had already checked out, and the desk clerk assured her quite emphatically that he was bound for America that very morning.

That should have been enough, Annabelle thought miserably, as she pushed her way through the crowd on the dock, after first going to the wrong pier and getting lost. It should have been the answer she needed—that Magnus was abandoning her yet again, and she had been a fool to believe there was hope.

But it had not been enough. She was desperate to see him, without the slightest care for her pride or her fears. She had not been able to let go of the tiny fragment of hope that still flickered within her—that yes, he loved her and she could trust him. That she’d always been able to trust him.

It couldn’t be over yet, she thought as she reached the gangplank. It couldn’t.

But then a porter blew his whistle and waved his arms over his head, and the gangplank was lifted away from the ship.

She stopped on the dock, watching, looking up at the people waving from the railings, searching for Magnus, unable to accept that he was actually on board.

She tried to make her way along the dock, shading her eyes from the sun as she looked for him. She walked the length of the ship, then found herself searching through the crowd on the dock, wondering if he had changed his mind and had never even stepped on board.

But she did not see him.

Not long afterward, the ship blew its horn and the ropes were drawn up and everyone was waving good-bye.

Annabelle stood among the crowd, watching in dismay as the ship steamed away from the dock. A cold, piercing agony spread through her like ice.

What a fool she was. She should have known better. How could she have put herself in this situation, to be rejected a second time?

And how could he have done this to her? How could he have made love to her with such tenderness and passion, then leave like this? It was unimaginable, and she didn’t know how she would ever recover from such a betrayal a second time.

Somehow, feeling completely dead inside, she managed to turn around, walk back to her carriage and make her way home, though she remembered none of the trip.

When she arrived at the house, she asked the butler, “Did anyone pay a call? Was there a letter delivered?”

“No, Miss Lawson,” he replied soberly.

She wondered if he knew whose letter she was hoping to receive. Either way, it did not matter.

Annabelle slowly climbed the stairs and went to her studio rather than her bedchamber, for she had no intention of flinging herself on her bed and crying like she had all those years ago. She would not do that again.

All she wanted to do now was distract herself from the persistent hope that Magnus had not even been on the ship to begin with, and would perhaps be knocking on her door within the hour…

She looked at the painting she had brought with her from the country—the waterfall surrounded by moss-covered rocks.

With her body moving in an oddly mechanical way, Annabelle donned her smock and squeezed some paint onto her palette, creating a few different shades of brown and adding black, green, and white. Then she picked up a brush.

But as she stared at the water flowing over the rocks, she knew in her heart that she was too frustrated to paint, and besides that—this piece wasn’t right, and it would never be right. She wasn’t happy with the brushstrokes around the rocks, and the mist at the bottom was all wrong, as were the shadows on the trees. It didn’t look real.

She needed to change it. It wasn’t even close to being finished. It was a mess.

She took a step forward, dipped her brush and lifted it, but froze with her hand an inch away from the canvas.

How could she paint now, when she was so angry because she had not been able to trust the one man who understood her eccentricities and aroused her passions?

He was the only real world she had ever known, she realized suddenly, with a raw new heartbreak. He was the only person who had ever made her feel alive.

But he had left her.

Overcome by a fierce swell of frustration, she turned her palette over in her hand and smacked it paint side down upon her canvas, smearing it back and forth over the waterfall, wanting only to destroy the painting, to turn it into a misfit, too. Just like her. She hated the way it was. She couldn’t get it right. And she was so bloody, bloody angry!

After a few seconds she realized what she had done, and winced as she pulled her hand from the palette—which stuck to the canvas briefly before sliding down.

Annabelle quickly reached for it, to keep it from falling onto the floor, not really caring that she had destroyed the painting. She hadn’t liked it anyway, and it had felt so good to feel the thick paint smearing under the palette.

Finally, she peeled it back to see the anarchy she’d created…

It most certainly was a picture of anarchism. It was wild, unrecognizable mayhem—nothing but emptiness—just like her life without Magnus.

She stared at it for a moment, but then turned her back on it because she couldn’t bear the loneliness it made her feel.

She set her brush and palette down on the table. Closing her eyes, she wondered if this creative agony was worth it. Perhaps she should give up painting altogether and give up being strange. She should replace these boots with a pretty pair of shoes, and get a lapdog like other spinsters her age.

No. What was she thinking? She could never replace these boots, nor could she stop painting. And she would always prefer her cow to a lapdog.

So she turned around and faced the canvas again, and strangely, sadly, when she looked at the waterfall, all she saw was Magnus.

Struck by the sight, she reflected upon the state of her life and the confusing collage of her emotions. She still couldn’t believe he had left her. She had been so sure that everything was different this time.

She supposed it had been different. But it was all her fault for not being able to give him her whole heart, for thinking only of protecting herself and keeping her world safe, like her dull, uninteresting paintings.