Shadow among Sheaves

by Naomi Stephens

  Rena clutched at her shawl, pulling the fabric tighter over her hands, and only then did he realize she was trembling all over. He wanted to be angry with her for her recklessness in the cold, but there was a terror in her eyes, which he prayed had nothing to do with him. He loosed a pent-up breath, taking her icy hand in his and tugging her toward the fireplace. He motioned for her to sit on the warm stone hearth. As she did, she angled her face toward the flames, which illuminated the gentle planes of her expression. She wouldn’t look at Barric as he crouched beside her, not even as he lifted the soaked shawl from her shoulders. He noticed that the dress she wore was no longer black but a much softer gray; her eyes were still black as mourning.

  “I will call for tea,” he suggested, his voice more even as he set the shawl aside. “Something warm?”

  She stared emptily at the necklace still resting in her palm. “You must think I’m crazy,” she finally whispered.

  Head bowed, hand screening her eyes, Rena’s hair fell like a black curtain between them. She often seemed this way to Barric. Boarded and shuttered, stumbling around in the dark, alone.

  Deciding the most he could do was make sure she was warm, he crossed to the hutch beside his desk and rummaged among the bottles.

  He decided on a fat bottle of brandy, pouring two generous glasses before returning to the fire. “I don’t think you’re crazy.” He crouched at her side, and she eyed him suspiciously. He knew, of course, how this situation would look to outside eyes—the two of them dripping on his plush carpet, half-frozen by the fire with drinks in hand. Oh, how his cousin would mock him. He held out a glass anyway. “You’re frozen,” he explained. “This will help.”

  She slipped her hand around the glass and brought it to her lips for a tentative sip. Immediately her face scrunched into a hard wince. Barric took a swig of his own, relishing the heat that pounded through him.

  “I didn’t mean to shout at you,” she said after he had lowered his glass.

  “You were upset.”

  She ran a finger along the rim of her glass before taking another drink. “I kept very little when I left India,” she explained softly. “I had to sell my wedding ring to pay for our passage. Edric’s ring—it’s all I have left of him. When I thought I had lost it, I just…lost myself too.”

  Her admission shocked him. She’d never spoken to him directly of her husband, and he still wasn’t sure what, exactly, he thought of their marriage. He frowned as he watched her take a deeper drink. “You must have loved him a great deal.” His words were hard to get out, even harder to believe. She seemed too young to love anyone like that—to love so deeply she would crawl through icy mud just to hold on. Her loyalty unnerved him.

  “Every day, I try to love him more than when he was alive, but it never feels enough. I never feel sad enough, sorry enough.” Her eyes were flat and distant. “Not very long ago, where I come from, they burned widows on their husbands’ funeral biers. It has been outlawed for some time, but some women still burn…” She drank away the end of her sentence.

  In a flash, Barric pictured Rena writhing in terror within a sea of hungry flames, and his mouth filled with the imagined taste of burnt ash. Grimacing, he met her eyes.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Sati,” she spoke in her own language, lowering her glass. “It is believed, without her husband, a woman loses her purpose. Her very life. And so she follows him into death. It is a great honor to die in such a way. It shows a woman’s boundless love.”

  Though Barric had heard of such pagan rituals, he often forgot they colored Rena’s world. “And?” His voice hardened as he again recalled his earlier suspicion. That maybe she wished to die. “Do you espouse the same philosophy?”

  “I am empty without Edric,” she admitted. “That much is true. But he cherished my life as if it were his own. It would be an insult to his memory, to our marriage, to entertain such thoughts. Besides, I am not sure it counts if one’s husband is British….”

  Barric had never heard her speak so openly. He detected self-mockery in her voice, the nearest thing to humor he’d heard from her and yet so very tragic.

  “You feel guilty,” he decided, taking in her downcast eyes. “What for?”

  “Widows are punished in India,” she replied. “Especially those who are widowed young. It is believed they have sinned in another life or misstepped gravely in this one. My family spared me great dishonor by protecting me after Edric’s death, by welcoming me home and begging me to stay. They might have cast me off. I might have been beaten and shunned. They might have said his death was punishment for our union. But my father said all might be undone by endless prayer and a life of sacrifice. That I might yet live to marry again. He risked much by saying these things. I’m not sure I deserve such love.”

  “Do you believe what he said?”

  She shook her head. “I will never marry again. I seek only to lessen Nell’s grief.”

  And this was the woman the people called harlot. Barric shook his head, considering how richly she had once lived and now how barren.

  “I hope he is worth every bit of your sacrifice.”

  “Would you believe I had only known him for three weeks?” She looked up at him, shaking her head as if still shocked by her own actions. “Three weeks, and I was climbing out of my bedroom window to marry a man I barely knew. My parents had no idea I even knew him until it was already done.”

  Stunned again, Barric paused to sort through what he knew of Rena, which he realized was still extremely little. He had seen the tireless way she had worked in his field, the raw calluses on her hands, the lifted chin which so outraged his cousin. An unbreakable thread stitched her up and made her whole.

  “You don’t seem the type to elope,” he observed carefully. “To be swept away. Why marry anyone so quickly?”

  She was about to take another sip, but her glass hovered as she eyed him sideways. “I didn’t marry him for his money, if that’s what you mean, nor did I need to.”

  “I didn’t say that, and I would certainly never think it.”

  She took another drink, then set down her nearly empty glass.

  “Edric was…charming. Different. When he first looked at me, it was as if he’d known me all my life. He was exciting and dependable, and I knew as soon as I saw him that nothing in my life would ever make sense again.”

  Barric downed the rest of his drink and set the emptied glass beside hers. When he glanced back up, it took him a moment to collect his thoughts. The rain had crinkled Rena’s hair around her high cheekbones, and as the firelight now danced with her shifting expressions, he allowed himself to admit—though not for the first time—that she was remarkably beautiful. Not that it mattered, of course. It was the kind of reflection brought about by a bottle of brandy on a cold, rainy evening. The kind of reflection he ought to keep entirely to himself.

  Rena didn’t seem to have noticed anything remiss in his gaze.

  “Have you never been in love, Lord Barric?” The question was inappropriate given their relationship—far too personal—but he found himself flashing a wry smile anyway. They had already stepped well beyond the line of what would pass for appropriate conversation.

  “No,” he replied. “But Charlie has been in love enough times for both of us, so I consider myself more or less covered.”

  “Charlie. Your brother?”

  He made a distant sound of agreement.

  “How did the two of you end up living so…differently?”

  Barric wished he had a fast and easy answer for what had separated him from Charlie. His brother was not a bad man, not like their cousin, Thomas, who seemed bereft of any moral guide whatsoever.

  “I wanted to be like my father,” he answered truthfully. “Charlie did not. It would seem we both got our wishes.”

  “Did your parents disapprove of your brother’s choices?”

  He stiffened at her question, his eyes trailing the stonework pattern of the h
earth.

  “My parents are dead. Have been for a good many years.”

  He sounded less affected than he was. It had been many years since his uncle had slammed through the front door, face pale, to bring them news of the accident. Still, there hadn’t been a day Barric hadn’t stopped to remember them. His father’s low rumble of a voice, his proud even strides as he sauntered through the fields. As a lad, Barric had trailed his father every day, studying the artful way he conducted his business and instructed his field hands. He had pored over his father’s mysterious ledgers until the numbers would blur and his mother would gently call his attention back to his studies. She smelled of tea and book pages, and Barric missed that too.

  “I’m so sorry. Have I upset you?” Rena’s words emerged in a quick, embarrassed tumble. “I did not mean to upset you.”

  He shook his head, the memories scattering like bits of dust that had gathered too long on his weary bones. “You have not upset me,” he said, attempting a rare smile. “I don’t usually speak of them. My parents were good people. I feel their loss often.”

  Actually, he had never spoken of them. Not really. The loss of his father, especially, had sent Barric spiraling headlong into strenuous work; he had wanted the fields to be run exactly as they had been under his father’s watchful eyes, for his father’s money to be used in ways which would have pleased him. Sometimes he still felt lost beneath his father’s shadow.

  He tousled his damp hair, focusing on the heat of the fire as it rolled like a wave over his back. He did not want to think or talk about Charlie or his parents or how he had come to be the kind of man he was. He was much too cold and far too wet to deal with such things, too dizzied by the girl still crouching beside him. But Rena was staring at him as if she’d heard everything anyway.

  “You should speak of them more often,” she recommended quietly, after giving him a moment to collect himself.

  He released a humorless laugh, sending her an arched, sideways look. “You’re going to give me advice on grief? You aren’t exactly an expert yourself, are you?”

  His slighting words sobered her in an instant. Sitting up stiffly, Rena straightened her wrinkled skirts as if preparing to leave. Before he could reconsider, he reached down, clenching her fingers tightly, frowning when he realized how clammy and cold her skin still was.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s a hard task, grieving, but I’ve found it’s necessary. I suppose we could both learn from each other.”

  She didn’t pull her hand away from his, but her eyebrows rose.

  “You don’t think I’ve grieved?”

  He tipped his hand toward the window, where drops of rain cut fast lines down the foggy glass.

  “I think you might have started to, out there. Or maybe you were punishing yourself for not grieving enough. Either way, I think Edric would understand.”

  She nodded distantly as if his words had found a place somewhere within her. “May I ask you something?” she asked, her voice slow, hesitant.

  “Certainly.”

  “My mother-in-law said your families—the Hawleys and the Fairfaxes, that is—that you don’t carry on well with each other. Why is that?”

  Barric challenged her query with a wistful grin. “Afraid to be found consorting with the enemy?”

  She shook her head, her nose scrunching up in a near smile of her own as she dismissed his jest. “Nell told me you and Edric are second cousins. I wonder that you have not spoken to me of him before tonight. Did the two of you not get on well?”

  “It’s nothing like that,” he assured her. “Your husband was a good man, but his grandmother was my grandfather’s sister. She married…unwisely. I’m afraid she has never been fully forgiven for becoming a Hawley. Our families have never been close.”

  “Married unwisely.” Rena paused as she considered this. “Some might say Edric followed in his grandmother’s steps.” She lifted both brows, only half-serious. “Perhaps it is the Hawley curse?”

  Without meaning to, Barric felt his fingers tighten slightly around hers. “If such a curse exists,” he murmured, “I’m fairly certain Edric was not at all disappointed to be plagued by it.”

  Her eyes dropped from his, but he was still holding her fingers when the door creaked open and a servant in crisp uniform stepped into the room. The servant’s pressed appearance reminded Barric instantly of how rumpled he and Rena must have looked—her shawl was still discarded beside him, his own coat slung carelessly over the back of a chair. Releasing Rena’s hand, Barric sprang up from the hearth, knocking over one of their glasses as he rounded toward the intruder.

  There was a quick, embarrassed apology, half mumbled, and then the servant’s head bowed slightly with an obvious question: Should he leave?

  Rena grabbed her shawl and pulled herself into a standing position, her cheeks flushed from the brandy. Strands of black hair hung limp against her shoulders from the rain.

  Her eyes flashed to the servant, then back to Barric, as if waiting for him to make an explanation.

  “It’s time for you to leave,” Barric said to Rena, trying to temper his tone but sounding fiendishly curt. “We’re finished here. Go.”

  Rena’s eyes fell to her hands, and he knew he had hurt her.

  “Yes, of course,” she agreed, her tone stiff and flavorless, a horrible pretense in light of everything she had shared with him.

  Barric had forgotten Rena still held her necklace until she slipped it back around her neck. His eyes flicked downward to the ring, and just like that, a dead man stood between them.

  He grimaced, jerking his head toward the door. The servant caught the message and stepped aside, his eyes on the carpet. Rena exited soundlessly, her eyes now as vacant as those of his servant. What would his cousin say if he heard of this, Barric wondered, or if word made it into town as it doubtless would? All would say Lord Barric had a touch of Charlie in him, after all. They’d say he’d been trying to seduce her. Or worse, that she was trying to seduce him. He felt an uneasy twist within him as he wondered what Rena thought. At her weakest moment, he’d brought her in the back entrance, offered her a drink as he sat down beside the fire with her. His eyes fell to his coat still slung across the chair back, and he suddenly doubted himself.

  “What do you want?” Barric asked in a curt voice, realizing the servant still awaited his attention. The servant drew forward, offering him a thin, ivory envelope. Barric snatched it out of the servant’s gloved hand, tipping it up to glance at the lazy, elegant scrawl. Charlie’s handwriting. He fisted the letter in his hand.

  “If I hear about you running your mouth,” Barric warned. “You’ll be gone by morning. Understand?”

  The servant bowed his anxious understanding, then left. As soon as the door had snicked closed, Barric strode toward the window, spreading his fingers like a fan against the cool glass. He studied the property beneath the window until Rena finally came into his line of vision. Her shawl was pulled twice as tight around her shoulders as she hastened across his property.

  He’d been careless, he thought angrily, and had dismissed her like a dog. He watched as she crossed the clearing and made for the edge of the hill. After the intimate details she had offered him—and he knowing what it cost her to speak so openly about her husband—he had tossed her back into the freezing rain to walk home alone, as if her grief had meant nothing to him.

  He turned, leaning against the cold windowpane as he sliced a finger along the letter’s seal. He didn’t care much for what his brother had to say these days. But in that moment, he didn’t feel much better about himself.

  CHAPTER 9

  “So the younger Barric deigns to visit his withering uncle, even after all these months….”

  Barric jostled his gaze from the bookshelf to the door, unable to hide his frown as his uncle strode into the room with two gray hunting dogs prowling at his heels. Uncle George was anything but withering, and he knew it. He was a proud man, and tall, much older than
his thick black hair and arresting blue eyes would lead anyone to believe.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure of this little visit?”

  “I’ve heard from Charlie,” Barric announced, lowering his hand for the dogs to nuzzle. Assured he was no threat, the hounds retreated to the fireplace, lounging beneath a mahogany table with their tails curled around their bellies.

  His uncle sank into a plush armchair with a slight groan of exaggerated age.

  “Ah, yes, the more indiscreet of my nephews. What trouble has he gotten himself into this time?”

  Charlie’s letter was still crumpled in Barric’s pocket. He’d glanced at it repeatedly over the past few days, though its cryptic message was seared into his memory. Only two words were written in Charlie’s lazy script: Please come.

  Usually Charlie was a bit more specific in his letters—particularly when it came to money and just how much he needed.

  “He didn’t mention a reason.” He tried to sound more at ease than he usually felt around his uncle. It wasn’t as though Uncle George was anything like his son. Thomas was an arrogant bully, a wastrel as his uncle usually called him, but Thomas had taken more after his mother, a spoiled woman with a papery face and a taste for laudanum. Uncle George was an elegant, cunning man, and, though he wasn’t cruel like his son, he was ruthless in his own way and often got exactly what he wanted.

  “I’ve come to ask you for a favor.”

  “Of course,” his uncle replied with a pleasant expression that was still slightly pinched at the corners. He had every right to be suspicious. Barric could count on one hand the number of times he’d asked his uncle for anything. Barric had always been too proud to ask for help, and, though his uncle was a decent enough man, he often felt like a cheaper version of Barric’s father. Except for the fact that his father’s hair had been red and his uncle’s black, the two men had always looked markedly similar. They had similar profiles, similar mannerisms, and a sharp crease between their eyes—a wrinkle in the shape of a musical note—which surfaced only whenever they were vexed.