Another strong gust of wind blew the window open. Jumping out of bed, she wrestled to close it over. A storm was brewing in more ways than one. A shaft of moonlight pierced the thick cloud casting a shadow on the lake, illuminating the ruined tower on the island. It looked stark, brooding, ominous, as befitting a place harbouring dark secrets.
Secrets which had already blighted their marriage. They had lived—no, barely existed—in the shadow of those secrets for far too long. Was it too late to salvage something from the wreckage?
She lay awake waiting for morning, staring wide-eyed into the darkness. She wasted little effort speculating about what it was he was going to reveal to her. All she could think about were the consequences of him doing so.
I love you as if you’re part of me, but ultimately it makes no difference.
I shouldn’t have married you.
Aidan clearly believed their marriage was over. Every time she tried to imagine what that meant, her mind became a complete blank and her heart began to race. She loved Aidan. Aidan loved her. A proper kind of love, a caring kind of love, and a passionate kind too, which didn’t rely on making love to express it. She loved him with all her heart and soul. Losing him would be like losing an essential part of herself. She couldn’t lose him. But no matter how many times she said so over and over in her head, she couldn’t convince herself.
She’d begged for tonight to prepare herself, but she would never be prepared to say goodbye. If he truly felt that he couldn’t live with her, would she have the courage to leave? In just a few hours, she thought despairingly as the storm died down and the first fingers of grey dawn poked through the curtains, she would find out.
Chapter Twelve
Estelle glanced up at the heavens. There was barely a trace of last night’s storm. It was one of those days where the weather was hedging its bets, yet to make up its mind whether to be fair or foul. White and grey clouds bled into one another making the sky look like a huge swathe of crumpled silk with rents torn in it where blue peeked through, though there was no trace of any sunshine. It was mild, and though last night’s rain sparkled on the grass, the air had the crispness of autumn.
‘Ready?’ Aidan asked.
She nodded, though it was a lie, but though she’d happily never hear whatever was to come, she could see that Aidan wouldn’t rest until he’d spoken. He led the way, taking the path that followed the lake to the far side, pulling aside a swathe of brambles to reveal a gate which she hadn’t noticed before, standing aside to let her precede him. The boathouse sat low on the ground, projecting out on to the lake. It was a simple wooden building, the roof moss-covered from the overhanging trees.
Taking a large key from his pocket, Aidan set it in the lock. ‘You haven’t asked me why we’re going to the island.’
‘Aoife’s buried there, isn’t she?’ Estelle answered, for that was one of the few things she guessed. ‘Her sanctuary, you called it, and I assumed that the church wouldn’t permit...’
‘No, they wouldn’t.’ Aidan visibly braced himself as he turned the key and opened the lock. ‘I’ve not been out there since the funeral, but Finn keeps the boats in order in the hope that one day I’ll take a notion to sail again.’
Inside, there were two boats tied up, a small yacht and a rowing boat, both bobbing on the waters which lapped against the narrow platform which ran around the walls. Aidan made his way to the end of it, heaving the sliding door to one side, letting the daylight in, before jumping into the rowing boat with practised ease.
‘Just step down carefully, I’ll not let you fall,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Don’t worry, this isn’t her boat. We scuttled that one.’
He really had done everything in his power to eliminate all trace of Aoife. What she’d taken previously for an extreme form of grief, Estelle now saw was something decidedly odder, not the actions of a man trying to forget, but of a man with something to hide. Her cloak got tangled around her ankles as she stepped into the boat, making it rock alarmingly, but Aidan was as good as his word, catching her around the waist, holding her until she and the boat were steady, then for just a fraction longer than necessary before letting her go.
She sat in the stern, her heart leaden, and Aidan took up the oars. There was scarcely a breeze. The waters of the lake lapped gently against the hull. Above them, the clouds parted to allow a weak sun to shine. He rowed steadily and efficiently and as far as she could tell, instinctively, for he made a direct line for the island without the need to check over his shoulder.
‘There’s an iron ring over on the little shore by the house,’ Estelle said.
‘We always tended to moor the little boat—this one, or its predecessors—there.’
Until Aoife drowned, he meant, after which they were hidden away in the boathouse. Out of sight but not necessarily out of mind. ‘The tower isn’t actually unsafe then, I take it?’
‘It was built to resemble a ruin.’
‘So there was never any chance of my being injured by falling masonry.’
‘It was the easiest way to stop you going anywhere near the place. I’m sorry for lying to you but at the time I thought I had no choice.’
‘In the same way that you now think you have no choice but to tell me the truth now?’
His acknowledging smile was bittersweet. ‘It is a perfect spot for a picnic, you were right about that—or at least it was once. My father used to take Clodagh and me out there in the summer months. We used to swim from the small beach where I’ll land the boat in a minute.’
A lump rose in her throat, for this was exactly the sort of family outing she’d imagined them having. A family which would now never exist? Panicked, Estelle pushed this thought to one side. She had to save her marriage first, before she could even begin to think of introducing children to it. She had to save her marriage, not for the family they might have, but for the husband and wife they could become. If only. How she loathed those two words. So deceptively simple to say and yet so difficult to achieve.
As they approached the island she could see that the tower was indeed an artfully constructed ruin, the deliberately ramshackle wall neatly pointed, no trace of the wooden rafters that would have been needed to support a roof, if one had ever existed. The island itself was smaller than she’d imagined, oval-shaped and almost completely flat, with the tower on an ellipse nearest the castle. Aidan beached the boat on the little shore, pulling the oars in before helping her out.
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ she asked, desperate for one last chance to avoid her fate.
‘I have to,’ he said. ‘You were right all along. I can’t pretend she never existed.’
The grave was in the lee of the tower, in a small dip in the ground, on the side of the lake facing the boathouse.
Aoife Isolde Malahide, née Kilpatrick
May she finally find peace here
Estelle studied the grave. She read the stone. Then she pressed his hand, and murmured that she’d leave him to his thoughts, and headed back down to the boat.
* * *
Alone, Aidan was grateful for her absence, though he’d needed her presence to give him the courage to make those last few steps. He stared at the gravestone he’d never seen, the inscription he’d agonised over but had never read, for he’d left it to Finn to make these final arrangements. The last time he’d been here, the grave was freshly dug, the earth had been heaped to one side, slowly turning to mud in the steady rain. If it weren’t for the marker, it would be hard to spot her last resting place.
Had she finally found peace? Crouching down, he took the baby’s teething toy from his pocket and set it down carefully beside the headstone. It was the one thing he’d kept when he’d had the sham nursery cleared. Made of ivory with silver bells, he’d found it on the pillow in the baby carriage, and kept it on impulse. He closed his eyes, and said a rare and fervent prayer
for her, and for himself too. He didn’t ask for forgiveness, it was too late for that, and it would make no difference anyway. Aoife was dead, and nothing could change that.
Aidan got to his feet. He couldn’t change the past, but he could stop history repeating itself. He couldn’t save himself, but he could save Estelle. She hurried towards him when she saw him approach, catching his hand, pressing it against her cheek, kissing his knuckles. She didn’t tell him she loved him but he could see it in her eyes, and he had to fight with himself to refrain from pulling her into his arms one last time.
‘We’ll go round the other side of the tower,’ he said. ‘It’s sheltered, and there’s a stone bench built into the ruined bit of the wall.’
‘Your grandfather thought of everything.’ Estelle sat down. ‘I feel horribly like a condemned prisoner exiled to an island prison.’ She tried and failed to smile. ‘Sorry, that was a terrible thing to say.’
‘But accurate. I feel pretty much the same.’ Aidan leaned against the wall, closing his eyes, struggling for calm. Over and over last night, he’d reviewed the logic of what he was about to do and reached the same conclusion. He no longer questioned the telling of his sorry tale, but he dreaded the consequences. Opening his eyes, he forced himself to meet Estelle’s gaze. ‘Nothing I’ve told you about my first marriage has been a lie, but I’ve not told you the whole truth.’
‘I know you think you’re responsible for Aoife’s death, Aidan, but...’
‘Estelle, I am responsible. I didn’t push her over the side of the boat, but I may as well have. I killed her.’
She stared at him in utter disbelief. ‘You don’t mean that.’
His heart had been racing, but it began to slow now, and though he still dreaded what he must say, his dread was tempered with relief. This was the right thing to do. ‘I’ve told you that my marriage had become a living hell. I still don’t think I’ve managed to get across what it was like, to be locked in that particular purgatory together. It was all-consuming. The only escape would have been for us to have a child, and that was the one thing that there was no prospect of. And in the end, the very last thing I wanted.’
‘But I thought you said that you married because you wanted a family.’
‘Oh, I did. I was every bit as eager as she was to have children, and every bit as confident as she was that we would. We were both healthy, we were young, our married life was what it should be, the odds were on our side. But as time passed, nature stubbornly refused to comply. I did try, as I told you, to find out what we could do to improve our chances of success. There was little to be done save keep trying. And so we did.’
The recollection of those nights made him cringe inwardly. There had been some nights when his performance had relied on his imagination taking him far away from his wife and the marriage bed. It had become an act. But a successful act.
‘Time passed,’ he continued. ‘She grew more frantic. I began to lose hope, and that made her furious. Having a child was the most natural thing in the world, which meant that not having one was unnatural, to her way of thinking. Since there was no reason why we couldn’t have a baby, then we simply needed to persist. It was my duty to persist, I’d be failing her as a husband if I didn’t.’
‘Oh, Aidan!’
He shook his head to cut short Estelle’s indignant protest. ‘You couldn’t fault her logic. She didn’t want a husband, she wanted a father for her children, and to be brutally honest, that’s why I married her, to be a mother to my children. I was failing her.’
‘You don’t know that.’
Aidan flinched. ‘I didn’t know it, not at first. Part of the problem was that there seemed to be no explanation. How can you admit defeat when you aren’t sure you’re beaten?’ He sighed wearily. ‘In truth though, I began to lose hope and I began to lose the will to persist.’
He stopped to swallow, taking a deep breath before he continued, unable to look Estelle in the eye. ‘I no longer wanted a child, not with her. I no longer believed that a child would make her happy and I worried that there was every possibility we’d make any child miserable, for we were so miserable ourselves. But how the hell could I tell her that? I couldn’t tell her what I felt, but nature intervened and took the decision out of my hands.’
Estelle got to her feet. He made a half-hearted attempt to fend her off, but when she persisted, putting her arms around his waist, burrowing her head into his shoulder, he allowed himself to take succour and strength from her embrace before gently disengaging and waving her back down on to the bench.
‘You’re still thinking I’ve no reason to feel so guilty, I can tell. Bear with me, for I’ve never even allowed myself to recount this last chapter. Just bear with me.’ He closed his eyes, leaning his head back against the wall, and forced himself to remember.
* * *
‘What are you frowning about?’
‘This.’ Aidan held out the bill. ‘Take a look.’
Aoife remained where she was at the drawing-room door, eying him warily. ‘We should go through for dinner.’
‘A rocking horse, Aoife? This has to stop.’
She sidled into the room. ‘Every child loves a rocking horse, Aidan.’
‘We don’t have a child.’
‘Not yet, but soon.’
‘Aoife, you’re not pregnant.’
She covered her ears with her hands. ‘Don’t say that! I’m not listening.’
‘You’re not pregnant!’ Aidan swore. ‘You know perfectly well that you’re not pregnant.’
‘And I know perfectly well whose fault that is!’
She glared at him for a moment, then she smiled, and his heart sank for he had come to loathe that smile.
‘Please, Aidan, won’t you come to me tonight?’
‘There’s no point,’ he said flatly.
‘How do you know, if you won’t try?’
‘We have tried repeatedly, and I’m sick of failing.’ He held out the bill. ‘This has to stop, Aoife. It’s one thing to fit out a nursery before a child is born, quite another to do so when there is no child, nor any prospect of one. We’ll give the stuff in the attic away. It won’t go to waste.’
‘Give it away? That’s our child’s nursery.’
‘There is no child!’
‘Don’t say that.’ Her eyes flashed. ‘I won’t listen.’ She began to back towards the door. ‘I mean it, Aidan, if you say that again I won’t be responsible for my actions. You’ll live to regret it.’
‘You say that every time we have this discussion. You don’t mean it.’
‘I do mean it. This time I really mean it, Aidan. If you won’t give me a child I don’t want to live.’
* * *
‘I don’t know how many times I’d heard her say those words, or something similar. I don’t know how many times I’d backed down, or said something—anything—to pacify her. I don’t even know what it was about that damned bill for the rocking horse that felt like the final straw, but it was. So when she opened the door and announced she was going to throw herself in the lake, I told her to go ahead. “Just do it,” I said. “Put us both out of our misery.” And she did.’
Aidan stopped speaking and drew a shaky breath, looking confused when he realised he was sitting on the bench beside her. His knee was shaking uncontrollably. Estelle’s heart went out to him as tears streamed down her cheeks. ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she said. ‘You had no reason to believe she’d act this time, when she’d cried wolf so often. How were you to know?’
He took her hands, for the first time since he’d begun his heart-wrenching confession, looking straight into her eyes. ‘I knew her mind was unstable, but I did nothing to stop her. Worse, I dared her, virtually ordered her to do it.’
‘You didn’t force her to jump from the boat, Aidan, she chose to.’
‘I didn’t call her b
ack. I didn’t go after her. I didn’t stop her taking the boat out. If I’d done any one of those things, then she wouldn’t have killed herself. She was at the end of her tether because I had destroyed the last vestige of hope she had left.’
What if. A game Aidan had played even more than she had. ‘Aoife couldn’t have hoped,’ Estelle said, ‘not when you could not...’
He coloured, but didn’t drop his gaze. ‘Even if I could have, I wouldn’t have, and I finally told her so that night. That’s what I mean about taking away any residual hope she might have had. That was the final straw that pushed her over the edge, and it was my doing. I killed her.’
‘You didn’t kill her.’
‘Then why can’t I live with myself? For three years I’ve been trying to get over this, but it’s not going away. I shouldn’t have married you. It was very wrong of me, but I’m going to put it right.’
‘I don’t see how you can.’ She sounded desperate. She felt desperate. The more she protested, the more implacable Aidan was becoming. ‘We’re married. You can’t mean we’ll get a divorce?’
‘Or an annulment. You’d be entitled to one.’
She was icy cold. This couldn’t be happening. She wouldn’t let it happen. Carefully, she disengaged her hands and shifted away from him on the bench. ‘Aidan, you love me, and I love you.’
‘I do love you, with all my heart, but I can’t live with you, Estelle. It would be wrong. I can’t make you happy, and I refuse to be responsible for making you unhappy.’
‘But you will. I’ll be miserable without you.’
‘Believe me, not as miserable as you’d become living here with me.’
The Truth Behind Their Practical Marriage (Penniless Brides 0f Convenience Book 3) Page 20