by Mary Balogh
It was unmistakably a guest chamber rather than a servant’s room, she saw with some dismay. She ought to have clarified her exact status here with Joshua and Lady Hallmere before their arrival. She ought to have made it clear to them that she wanted to be classed with the servants, or at least with the nurses and governesses-if there were any of the latter. But then she had assumed that it did not need to be said.
“I hope I have not put you to a great deal of trouble,” she said with an apologetic smile, “arriving unexpectedly like this.”
“I was delighted, mum, when Mr. Butler said the duke and duchess were coming with a large party,” the housekeeper told her with a pronounced Welsh accent. “We don’t see company often enough here. Mr. Butler hired extra help and I had every room in the house prepared just in case. So it’s no trouble at all. I’m Mrs. Parry, mum.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Parry,” Anne said. “What a lovely view.”
“It is that,” the housekeeper agreed, “though the view from the back rooms is just as grand. You will want to tidy up and maybe rest a while, mum. I’ll send a maid up to unpack your things for you.”
“There really is no need,” Anne assured her hastily. Heavens, she was not really a guest. She was certainly not entitled to the services of a maid. “But the idea of a rest sounds very inviting.”
“The roads hereabouts aren’t all they ought to be, are they?” Mrs. Parry said. “Though there are enough toll gates to pay for repairs, the good Lord knows. You are probably all bounced to pieces. I’ll leave you alone, then, mum. But if you should want to go down to the drawing room later, just pull on the bell rope here and someone will come to show you the way. I’ll have a maid come up before dinner to help you dress and tell you the way to the dining room. Will there be anything else?”
“Nothing.” Anne smiled at her again. “Thank you.”
Go down to the drawing room? Take dinner in the dining room?
What had Joshua said about her? He could not possibly be expecting her to mingle with the Bedwyn family-and to make her curtsy to the Duke and Duchess of Bewcastle. Could he? But one never knew with Joshua. He had some peculiar notions about her-and about David.
She unpacked her modest trunk and put everything away-she even found that there was a dressing room attached to her bedchamber. She lay down on the bed when she was finished, more because she did not know what else to do than because she was weary.
She would cheerfully cower right here in this room for the next month given half a chance, she thought. But-sadly-it was too late to wish yet again that she had remained in Bath.
She fell asleep while she was in the middle of worrying.
When she awoke an indeterminate amount of time later, she jumped hastily off the bed and washed her hands and face. If the promised maid should arrive, she would perhaps not be able to avoid going down to dinner. She could not possibly do that. She was ravenously hungry, she realized, not having eaten since luncheon at a wayside inn, but being hungry and alone seemed preferable to having to dine with the duke and his family.
Good heavens, did Joshua really expect that she would be welcomed into their midst? As a social equal?
She slipped on her outdoor shoes and wrapped a cloak about herself in case the sea air was chilly. She could not avoid mealtimes for a whole month, of course, but perhaps by tomorrow she would feel sufficiently rested and in command of herself to suggest to the housekeeper that other arrangements be made for her accommodation and meals.
She slipped out down the back stairs and through the side door by which she had entered the house earlier. She hurried down the driveway, not sure where she was going exactly, but not really caring as long as it was far enough away to be out of sight of the house. Just past the thatched cottage, before she had to make the decision whether to leave the park entirely or turn back, she noticed a well-worn path to her right that must lead to the sea, which she had been able to see from the window of her bedchamber.
She turned and walked along it and soon found that she was indeed on top of high cliffs with the sea below and coarse grass to either side of the path and some gorse bushes and other wildflowers.
She was reminded again of Cornwall. Below the cliffs there was a wide, golden beach.
She left the path and first stood and then sat in a sheltered hollow from which she could gaze down at the sea, which was calm and almost translucent in the light of early evening though there were ripples of waves close to the shore, a few of them breaking into foam before meeting the beach. The beach itself stretched in a wide golden arc. Just to her left the land curved outward toward the sea and then fell away into huge, jagged rocks to form an abrupt end to the beach. To the right the sands stretched for a few miles before being cut off by a craggy, grass-topped tongue of land that thrust out into the sea like a humpbacked dragon with lifted head roaring defiance to the deep.
She still missed Cornwall, Anne realized. She had loved it even though there had been much pain to endure during her time there.
There was something about the sea that had always called to her spirit. Somehow it reminded her of her littleness in the grand scheme of things, and yet strangely that was a soothing rather than a belittling thought. It made her feel a part of something vast, her own little worries and concerns of no great moment after all. When she was close to the sea, she could believe that all was well-and somehow always would be.
She could have lived contentedly in Cornwall for the rest of her life if only…
Well, if only.
She would not have lived there all her life anyway. She had been going to marry Henry Arnold, and he lived in Gloucestershire, where she had grown up.
She sat where she was for a long time until she realized that the evening was now well advanced. She was suddenly glad of her cloak. The day had been warm, but dusk was approaching, and the breeze blowing off the sea was fresh and slightly moist. It smelled and tasted salty.
She got to her feet, scrambled back up to the cliff path, and strolled onward, her face lifted to the breeze, alternating her gaze between the beauty of the gradually darkening sky above and the corresponding loveliness of the sea below, which seemed to be absorbing the light from the sky so that it turned silver even as the gray overhead deepened-one of the universe’s little mysteries.
If she were a painter, she thought, pausing again in order to look about with half-closed eyes, she would capture with her brush just this effect of light before dark. But she had never been much of an artist. Somewhere between her brain and the end of her arm, she had always said, her artistic vision died. Besides, a canvas would not be able to capture the salt smell of the air or the light touch of the breeze or the sharp cry of the seagulls that clung to the cliff face and occasionally wheeled overhead.
It was as she walked onward that she became aware that she was not the only person out taking the evening air. There was a man standing out on a slight promontory ahead of her. He was gazing out to sea, unaware of her presence.
Anne stood quite still, undecided whether to turn back in the hope that he would not see her at all or to hurry past him with a brief greeting and a hope not to be detained.
She did not believe she had seen him before. He was not either Lord Aidan Bedwyn or Lord Alleyne. But he was probably one of the other Bedwyns or their spouses. This was, after all, the duke’s land, though it was possible he allowed strangers to wander here beyond the cultivated bounds of the park.
It was still only dusk. There was light by which to see the man. And as she looked Anne found it difficult either to retreat or to advance. She stood and stared instead.
He was not dressed for evening. He wore breeches and top boots, a tight-fitting coat and waistcoat, and a white shirt and cravat. He was hatless. He was a tall man, with broad shoulders and slender waist and hips and powerfully muscled legs. His dark, short hair was ruffled by the breeze.
But it was his face, seen in profile, that held Anne transfixed. With its finely chiseled features it
was an extraordinarily handsome face. The word beautiful came to mind, inappropriate as it seemed to describe a man. He might have been a poet-or a god.
He might well be, she thought, the most beautiful man she had ever set eyes upon.
She felt a craving to see him full face, but he was obviously still quite unaware of her presence. He looked as if he were in a world of his own, one that held him quite motionless, the gathering gray of the evening sky sharpening his silhouette as she gazed at him.
Something stirred inside her, something that had lain dormant in her for years and years-and something that must remain dormant. Good heavens, he was a total stranger, and if her guess was correct he was someone’s husband. He was certainly not someone about whom to weave romantic fantasies.
She could not simply retreat, she decided. He would probably see her and think her behavior peculiar, even discourteous. She could only continue on her way and hope that a cheerful good evening would take her past him without the necessity of introductions or the embarrassment of having to walk back to the house with him, making labored conversation.
Was he perhaps Lady Morgan’s husband? Or Lord Rannulf Bedwyn? Or the Duke of Bewcastle himself? Oh, please, she thought, please do not be the duke. And yet he was said to be a handsome man.
She wished then that she had decided to go back. But it was too late to do that. As she approached closer to the man, keeping to the footpath that would pass behind the promontory on which he stood, he became aware of her and turned rather sharply toward her.
She stopped short, not more than twenty feet from him.
And she stood transfixed again-but with horror this time. The empty right sleeve of his coat was pinned against his side. But it was the right side of his face that caused the horror. Perhaps it was a trick of the evening light, but it seemed to her that there was nothing there, though afterward she did recall seeing a black eye patch.
He was a man with half a face, the extraordinarily beautiful left side all the more grotesque because there was no right side to balance it. He was beauty and beast all rolled into one. And all of a sudden his height and those powerful thighs and broad shoulders seemed menacing rather than enticing. And equally suddenly the beauty of the gathering darkness and the peaceful solitude of the scene were filled with danger and the threat of an unknown evil.
She thought he took one step toward her. She did not wait to see if he would take another. She turned and ran, leaving the path and the cliff top behind her, half stumbling over the uneven ground, tugging at her cloak as it snagged against gorse bushes, and feeling the sharp sting of their scratches on her legs. Her stockings would be torn to ribbons, a part of her mind told her.
The trees surrounding the inner park were dark and threatening as she crashed through them, making all sorts of loud noises to reveal where she was. The lawn when she reached it looked dauntingly wide and very open, but she had no alternative but to dash across it and hope that at least she would be within screaming distance of the house before he caught up with her.
But her first panic was receding, and when she glanced quickly and fearfully over her shoulder, she could see that she was alone, that he had not followed her. And with that realization came a return of some rationality.
And deep shame.
Was she a child to believe in monsters?
He was merely a man who must have suffered some fearful accident. He had been out to take the air, as she had. He had been minding his own business, enjoying his own solitude, gazing quietly at the view, perhaps as affected by its loveliness as she had been. He had not said or done anything that was remotely threatening except to take that one step toward her. Probably all he had intended was to bid her a good evening and go on his way.
She felt quite mortified then.
She had run from him because he was maimed. She had judged him a monster purely on the strength of his outward appearance. And yet she had a reputation for tenderness toward the weak and handicapped. When she became a governess, she had deliberately taken a position with a child who was not normal according to the definition of normality that society had concocted. She had loved Prue Moore dearly. She still did. And she was forever instilling into the girls at school and into David her conviction that every human being was a precious soul worthy of respect and courtesy and love.
Yet she had just fled in panic because the man whose left profile was godlike had turned out to be horribly maimed on the right side. He had no right arm. What had she expected he would do to her?
Hunger and shame made her feel somewhat light-headed. But she closed her eyes, drew in deep lungfuls of sea air, and then opened her eyes and deliberately returned the way she had just come.
Darkness was definitely falling now, and she was aware that she ought not to be wandering thus in a strange place. But she had to go back and make amends if she could.
She came to the path she had been following. And there, she thought as she looked about to get her bearings, was surely the promontory. She looked to left and right and decided that yes, that was certainly the place where he had been standing.
But he was no longer there.
She could not see him anywhere.
She hung her head and stood where she was for some time. She might have said good evening to him and nodded genially. He probably would have replied in kind. And she might then have walked onward, content with her behavior, and mourned whatever it was that had destroyed his beauty.
But she had recoiled from him, run away in fright and revulsion. How had he felt? Was this how other people treated him too? Poor man. At least all her hurts were inner ones. People-especially men who had looked on her with admiration and interest-sometimes shrank from her when they knew her for what she was, an unwed mother, but at least she could walk along a street, or along a cliff path without causing anyone to turn in horror and run.
How could she have done it? How could she? And now she had been suitably punished for her cowardice in running away from the house. She had been discourteous-worse!-to a fellow human being who had in no way offended or hurt her.
Perhaps, she thought as she made her way back toward the house again, he was a stranger passing through and had just wandered by chance onto the duke’s land. Perhaps she would never see him again.
She despised herself for hoping that was so.
It was suitable punishment, she thought as she drew near to the house and her stomach rumbled with emptiness, that she must go hungry to bed.
She could not get the maimed man out of her mind all night. She kept waking and thinking of him.
Poor man. What must it be like to carry one’s pain and one’s deformities like that, for all to see? Ah, the loneliness of it!
Poor man.
But such beauty! Such physical perfection to have been so cruelly destroyed!
Sydnam watched her go. For a moment he considered going after her, but he would only increase her panic by doing that.
Besides, he did not feel at all kindly disposed toward her.
Who the devil was she? Lady Alleyne Bedwyn perhaps? She was the only one of the Bedwyn wives he had not met. But what had she been doing out here alone? Why was Alleyne not with her? And had no one warned her about the monster who was Bewcastle’s steward?
He had been in another world. Or rather, he had been in this world, but he had been deeply immersed in the final, breathtaking moments of a dying day, with the sun just dropped behind the western horizon but the night not yet quite descended. It was a scene of grays and silvers and majesty. His right hand had itched to grasp his paintbrush more tightly so that he could reproduce the scene both as he saw it and as he felt it, but he had resisted the urge to flex the fingers of that hand, knowing that as soon as he did so he would have to admit to himself, yet again, that it was a phantom hand he carried at his side, that both it and his right arm were no longer there just as his right eye was no longer there. And there was no paintbrush. He would have had to admit to himself that his vision of t
he scene was distorted, the depth and the perspective as well as the breadth of vision no longer feeding accurate information to his artist’s soul.
But he had still not come to the moment of that admission. He had still been transported by beauty. He had still been immersed in the illusion of happiness.
And then something-a flutter at the corner of his eye, a footfall, perhaps-had brought awareness crashing back and he had sensed that he was no longer alone.
And when he had turned, there she was.
Or perhaps the crash back to awareness had come a moment after he turned to look.
For that moment before it happened the woman standing on the path had seemed a part of the beauty of the evening. She had looked tall and willowy slender, her cloak flapping in the breeze and revealing a dress of lighter color beneath. She had not been wearing a bonnet. Her hair was fair, perhaps even blond, her face oval and blue-eyed and lovely, though truth to tell he had seen it one-eyed from twenty feet away in the dusk and could not be sure he had observed accurately, especially as far as the color of her eyes was concerned.
She had looked like beauty personified. For one moment he had thought…
Ah, what was it he had thought?
That she had walked out of the night into his dreams?
It was embarrassing even to consider that that was perhaps what he had thought before he had come jolting back to reality.
But certainly he had taken a step toward her without speaking a word. And she had stood there, apparently waiting for him.
And then he had seen the horror in her eyes. And then she had turned and fled in panic.
What had he expected? That she would smile and open her arms to him?
He gazed after her and was again Sydnam Butler, grotesquely ugly, with his right eye gone and the purple scars of the old burns down the side of his face, paralyzing most of the nerves there, and all along his armless side to his knee.
He was Sydnam Butler, who would never paint again, and for whom no woman would ever walk beautiful out of the night.