by Mary Balogh
“Sometimes,” he said, “it is easier to confide in a sympathetic stranger than in a friend or relative.”
“Is that what you are?” She glanced at him again and he noticed that her face had caught the sun and would be unfashionably bronzed for a while.
“A sympathetic stranger?” he said. “Yes. And have you noticed that people will admit to almost any vice or shortcoming before they will admit to loneliness? It is as if there were something rather shameful in the condition.”
“I am lonely,” she said quickly and rather breathlessly. “Terribly lonely. And yes, it does seem shameful. It also seems ungrateful. I have my son.”
“Who is busy forging his own life in company with other children,” he said.
“A dreadful thing just happened,” she said in a rush. “It is why I was walking here alone. Everyone was leaving the beach, and without thinking I held out my hand to take David’s-I sometimes forget he is no longer an infant. He said, ‘Oh, Mama!’ and dashed off to walk with Joshua, who ruffled his hair and set a hand on his shoulder and talked to him even though his own son was riding on his shoulders. Neither of them meant to be cruel-Joshua had not even seen what had happened. It was ridiculous of me to feel hurt. There were any number of other children and other adults to whom I might have attached myself for the walk back to the house. But I felt very alone and very frightened. How can I compete for my son’s affections with other children and men who are willing to give him their attention? And why would I want to? I am glad for him. And I hate my own pettiness.”
Ah, yes, Sydnam thought, he had been very wrong about her. Her beauty counted for nothing in the life that had been mapped out for her and that was slowly and inexorably changing as her son grew older. He wondered briefly about the man who had fathered her child. What had happened to him? Why had she not married him? More to the point, perhaps, why had he not married her?
“No one,” he said decisively, “can or ever will be able to compete with you, Miss Jewell. You are the boy’s mother. He relies upon you for love and comfort and support and security and approval. And in some ways he always will. No one could ever replace my own mother in my heart for the things I look for from her. But a mother-son relationship is not a coequal one, is it? He is lonely with only you just as you are lonely with only him.”
“But I have my friends,” she protested.
“I do too,” he told her. “I have been here for five years and have made friends, some of them quite close, on whom I can call at any time and with whom I can talk comfortably on any subject under the sun. I have a family in Hampshire-mother, father, brother, sister-in-law-who love me dearly and would do anything in the world for me.”
She had not mentioned family of her own, he noticed-except her son.
“But you are lonely?”
“But I am lonely,” he admitted, turning his head so that he could see the sun shining on the cliff face, making it more silver than gray, and on the deep blue sky above.
He did not believe he had ever said those words aloud before-even to himself. But they were, of course, starkly true.
“Thank you,” she said unexpectedly. She drew breath as if to say something else, but she did not speak.
Thank you? And yet he felt a certain gratitude to her too. She had asked if he was lonely and then admitted her own loneliness and given him a glimpse into the insecurities of her life. She had bound them in the common human experience of pain and uncertainty, as if there were nothing peculiar and pathetic about his own.
So many people saw him as an object of pity that it had always taken more than usual fortitude not to pity himself-and he had not always been successful, especially at the beginning. He did not pity himself in his loneliness. It was just a fact of his life to which he had adjusted-if one ever adjusted to loneliness.
“I had better go back,” she said. “After I have been away from David for an hour or two, my heart yearns for him-and what a foolish way of expressing myself. Thank you for walking with me, Mr. Butler. This has been a pleasant half hour.”
“Perhaps,” he said, “if your son is well occupied with the other children and you feel somewhat uncomfortable with being a houseguest here, you would care to walk with me again some other time, Miss Jewell. Perhaps…Well, never mind.” He felt suddenly, horribly embarrassed.
“I would,” she said quickly.
“Would you?” He stopped and turned to look at her, deliberately presenting her with a full-face view of himself. “Tomorrow, perhaps? At the same time? Do you know where I live? The cottage?”
“The pretty thatched one close to the gates?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he said. “Will you walk that way tomorrow?”
“Yes,” she said.
They looked at each other, and he noticed her teeth sinking into her lower lip.
“Tomorrow, then,” she said, and turned and hurried away barefoot across the sand in the direction of the cliff path.
He watched her go.
…after I have been away from David for an hour or two, my heart yearns for him.
She had apologized for the sentimentality of the words, spoken of her son. But they echoed in his mind and for a moment he indulged in a waking fantasy without even the excuse of sleep.
What if those words had been spoken of him, Sydnam Butler, instead of David?
…my heart yearns for him.
The Reverend Charles Lofter and his wife drove into the nearby village the next morning to pay their respects to the vicar. They took Mrs. Thompson and their children with them, including ten-year-old Alexander. The Duchess of Bewcastle went calling upon some neighbors with Lord and Lady Aidan, who had met them during a previous visit to Wales. Davy and Becky went too, though both her grace’s baby and Lady Aidan’s two-year-old daughter, Hannah, remained in the nursery.
Both groups invited David Jewell to accompany them, but he chose to remain behind. Anne found him in the nursery, playing good-naturedly with several of the younger children, who were squabbling fiercely over which of them was to ride on his back next.
“It is Laura’s turn,” he was telling Daniel, “and then Miranda’s.”
One of Lord Alleyne’s young twins climbed triumphantly on and David crawled across the floor with her, bucking and neighing a couple of times as he went and causing her to squeal and giggle and grasp him more tightly about the neck while Lord Rannulf’s Miranda and the other children jumped up and down in anticipation of their next turn.
Ten minutes later he announced that the horse needed its oats and came toward Anne, his hair tousled, his face flushed, his eyes sparkling and happy.
“They wanted me to stay,” he explained, “and so I did.”
“That was good of you,” she said, pushing back an errant lock of hair from his forehead. Almost immediately it fell back into place again, as it always did. She realized how much it meant to her son, who had always been very much the youngest of all the pupils at the school in Bath, to be the older hero to the little children.
“I am going to play cricket with everyone again this afternoon,” he said. “Cousin Joshua is teaching me to bowl.”
Cousin Joshua? For a moment Anne felt angry. She had never wanted to acknowledge that relationship between the Marquess of Hallmere and her son, much as she was fond of Joshua and much as she appreciated all he had done for her and continued to do. But she curbed her first instinct, which was to instruct her son rather sharply to call Joshua Lord Hallmere. Calling him Cousin Joshua had clearly not been David’s idea.
“And are you good at it?” Anne asked.
“Not yet,” he admitted. “But the duchess told me I had promise after she had hit a four off me, and I shattered the wickets when Lord Rannulf was up at bat, though I think he let me do it.”
“And so,” she said, smiling at him and stooping to pick up Jules Ashford, the toddler son of the Earl of Rosthorn, who was pulling insistently at David’s leg, “you are going to learn how to bowl him out even when he
is not letting you, are you?” She held the young child suspended above her head until he giggled, and then lowered him far enough to rub noses with him.
“Mama,” David said, a renewed element of eagerness in his voice. “Lady Rosthorn is going painting this morning, and she has said I may go with her. She has an easel and paints I can use. May I go? Please? And will you come to watch?”
“That is remarkably kind of her,” Anne said, while the child in her arms bounced and giggled and otherwise indicated that he wanted to be lifted into the air again. Anne obliged him and laughed up at him.
David had always loved to draw and paint, and she had always thought him good at it. Mr. Upton, art master at Miss Martin’s school, insisted that he had real talent that should be nurtured.
“You have made a friend for life, Miss Jewell,” the Earl of Rosthorn said from behind her. “But he will exhaust you given half a chance. Come here, mon fils.”
Jules was already reaching for him.
The countess had come into the nursery with her husband.
“Has your mama given you permission to come and paint, David?” she asked.
“I hope,” Anne said, “he will be no trouble to you.”
“None whatsoever,” the countess assured her, stooping to pick up her three-year-old, who had come skipping across the nursery to meet her. “I am delighted to discover a dedicated artist in a young boy. And you, Jacques, my sweetheart, are to go outside with Papa and Jules and Aunt Judith’s William to look at the sheep, perhaps even to ride one if Papa can catch one. Will that be fun?”
“Watching me chase after the sheep doubtless will be,” the earl said ruefully.
“You will come with David and me, Miss Jewell?” the countess asked. “I am going to paint the sea. I persist in believing that one day I will capture the very essence of it, though I have been told that doing so is as impossible as it would be to hold a cupful of it in my bare hand.”
“But you have not been told that by me, cherie,” the earl said. “I have seen you do it with a river-capture the essence of it, that is.”
It was a lovely, sunny morning, and Anne enjoyed herself even though she chose not to paint. The countess set up her easel on the very promontory where Mr. Butler had been standing three evenings ago. It seemed a rather bleak setting to Anne, who would have chosen somewhere more picturesque, but the countess explained her choice before sitting down on the coarse grass, clasping her arms about her knees, and withdrawing into a silent world of her own.
“My poor governess used to despair of me,” she said. “She would find the prettiest parts of the park at Lindsey Hall and instruct me to paint the flowers and the trees and the birds. And then she would hover over me as I painted and disapprove of everything I did while telling me exactly how I ought to be doing it. But painting has nothing to do with prettiness, Miss Jewell, or with following the rules. At least to me it does not. It has to do with getting inside what I see with my eyes to the reality within.”
“To see things as they see themselves,” David said unexpectedly.
“Ah.” The countess laughed. “You do understand, David. Have I chosen a place you would not have chosen for yourself? Have I been very selfish?”
“No, ma’am,” David assured her. “I can paint anywhere.”
Anne sat basking in the sunshine for what she was sure must have been a couple of hours while her two companions worked in silence.
She was to go walking with Mr. Butler again this afternoon, she thought. But this time they had a deliberate assignation. He had asked her and she had agreed. It was surprising that either had happened. She had had the distinct impression just two evenings ago that he did not really like her, though admittedly that was before they had sat and talked with each other for a while. And he was someone with whom she was not physically comfortable even though they had strolled on the beach with each other. It was not easy to look at him.
And yet what a conversation they had had! She could hardly believe she had spoken so openly to him about things she usually avoided admitting even to herself.
She rarely thought of herself as lonely.
She was twenty-nine years old. Ten years ago-a little longer than ten actually-she had looked forward to a life of conventional happiness with the man of her choice. She had still believed in happily-ever-after at that time. But then there had been David-and what had preceded David-and her planned future had been in tatters.
For nine years-almost ten-David had been her all in all. He was her present. But he was not her future-she was well aware of that. Was the future so important to her, then, even though it did not really exist except in the imagination? Ought not the present to be enough?
But it was not so much the future that she needed, she realized, as hope.
It was her lack of hope that made her lonely and occasionally brought her to the edge of what felt frighteningly like despair.
Would she live out her life at Claudia Martin’s school? She loved teaching there. She really did. And she was very fond of all the girls, especially the charity pupils, and of Claudia and Susanna, and the other teachers too to a slightly lesser degree. There was nothing at all bleak about the prospect of spending the rest of her life there.
Except that there was.
Now Mr. Butler had invited her to walk with him, and absurdly such a little thing felt like something rather momentous. He, a gentleman, the son of an earl, had invited her to walk out with him simply because he wished to spend more time with her. There could be no other reason. And she had agreed because she wished to spend more time with him.
It was as simple as that.
His looks did not really matter. This was no courtship, after all.
And truth to tell, she felt grateful-even honored-that he had even asked. In ten years no other man had asked her to go walking with him.
David was the first to finish painting. He cleaned his brushes and looked up at Anne.
“Do you want to come and see, Mama?” he asked her.
He had chosen to paint a single rock. It jutted out from the edge of the promontory, Anne could see, and would eventually break away altogether and fall to the beach below. But it still clung to the headland at a slight angle, and plants still grew in its cracks, connecting it to the land. David had painted it in such a way that Anne was made aware of details she had not noticed until now even though she had been sitting idle and with open eyes for a couple of hours. And he had used a multitude of colors to depict what to her unpracticed eye had seemed simply pale gray and green. Many an adult would have been proud to produce such a painting. She would have.
“Oh, David,” she said, squeezing his shoulders, “Mr. Upton really is right about you, is he not?”
“But it is so flat, Mama,” he protested.
The countess was smiling at them over the top of her easel.
“Miss Jewell,” she said, “you have been remarkably patient. Your son and I have not been scintillating company, have we? May I see your painting, David?”
She came and looked at it after he had nodded.
“Ah,” she said after staring at it for a whole minute in silence. “You do have an artist’s eye. Would you care to see mine?”
David dashed around to her easel and Anne followed.
“Oh, I say!” David said.
They both stood for several silent moments looking at her work.
She had painted the sea, sparkling in the sunshine and reflecting the blue of the sky and the few fluffy clouds that floated across it. But it was not a pretty picture, Anne thought. It was not merely a reproduction of the visual reality. It was hard to put into words what it was. It somehow took the viewer under the water and up to the sky. Or perhaps it was not even that. It was more as if one were being drawn into the water and into the sky.
What had David said? To see things as they see themselves. How had he known to say that?
“Oh, do look who is coming,” Lady Rosthorn said suddenly, smiling warmly and ra
ising one hand to wave. “Sydnam, well met.”
Anne turned her head sharply to look, and sure enough Mr. Butler was walking along the cliff path, dressed as he had been when she first saw him, with the addition of a hat. He doffed it even as she looked.
David collided hard with her side and shrank half behind her.
“Mama,” he whispered. It was half whimper.
“Good morning, Morgan, Miss Jewell,” he called, staying on the path. “Is it not a lovely one? I am taking a shortcut back from one of the farms.”
“And we have been painting, as you can see,” Lady Rosthorn told him. “Do you want to come and point out all the faults in my poor offering?”
It seemed to Anne that he hesitated for a few moments, but then he came. His eye met hers briefly, and she felt an absurd quickening of the pulse, as if they shared a secret. She was to meet him later. They were to go walking alone together.
How foolish to feel as if there were some sort of courtship proceeding. And how…horrifying.
“When did I ever criticize anything you painted, Morgan?” he asked, coming to stand before her easel while David pulled Anne out of the way. “I would not so presume.”
“You never did,” she admitted. “You were always kind and always encouraging. But I was always nervous when you of all people came to take a look.”
“This,” he said after standing in silence for what seemed like a long time, his head bent toward the painting, “is very good indeed, Morgan. You have grown immensely as an artist since I last saw any of your work.”
Lady Rosthorn smiled and moved closer to him, her head tilted to one side as she looked at the painting.
“Now I can see that perhaps it does have some merit,” she said, laughing. “But I brought out a fellow artist with me this morning. Have you met David Jewell, Miss Jewell’s son? David, this is Mr. Butler, the duke’s steward here and a very dear childhood friend of mine.”