by Mary Balogh
“Don’t shut me out of your life, Sydnam,” she said as if she knew very well what he was thinking. “We must try to make our marriage work if we possibly can. We were friends in Wales, were we not? Let’s continue to be friends now. I want to come with you.”
“Come, then,” he said grudgingly, finding his hat and waiting for her to pull on her warm new pelisse and tie the ribbons of her bonnet beneath her chin.
They walked without talking or touching down the driveway and across the Palladian bridge before he turned onto a path that led among the trees until it arrived at the marble temple folly that stood on the southern shore of the lake and made a picturesque prospect from the opposite shore.
It was a chilly, cloudy day and blustery too. The ground was carpeted with leaves, though there were still plenty left on the trees. Anne went to sit inside the shelter of the temple while he stood outside gazing across the choppy water.
He was not often depressed. He did not allow himself to be. Whenever his spirits threatened to droop, he always found more work to do. Work was an amazing antidote to depression. And he did not often give in to self-pity. It was tedious and cowardly and pointless. He preferred to count his blessings, which were many. He was alive. Even that was a miracle.
But just occasionally depression or self-pity or both assaulted him no matter how determinedly he tried to keep them at bay. He dreaded such times. Sometimes neither work nor positive thinking would help.
This was one of those times.
The smell of the oils was still in his head.
He still remembered the moment when he had lifted his hand to take the brush from David.
His right hand.
And he still remembered lifting his left hand to the canvas.
“Sydnam-”
He had almost forgotten Anne’s presence. She was his wife, his bride. She was bearing their child. And she had shown him enormous kindness even in the midst of her own pain.
“Sydnam,” she said again, “is there no way you can paint again?”
Ah. Already she understood him too well.
He stared bleakly into the folly.
“My right hand is no longer there,” he said. “My left will not do my bidding. You must have seen that this morning.”
“You used your mouth,” she said, “and changed your grip on the brush. And then you made brushstrokes that caused David to understand what you had been telling him.”
“I cannot produce art with my left fist and my mouth,” he said. “Forgive me, but you do not understand, Anne. There is the vision, but it flows down my right arm, which is not there. Am I to produce phantom paintings?”
“Perhaps,” she said, “you have allowed the vision to master you instead of bending it to your will.”
She was sitting very upright on the stone bench at the back of the folly, her feet together, her hands cradled in each other, palm-up, in her lap. She looked very much like the rather prim teacher she had been until a few days ago-and ever and always dazzlingly beautiful. He turned his head away.
“The vision is not like a muscle to be exercised,” he said softly. “I have lost an eye as well as an arm, Anne. I do not see properly. Everything is changed. Everything has narrowed and flattened and lost perspective. How could I even see accurately to paint?”
“Properly,” she said, picking up on the one word he had spoken. “How do we know what is proper or accurate vision?”
“That which involves two eyes?” he said rather bitterly.
“But whose two eyes?” she asked. “Have you ever watched a bird of prey hovering so high in the sky that it is almost indiscernible to the human eye and then diving to catch a mouse on the ground? Can you even begin to imagine the vision that bird has, Sydnam? Can you imagine seeing the world through its eyes? And have you seen a cat at night, able to see what is invisible to us in the darkness? What must it be like to see as a cat does? How do we know what is proper vision? Is there any such thing? Because you have only one eye, you see differently from me or from yourself when you had two. But is it therefore improper vision? Perhaps your artistic vision is great enough to see new meaning in things and to find a different way of expressing itself without in any way diminishing itself in the process. Perhaps it has needed the changes so that it may challenge you to do great things you never even imagined before.”
He stood looking out over the lake as she spoke, its surface gray and rough in the wind but nevertheless reflecting some of the myriad colors of autumn that the trees were sporting.
He felt a painful surge of love for her. She wanted so badly to help him, just as she had the night before last after he had woken from his nightmare. And yet there seemed no way he could help her.
“Anne,” he said, “I cannot paint again. I cannot. Yet I cannot live without painting.”
Those final words were wrenched unwillingly from him and horrified him. He had never dared even think such thoughts before. He dared not believe in the truth of them now. For if they were true, there was no real hope left in life.
Suddenly, without warning, he hit the very bottom of despair.
And then he was horrified anew as he sobbed aloud and, when he tried to strangle the sound, sobbed once more.
After that he could not stop the sobs that tore at his chest and embarrassed him horribly. He turned to stumble away, but two arms came about him and held him tightly even when he would have broken away from them.
“No,” Anne said, “it is all right. It is all right, my love. It is all right.”
Not once before now had he wept. He had screamed when he had been unable to stop himself, he had groaned and moaned and later raged and suffered in silence and endured. But he had never wept.
Now he could not stop weeping as Anne held him and crooned to him as if he were a child who had hurt himself. And like a child that had hurt itself, he drew comfort from her arms and her warmth and her murmurings. And finally the sobs turned to a few shuddering hiccups and stopped entirely.
“My God, Anne,” he said, pulling back from her and fumbling in his pocket for a handkerchief. “I am so sorry. What kind of a man will you take me for?”
“One who has conquered every aspect of his pain except the deepest,” she said.
He sighed and realized suddenly that it had started to rain.
“Come and shelter inside,” he said, taking her hand and drawing her back under the roof of the temple. “I am so sorry, Anne. This morning seriously discomposed me. But I am glad I did it. David was happy. And he is going to be good with oils.”
She had laced her fingers with his.
“You must face the final, deepest pain,” she said. “No, more than that. You have, in fact, just faced it. But you have looked at it with despair. There must be hope, Sydnam. There is your artistic vision and your talent, and there is you. They have to be enough to propel you onward even without your right arm and your right eye.”
He raised their hands and kissed the back of hers before releasing it. He tried to smile at her.
“I will teach David,” he said. “I will be a father to him in every way I can. I will ride with him. I will-”
“You must paint with him,” she said. “You must paint.”
But though he had calmed down considerably, there was still a coldness and a rawness at the core of his being, where he had not dared tread during all the years since he returned from the Peninsula.
“And you,” he said, realizing something suddenly with blinding clarity when he had not even been thinking about it, “need to go home, Anne.”
There was a brief, tense silence between them while the faint rushing sound of rain beyond the shelter mingled with the lapping sounds of the lake water.
“To Ty Gwyn?” she asked.
“To Gloucestershire,” he said.
“No.”
“Sometimes,” he said, “it is necessary to go back before we can move forward. At least I think that must be so, unwelcome as the thought is. I suppose we both n
eed to go back, Anne. Perhaps if we do it, both of us, there will be hope. I cannot see it in my own case, but I must try.”
When he looked at her, he found her staring back, her face pale, her look inscrutable.
“It is what you want me to do,” he said.
“But…” She paused for a long moment. “I cannot and will not go home, Sydnam. It would change and solve nothing. You are wrong.”
“So be it, then,” he said, taking her hand in his again.
They sat in silence, watching the rain.
Anne eyed the horses apprehensively. They looked so very large and full of energy, and the stable yard seemed to be filled with them. It was some time since she had ridden. But she would do so this morning in a good cause. She glanced over to where Sydnam and Kit were supervising David as he mounted. Having accomplished the task successfully, her son gazed down, triumphant and happy, at both men-and then across the stable yard at her.
“Look at me, Mama,” he called.
“I am looking,” she assured him.
Kit had turned his attention to Lauren, helping her mount her sidesaddle, and lifting Sophia up to sit with her.
Sydnam came striding toward Anne.
“Riding is not something you forget,” he assured her, correctly interpreting the look on her face. He grinned at her in his attractive, lopsided way. “And Kit has chosen a good horse for you.”
“Meaning she is ancient and lame in all four legs?” she asked hopefully.
He laughed.
“Set your boot on my hand and you will be in the saddle in no time,” he said.
“Let me do that, Syd,” Kit suggested, coming toward them.
“I thought I broke you of that habit years ago,” Sydnam said, still grinning.
“Of underestimating you?” Kit said. “Go ahead, then, and show off for your bride. Impress all of us.” He was chuckling too.
Anne set her booted foot in Sydnam’s hand and found it as solid as a mounting block. A few moments later she sat in her sidesaddle, smiling down at him as she arranged her skirts about her. Kit had slapped a hand on his shoulder. They were both laughing.
“You have made your point,” Kit said. “No one needs two arms. The second one is superfluous.”
Just yesterday afternoon Anne had been in the depths of gloom, sitting in the temple folly by the lake while it rained, convinced that she had made a terrible mistake in marrying Sydnam, convinced that what she had said to him-quite unplanned-had hurt him beyond measure, and convinced that he was terribly wrong in saying that they-she-must go back before they could go forward. The only chance anyone had in life was to move constantly onward.
But then, after the rain had stopped, they had picked their way through the wet woods and walked side by side up the long driveway, and David had met them in the hall with his excited tale of riding on his own, first with a leading rope and then with none, beyond the paddock and to the limits of the park before turning around and being rained upon before they arrived safely back at the stables.
“You should have seen me, Mama,” he had cried. “You should have seen me, sir. Uncle Kit says I have a good seat.”
“I could see that yesterday.” Sydnam had reached out a hand to ruffle his hair, and David had beamed happily up at him.
And suddenly a great deal of the gloom had dispersed.
And suddenly and for no real reason it had seemed that after all there was hope.
This morning they were going to ride over to Lindsey Hall to call upon the Duke and Duchess of Bewcastle. When they had mentioned their plans in the nursery after breakfast, David had begged to go too and had renewed his pleas even after Anne had explained to him that all the children with whom he had played at Glandwr were now at their separate homes.
“But James will be there,” he had reminded her. “Let me come, Mama. Please, sir?”
And then, of course, Andrew had wanted to go too. And Sophia had wormed her way into the group and tugged at the tassel on Sydnam’s Hessian boot to gain his attention.
Yes, this morning, despite a night spent at opposite sides of their bed and no real resolution to any of their problems, Anne was filled with hope. The sun was even shining again from a cloudless sky, and there was warmth in the air.
Andrew, mounted on his pony, was attached to Kit’s horse by a leading rope, the understanding being that he would ride as far as he was able and then be taken up before his father.
The two men mounted last.
Anne watched Sydnam, appreciating anew the power of his leg muscles, his sense of balance, his control over a horse that was not even his own. He sat squarely in the saddle and gathered the reins in his hand.
“Ho!” David said admiringly. “How did you do that, sir?”
“There is very little a person cannot do if he has the will to do it,” Sydnam said, smiling at the boy and glancing at Anne. “A horse is not ridden with the hands, after all, but with the thighs. I heard Uncle Kit telling you that the day before yesterday.”
“I did not know then that you could ride,” David said, “or you could have taught me.”
“I would not be able to do my work at Glandwr if I could not ride, would I?” Sydnam said. “But now that you can ride, you will be able to come with me whenever you wish.”
“Will I?” David sounded interested.
“Of course,” Sydnam said. “You are my boy, are you not?”
They rode off side by side, following after Kit and Lauren and Andrew, and Anne drew her horse in alongside them. Sydnam smiled at her across David’s horse, and she smiled back. There was genuine warmth in the wordless communication, she thought. They were a family.
They rode at a very sedate pace all the way to Lindsey Hall, much to Anne’s relief, though she thought that the men might find the speed irksome. Lauren looked back when they were almost there and called out to Anne.
“I am always thankful to have Andrew with us when we go riding,” she said. “Kit is less likely to challenge me to a race.”
They both laughed.
“A race?” Kit said. “Heaven help us, a race with Lauren involves taking our horses into a fairly moderate trot. It is enough to make one weep, Syd, I swear.”
But Anne’s attention was soon taken by the approach to Lindsey Hall along a straight, tree-lined driveway-the very driveway down which Claudia must have stridden on the day she resigned from her post as Lady Hallmere’s governess. The house itself, huge and sprawling, was a mixture of architectural designs, testament to its great age and to the attempts of former dukes to enlarge and improve it. It was impressive and surprisingly beautiful. Before it was a large circular flower garden, still colorful though it was late in the year. At its center was a massive stone fountain, though the waterworks must have been turned off for the approaching winter.
After dismounting at the stables and turning the horses over to the care of grooms, they were shown into the house, and Anne’s breath was fairly taken away by the medieval splendor of it, with its intricately carved minstrel gallery, its huge stone fireplace and whitewashed walls covered with shields and banners, and the enormous oak banqueting table that stretched along its length.
But they were not left long to contemplate it. The duchess came hurrying into the hall only a minute or two after the butler had disappeared to announce their arrival. Both her arms were stretched out ahead of her.
“Lauren, Kit,” she said. “And Andrew and Sophie. What a delight! And Miss Jewell-it is you. And David. And Mr. Butler.” She laughed. “Oh, what is this? Do tell me.”
“Not Miss Jewell, your grace,” Sydnam said, “but Mrs. Butler.”
The duchess clasped her hands to her bosom and beamed from one to the other of them. But before she could say any more, the Duke of Bewcastle himself strolled into the hall, his eyebrows raised, his quizzing glass in his hand and halfway to his eye.
“Oh, Wulfric,” the duchess said, hurrying to his side and taking his arm with both hands, “here are Lauren and Kit
and the children, and Mr. Butler has married Miss Jewell after all. We were right, you see, and you were wrong.”
“I beg your pardon, my love,” his grace said, making a slight bow that encompassed them all, “but I must protest in my own defense. I do not believe I ever said that either you or my brothers and sisters and their spouses were wrong. What I did say, if you will remember, is that matchmaking was an undignified and unnecessary activity when the two people concerned were quite capable of conducting their own courtship. It would seem, then, that I was right. And so you have taken leave of absence from your post in order to marry, have you, Sydnam? My felicitations. Ma’am?” He bowed again to Anne.
“And we are going to have a new baby,” David blurted happily.
The duchess’s hands flew to her mouth, though her eyes danced with merriment above them. Kit and Lauren were very quiet. The duke raised his quizzing glass all the way to his silver eye and directed it at David.
“Are you, indeed?” he said frostily. “But I would wager, my boy, that that was your mama’s secret to tell-or not tell. I doubt you would be delighted if she divulged one of your secrets.”
The duchess lowered her hands and stepped closer to hug David.
“But it is the most splendid secret in the world,” she said, “and belongs to your whole family, not just to your mama. But why are we standing here just as if there were no nursery for the children to play in and no morning room where there is a warm fire for the rest of us to take coffee? Mama and Eleanor are up there and will be delighted to welcome company.”
Anne felt somewhat as she had felt on her arrival at Alvesley. Why had she not thought of having a word with David before they came here? She glanced helplessly at Sydnam, who looked back, a twinkle in his eye. The wretch! He was actually enjoying this!
The duchess linked an arm through hers and led her in the direction of the staircase.
“I am so very happy for you, Mrs. Butler,” she said. “Is it not the most glorious feeling in the world to discover that one is with child? Both Wulfric and I believed when we married that we could not have children. James is our miracle, the little rascal. He kept his nurse up half of last night with his crying and then fell promptly asleep after his feed this morning when I wished to play with him.”