by Mary Balogh
“Henry did not write,” she said.
No, he would not have done.
“And then, just three weeks after her first letter,” she said, “my mother wrote again to announce that Sarah, my younger sister, had just been married-to Henry Arnold. One month after my letter must have arrived. Just time for the banns to be called. She added again that perhaps it would be best if I did not come home-and I assumed she meant ever.”
Sydnam’s hand lay still in her hair.
“I did not know how many more blows I could take,” she said, her voice more high-pitched. “First, Albert. And then the discovery that I was with child. Then my dismissal by the Marchioness of Hallmere-Albert’s mother. And then rejection by my own mother and father. And finally the betrayal. You cannot know how dreadful that was, Sydnam. I had loved Henry with all my young heart. And Sarah was my beloved sister. We had confided all our youthful hopes and dreams in each other. She knew how I felt about him.”
She buried her face against his shoulder. He turned his face to kiss the top of her head and realized that she was weeping. He held her close, as she had held him just two days ago. He did not attempt to speak to her. What was there to say?
She was still at last and quiet.
“Do you wonder,” she asked him, “that I have never gone home?”
“No,” he said.
“My mother writes at Christmas and my birthday,” she told him. “She never says a great deal of any significance, and she has never once mentioned David, though whenever I write back I tell her all about him.”
“But she does write,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I tell you what I would do,” he said, kissing the top of her head again, “if Albert Moore were still alive. I would find him, and I would take him limb from limb even with my one hand.”
She half choked on a laugh.
“Would you?” she said. “Would you really? I would almost pity him. Almost.”
They fell silent for a few moments.
“What I have never been able to contemplate with any calmness,” she said, “is the fact that David is his son. He even looks like him. I try so very hard not to see that. I did not even know I was about to admit it aloud now until the words came out of my mouth. He looks like him.”
“But David is not Albert,” Sydnam said. “I am not my father, Anne, and you are not your mother. We are separate persons even if heredity does cause some physical resemblance at times. David is David. He is not even you.”
She sighed.
“How did Albert Moore die?” he asked. “Apart from the fact that he drowned, I mean?”
“Oh.” He could hear that the breath she drew was ragged. “I was already with child and living in the village. Lady Chastity Moore came one evening and told me that Albert and Joshua were out in a fishing boat. Joshua was apparently confronting him over what had happened. But Lady Chastity, Albert’s sister, was going down to the harbor to await their return. She had discovered the truth-from Prudence, I suppose. She had a gun. I went with her.”
“He was shot?” Sydnam asked.
“No,” she said. “When the boat came back, Joshua was rowing it and Albert was swimming alongside. Apparently he had jumped out when Joshua threatened him. Joshua turned without seeing us and rowed away as soon as he saw that Albert could wade safely to shore, but Lady Chastity raised the gun and would not let Albert come to land until he had promised to confess to his father and to leave home forever. He laughed at her and swam away. It was a rather stormy night. He never did come back. His body was discovered later.”
“Ah,” Sydnam said.
Sometimes, it seemed, justice was done.
They lay there in silence for a while.
“I will take Henry Arnold limb from limb if you wish,” he said at last. “Do you?”
“Oh, no.” She laughed softly and touched his face-the damaged side-with one hand. “No, Sydnam. I stopped hating him a long time ago.”
“And did you also stop loving him?” he asked softly.
She drew back her head and looked at him. She was flushed and red-eyed and lovely.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes, I did. And I am glad now that he did not have the courage to stand by me. If he had, there would not be you.”
“And that would be bad?” he asked.
“Yes.” She stroked her fingers lightly over his cheek. “Yes, it would.”
And she turned farther onto her side in order to kiss him on the lips. He felt himself stir into an unwelcome arousal.
“It is hard to understand,” she said, “how if all the bad things had not happened in both our lives, we would not have met. We would not be here now. But it is true, is it not?”
“It is true,” he said.
“Has it been worth it?” she asked. “Going through all we have been through in order that we may be together now like this?”
He could no longer imagine his life without Anne in it.
“It has been worth it,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, “it has.”
She gazed steadily at him.
“Make love to me,” she said.
He gazed back at her, and she licked her lips.
“It is bright and sunny here,” she said. “It feels…clean here. I want to feel clean again. I don’t believe I have felt quite clean in ten years. How foolish a thing is that? I feel so…soiled.”
“Shh, Anne.” He turned onto his side and set his mouth to hers. “Don’t upset yourself again.”
“Make love to me,” she said. “Make me clean again. Please make me clean.”
“Anne,” he said. “Ah, my dearest.”
“But perhaps,” she said, “you do not want to. I have not been-”
He kissed her into silence.
She had not even known that about herself-that she felt unclean. The hurt, the ugliness, the injustice, the pain had all been pushed ruthlessly inside her, beneath the necessity of living on, of maintaining dignity and integrity, of earning a living, of raising a son.
She had never talked it all out before now. She had never even allowed herself to think it all through. She had denied her own suffering. She had never wept-until now, today.
But the weeping had eased the pain, had enabled her to put it all in the past-Albert Moore, Henry Arnold, Sarah, her parents. All of it.
And now what was left was the Anne who had survived it all and found solace with another lonely soul, whose life had been as turned inside out as hers had been by circumstances beyond his control. He was here with her now-Sydnam Butler, her husband, her lover.
They were here in this lovely place, just the two of them, surrounded by natural beauty and solitude.
All was perfect-except this feeling of being unclean, spoiled.
Yet cleanliness, peace, joy were surely within her reach at last. They were contained in the power, the energy of love. She had reached out to Sydnam with a love that went far beyond the merely romantic, and now she knew that she could also receive love, that at last-oh, surely-she was worthy of being loved.
Even if he could not give her the sort of love that any woman dreamed of having from her mate…
It did not matter.
He was Sydnam, and he could…
“Make me clean,” she murmured again against his mouth.
He remained on his side facing her as he raised her skirts and unbuttoned his breeches and stroked her stomach and her hip and her inner thighs with his lovely warm, long-fingered left hand. She gazed into his face, so beautiful despite the burns and scars-no, beautiful because of them, because of the person they had made him into. Behind his head and all about them the sky was blue and sunfilled.
He touched the moist heat between her thighs.
“You are ready, Anne?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
He lifted her leg over his hip, adjusted his position, and pressed slowly into her. He kept his head back the whole time and held her gaze with his own.
&n
bsp; It was exquisite. And it was Sydnam who was inside her. She closed her muscles about him, holding him deep, and smiled.
“Yes,” she murmured.
Perhaps, she thought over the next few minutes, he would not have chosen her as the companion of his life if he had been given a free choice, but he was nevertheless a man filled with love, with tenderness, with compassion. He loved her slowly, deeply, rhythmically, very deliberately, his eye on hers. She bit her lower lip as swirls of pleasure and of wonder radiated up through her womb to fill her whole being with warmth and light until finally there was no room left for ugliness or hatred or bitterness.
Only love.
Simply love.
He kissed her as he released into her and something in her flowed to meet him.
It was surely the most glorious moment of her whole life. She could smell grass and water and sunlight and sex.
“Anne,” he whispered to her. “You are so beautiful. So very beautiful.”
“And clean,” she said, smiling sleepily at him as he withdrew from inside her. “Clean again. And whole again. Thank you.”
His lips rested warm against hers again as she sank into sleep.
“They have gone? Already?”
The Duchess of Bewcastle sank into a chair in the drawing room at Alvesley and held her hands out to warm them at the fire.
“They left this morning,” Lauren said. “How disappointing that you missed seeing them.”
“You will be thinking me very rag-mannered,” the duchess said, smiling at the countess and Lauren, “as if I came here only to see Mr. and Mrs. Butler when in reality I came just as much to see you. But it is a disappointment to find them gone, I must confess, Lauren. It has been bothering me that they did not have much of a wedding.”
“We were upset about that too, Christine,” the countess said. “But they were in a hurry to marry, you know, because…Well, because they were in love, I suppose.”
The duchess dimpled.
“Yes,” she said, “David told us all about that. The poor child even had to endure the full force of Wulfric’s quizzing glass as a consequence.”
All three ladies dissolved into laughter.
“Sydnam is painting again,” Lauren said, leaning forward in her chair, “with his left hand and his mouth. And the one painting he showed us was wonderful, was it not, Mother, though he declared that it was perfectly dreadful. He said it with a smile, though, and it was clear he was pleased with himself and determined to try again. Father had to leave the room in a hurry, but we could all hear him blowing his nose very loudly outside the door.”
“Oh,” the duchess said, her hands clasped to her bosom, “Wulfric will be pleased-about Mr. Butler painting again, that is. And so will Morgan. I must write to her.”
“And it appears that it is all Anne’s doing,” the countess said. “We must thank you, Christine, for inviting her to Glandwr during the summer and giving Sydnam a chance to meet her.”
“But it was Freyja who invited her,” the duchess said. “Joshua and David’s father were cousins, you know, and Joshua is very fond of the boy. But I will take credit if you insist. If I had not decided to go to Wales with Wulfric after James’s christening, after all, then no one else would have gone there, would they? And Anne would not have been invited.”
“We have grown exceedingly fond of her,” Lauren said.
“We all tried very hard to bring them together during the summer,” the duchess told them. “All except Wulfric and Aidan, who have the peculiar and very male notion that true love never needs a helping hand.”
They all laughed again.
“I do wish they had stayed here a little longer,” she added.
“They are on their way to Gloucestershire,” the countess explained, “to visit Anne’s family.”
“Indeed?” The duchess looked interested. “Joshua told us she was estranged from them. I do think it is sad to be estranged from one’s family. I know from experience, though it was in-laws in my case-in-laws from my first marriage.”
“We have guessed,” Lauren said, “that it is Sydnam who has persuaded Anne to go home.”
“Ah.” The duchess sighed and sat back in her chair, her hands warm again, “it really is turning into a good marriage, is it not? But they did not have much of a wedding for all that. When I broached the matter with Wulfric last evening, he insisted that Mr. Butler would probably hate any fuss, but he did finally relent and agree to allow me to organize a grand wedding reception for them. I came to consult you about it. But I am too late-they are gone. How very provoking!”
“Oh,” Lauren said, “how wonderful that would have been. I wish I had thought of it myself.”
The duchess sighed. “Wulfric will look smug when I go home and tell him they are gone,” she said.
“It was a very good thought, Christine,” the countess told her.
“Well,” she said, looking from one to the other of them, “there can be no wedding reception at Lindsey Hall within the next few days after all. But I am not discouraged. How many people could be assembled there at such short notice, after all? Perhaps it was not the best of plans.”
“You have another?” Lauren asked.
The duchess chuckled. “I always have another plan,” she said. “Shall we put our heads together?”
Mr. Jewell lived with his wife in a modest square manor just beyond the village of Wyckel in Gloucestershire, a picturesque part of the country.
It occurred to Sydnam as the carriage drove through the village and then turned between two stone gateposts and covered the short distance across a paved courtyard to the front door that they must be no more than twenty-five or thirty miles from Bath.
Anne had been that close to her family for several years.
She was looking very smart in a russet brown pelisse and matching bonnet with burnt-orange ribbons. She was also looking rather pale. Her gloved hand lay in his-today he was sitting beside her while David rode with his back to the horses. At the moment his nose was pressed against the glass and excitement was fairly bursting out of him.
Sydnam smiled at Anne and lifted her hand to his lips. She smiled back, but he could see that even her lips were pale.
“I am glad I wrote to say I was coming,” she said.
“At least,” he said, “the gate was open.”
He wondered how she would feel-and how David would feel-if they were refused admittance. But he still believed this was the right thing to do. Anne had faced most of the darkness in her life on the little island at Alvesley four days ago, and it seemed that the sunshine had got inside her since then. They had made love each night, and it had been clear to him that doing so had given her as much pleasure as it had given him.
But today, of course, the sun was not shining-either beyond the confines of the carriage or through her.
“This is where my grandmama and grandpapa live?” David asked rather redundantly.
“It is indeed,” Anne said as the coachman opened the door and set down the steps. “This is where I grew up.”
Her voice was low and pleasant. Her face looked like parchment.
The house door opened before anyone had knocked on it, and a servant, presumably the housekeeper, stepped outside and bobbed a small curtsy to Sydnam, who had already descended to the courtyard, his good side to her.
“Good day, sir,” she said. “Ma’am.”
She looked up at Anne, who was descending, one hand on his.
But even as Sydnam opened his mouth to reply, the servant stepped to one side and a lady and gentleman of middle years appeared in the doorway and came through it. Two other, younger, couples followed them out, and behind them a group of children clustered in the doorway and peered curiously out.
Ah, Sydnam thought, they had gathered in droves to greet the lost sheep, had they? Perhaps on the assumption that there was safety in numbers?
Anne’s hand tightened in his.
“Anne,” the older lady said, stepping a
head of the gentleman Sydnam assumed was Mr. Jewell. She was plump and pleasant-looking, neatly dressed and with a lacy cap covering her graying hair. “Oh, Anne, it is you!”
She took a couple more steps forward, both hands stretched out before her.
Anne did not move. She kept one of her hands in Sydnam’s and reached up to David with the other. He came scrambling down the steps and stood beside her, his eyes wide with excitement.
“Yes, it is I,” Anne said, her voice cool-and her mother stopped in her tracks and dropped her arms to her sides.
“You have come home,” Mrs. Jewell said. “And here we all are to greet you.”
Anne’s eyes went beyond her mother to survey her father and the two younger couples. She looked toward the doorway and the children fairly bursting out through it.
“We have called here on our way home,” she said with slight emphasis on the last words. “I have brought David to meet you. My son. And Sydnam Butler, my husband.”
Mrs. Jewell’s eyes had been fairly devouring David, but she looked politely at Sydnam, who had turned fully to face them all. She recoiled quite noticeably. There was a sort of collective stiffening of manner among the others too. Some of the children disappeared inside the house. A few bolder ones openly gawked.
Just a few months ago Sydnam might have been upset-especially about the children. He had spent years basically hidden away in a place where he was known and accepted and very few strangers ever came. But it did not matter to him any longer. Anne had accepted him as he was. More important, perhaps, he had finally accepted himself for what he was, with all his limitations and all the exhilarating challenges they offered him.
Besides, this moment was not about him. It was all about Anne.
“Mr. Butler.” Mrs. Jewell curtsied as he bowed and turned to introduce the others-Mr. Jewell; their son, Mr. Matthew Jewell, and Susan, his wife; Sarah Arnold, their daughter, and Mr. Henry Arnold, her husband.
Sydnam’s eye alighted on that last gentleman and saw a man of medium height and pleasant looks and balding fair hair-neither a hero nor a villain as far as looks went. He exchanged a brief but measured look with the man and had the satisfaction of seeing that Arnold knew that he knew.