My Saving Grace

by Harmon, Danelle

  “Of course I love you! You’re my friend!”

  Her friend.

  That damnable, wretched, gut-twisting, heartbreaking word, that king of obscenities that refused to leave him alone.

  Friend.

  He put the napkin on the tray. “I think you should probably go.”

  “You want me to leave?”

  “Yes. Go back to Norfolk, Grace.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now. I am exhausted. I need to sleep. It’s improper for you to be in my bedroom.”

  “But I—”

  “And it’s not right for you to even be here in Hampshire. It is not fair to Captain Ponsonby. People will talk. He will be the subject of scorn and you, the target of vicious gossip. That’s no way to start your marriage.”

  She stared at him, stricken.

  He gazed steadily back, his emotions, his demeanor, his very words belying the rising anguish in his heart that threatened to overwhelm him.

  “And now, Lady Grace, if you will go find my mother, I find myself in need of her medicine. A hefty dose of it, if you please. Please tell her to bring some.”

  He shut his eyes so he could not see her tragic face.

  So that she could not see how perilously close he was to falling apart.

  The dram was wretched and foul. Miserable, even. But it had nothing on the pain of a broken heart, and Del wanted only to escape back into the oblivion that it offered.

  37

  For a long moment, Grace could not move.

  And then she got slowly to her feet, her knees shaking, one hand on the table for support.

  He had just rocked her world on its axis. Dismissed her with absolutely no hint of emotion. The tears she had only just quelled threatened to return, to become one rising wail of anguish in her own throat. How could he be so stoic? So steady and unaffected?

  She looked at him lying there, his eyes shut tightly, his jaw clenched. At his dark hair curling against the clean white pillowcases. At his suntanned neck, the proud rise of his shoulders. This would probably be the last time she would ever see him, and most certainly, the last time she would see him in such an intimate setting. Once she left here, that would be it. He would have come and gone like a meteor across the sky of her life, his purpose served, the damage he’d unwittingly done to her own heart, her own ability to understand its strange movings, a scar from which she might never recover. Any interaction the two of them might have from now until the end of time would be no more than a few formally-spoken words at a naval function, a sea officer’s ball, someone’s wedding— and probably not even that.

  And yet she couldn’t end their last moments together like this. Couldn’t just leave. Sick as a dog he was, and yet she ached to crawl into bed with him, to nestle up against him and rest her head in the perfectly-sized cup of his shoulder, to listen to his heart beat against her ear and weep her tears within his embrace and feel his hand stroking her hair, telling her that everything would be okay.

  She didn’t want their last moments together be so very, very awful.

  She wanted to remember him by the memories they had made, the laughter they had shared, the friendship that could be no more.

  “Grace?”

  She came back to herself, pulled her attention from his shoulders and up to his face. To the steady gray eyes that had opened, colder now, resolute and giving nothing away as they regarded her with a flat detachment. She couldn’t hold his gaze, and her own dropped to the broad, muscular hand that rested atop the counterpane.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “You’re right. It was unwise for me to come here, and I regret it.” She swallowed hard. “But I’d have regretted it far more if I hadn’t come, and you’d been as ill as was originally thought... and died.”

  He said nothing for a long moment. At long last, he raised his hand, brushed away the heavy dark curls falling over his brow, and reached for a glass of water near the bed. He drank. She watched his Adams apple move up and down and ached for him in a way that already made her disloyal to Captain Ponsonby.

  As if she hadn’t been already, in thought and deed, if not word?

  He finished the glass, put it down, settled back and looked at her. “You should go,” he said again.

  She nodded, and when her voice came out, it was little more than a whisper. “Yes.”

  “I daresay that we shall not see each other again.” And when she didn’t respond, “Nor should we.”

  “No... it would be best if we do not.”

  “I will not be writing to you.”

  “Nor I, you...”

  “Goodbye.”

  She stood there, unmoving. The situation merited that she leave, and the sooner the better. Propriety demanded it. Respect for his feelings demanded it. The offer she’d accepted from Sheldon Ponsonby demanded it. And yet, she could not move.

  “I need to get some sleep, Grace.”

  She took a deep and steadying breath. Hugged her arms to her chest, sucked her lips between her teeth, told herself not to look at him or go anywhere near him, but to simply nod and walk away.

  Instead, she stood there gazing down at him. “Thank you, Captain Lord,” she whispered, and her own voice sounded tremulous to her ears. “I will never forget all that you have done for me.”

  He turned his head on the pillow to stare at the darkened fireplace.

  She began to bend down toward him. Just to drop a kiss on his brow. Nothing more.

  “Go,” he said, stopping her, and this time his voice was harsh. No more gentleness, just raw pain that he could no longer hold in, let alone hide.

  Grace froze, stepped back, and nodded stiffly. Then, her eyes filling with fresh tears, her head high, she turned and walked from the room. It was only once she had shut the door behind her and stood all by herself in the great corridor that she pulled out her handkerchief, pressed it to her eyes, and, pushing a fist against her mouth to hold in the sobs, made her way quietly to her own room.

  Tomorrow she would return to Norfolk and whatever her future with Ponsonby held.

  Tomorrow could not come quickly enough.

  * * *

  She did not come to visit him the following morning. No goodbyes, no last glimpses of her face, nothing by which to remember her save for a long dark strand of her hair that Del, staring morosely at the chair in which she had sat the night before, found on the carpet just beneath it.

  He was not Ponsonby. The hair brought him no disgust. He bent down upon spying it, picked it up, pressed it to his cheek and shut his eyes. He stood there for a long moment. And then he went to the desk, found a sheet of vellum, and carefully folded it up within the paper.

  He tucked the paper beneath his pillow.

  Colin did come in to say farewell, avoiding the subject of Lady Grace Fairchild and telling Del he must come and spend more time with him and his family the next time he was back in England. They embraced, wished each other well, and his brother left the room. Del heard his hitching gait moving down the hall, then down the great staircase. Heard goodbyes being said somewhere downstairs, and then voices out on the lawn beneath his window.

  He got out of bed. Parted the drapes and looked out to the drive below.

  She was there, standing with Polly and his brother as they waited for the coach to be brought round. There was something small and fragile about her in the way she stood. Something vulnerable, but fiercely resolved as well. Del could not see her face. He stood carefully well back from the window, peering out from behind the safety of one heavy drape that he was now crushing in his hand.

  There, the coach. A footman letting down the stairs. His mother and father embracing Colin, speaking a few words to Lady Grace. His mother handing Colin a basket, presumably of enough Irish bread and carefully wrapped cheeses to see them safely to the next coaching inn, if not Norfolk itself.

  Go to her. Stop her. End this madness and fight for her!

  Del shut his eyes, trying to ignore the voice in his head. It
was not his own. It was hers, Gráinne’s, fearsome, urgent and strong.

  Go, my son! You will lose her!

  He shook his head, watching her embrace his mother down there on the drive. “She was never mine to lose,” he said quietly.

  The girl he loved took his brother’s hand and lifted her foot to the lowered step. Del stilled, watching her, his heart aching. But in that last moment she paused and turned her face up, searching the house, the windows, one of which he stood behind with a fistful of the drape balled in his fingers like a lifeline.

  He did not move.

  She could not see him.

  And then she turned and continued her climb into the coach. Her maid and Colin followed her, and a moment later the driver was clambering up onto the box and the vehicle was starting to move off.

  Del never saw it.

  He had already turned away, the drape falling shut behind him.

  38

  Later that week in Norfolk, Lieutenant James Akers called for a side party to pipe his captain back aboard.

  The boat had put off from the dock at King’s Lynn, slicing through The Wash with unerring purpose. Now, Sheldon Ponsonby came up through the entry port, bright hair gleaming in the slanting light of the afternoon, nose straight and strong, jaw hard with what looked like irritation.

  And why not?

  Everyone on the frigate knew he’d offered for that silly bit of fluff, and no sooner had she accepted than she’d fled to Hampshire to see to the welfare of the dying Captain Lord.

  Dying, Akers thought to himself, because of me.

  He felt the ever-present cloud of guilt where that whole affair was concerned, something that had been eating at the pit of his stomach ever since he’d rushed to the mark, desperate to get there before his opponent, and fired his pistol in panic. He’d tried drinking away his remorse. Tried to ignore the whispers about his cowardice. He didn’t know what was worse; the guilt his own mind threw at him, or the silent snickers from his peers. He hadn’t really wanted to hurt, let alone kill the other man— that enmity was reserved for Lady Grace Fairchild, not her lovesick defender who deserved far better than that fickle bitch— but it rather seemed that he had. Now, the look on Sheldon Ponsonby’s face as he doffed his hat to the quarterdeck and snapped an order to make the ship ready for the admiral’s imminent return, made him wonder why the captain’s visage looked so dark.

  “Sir Graham and his family will be back aboard shortly, Mr. Akers, and we shall sail on the evening tide.”

  “Our destination, sir?”

  “Portsmouth. The admiral is keen to rejoin his flagship and get the hell out of England.” A muscle in his jaw twitched with irritation. “And I can’t say as if I bloody blame him.”

  Akers cleared his throat. “Sir?”

  His captain rounded on him. “I offered for the girl. Damned fine dowry, she has. But I don’t hold with her flying down to Hampshire to see to the welfare of another man. I don’t hold with it at all! Damned humiliating, if you ask me.”

  “He is just a friend to her, sir.”

  “Of course he is. Man’s as dull as a dry stick, nothing about him to attract a girl like Lady Grace, that’s for sure. No, Mr. Akers, it’s what it looks like to others. Tongues are already wagging. I’ve caught the glances, heard the whispers that I’m already being cuckolded. I won’t stand for it, I tell you. I won’t!”

  “Well, word has it she’s back now. She didn’t stay long.” Akers swallowed hard. “And Captain Lord?”

  “Not on his deathbed as everyone thought. Just a nasty cold.”

  “So all is well, then.”

  “It’s bloody well not! Last night I supped with two frigate captains, a lieutenant from the ’74, Dolphin, and some relation of Lord Nelson’s, all of whom were making comments about my missing fiancée and her headlong flight to Hampshire to comfort a man who fought a duel over her. Such flagrant disobedience won’t be tolerated, I tell you. I like a spirited woman as much as any, but there’s a limit and she’ll need to be reined in. What, does that horrify you? Yes, I’m angry! You would be too if it you were the one being mocked by your peers. Delmore Lord shouldn’t have fought a duel over her and you, Akers, shouldn’t have let yourself get dragged into such a damned mess. Makes me look bad, you know. Quite bad. Damn it all!”

  “Do you love her?”

  Ponsonby came up short, as if he’d run headlong into the mainmast.

  “What?”

  “I asked, sir, do you love her?”

  “Love? What the devil does that have to do with anything? She’s of good family, closely related to a vice-admiral, and heavily dowered. No need for love. That’s for fools, not sensible men who know exactly where they want their career paths to go and are in the business of mapping out a plan on how to get there. Besides, the girl is all agog over me, so there’s at least some affection there. It’ll have to do for us both, I daresay.”

  “Perhaps you will come to... to love her in time, sir.”

  “Damned if I care one way or another about such nonsense. I like ’em blonde, anyhow. But it’ll be an advantageous match and that’s all that matters.” Ponsonby started to stalk away, grabbing a glass from the rack as he did. “See to the launch would you? I believe that’s Sir Graham’s coach making its way to the waterfront now. Just what I need. The admiral and his out-of-control, squalling brats. I tell you, if I ever have children they’ll be seen and not heard!”

  Ponsonby moved off, taking his foul mood with him. Akers stood for a moment watching him, feeling an odd but useless relief about what his captain had just confessed. So, if Sheldon wasn’t in love with the woman he was destined to marry and had all but proclaimed he never would be, then that meant that he, James, had a chance—

  You fool. Fool!

  Of course he had no chance. He was destined to be as lovesick as Lady Grace Fairchild.

  His own mood deteriorating, Akers headed forward to get the launch ready to collect the admiral.

  * * *

  Grace’s mood wasn’t much better than that of her betrothed’s.

  She, Polly and Colin Lord had returned to Norfolk very late the previous night, and she had immediately fallen into bed, travel-weary, exhausted, and weighed down by a pressing grief she didn’t understand.

  Sleep had not come easily to her and when it had, she had dreamed.

  Not of the man to whom she had pledged her life. But the man she had left back in Hampshire.

  She had awoke with a start, her heart raw with an unidentifiable ache, her body warm and restless and moist in her secret places.

  Captain Lord.

  She had lain awake in the darkness, thinking of him so far away down in Hampshire. Of the miles of empty night that separated them. Her soul echoed with emptiness. Longing. Loneliness. Had it rained since they had strode together out there on the lawn just a few days ago, washing away his footsteps, his presence? Had the maids changed his bed and swept his floor after he’d so hastily left? And what of Ned? Had he forgiven her?

  Grace rolled over, staring out the open window into the night. She could see the dim outline of a sycamore, hear the breeze moving through its leaves, smell the sea. A cloud moved over the waning moon, backlit by its light.

  I shouldn’t have let him drive me off. I should have told him how I really feel.

  How did she really feel?

  Time had passed. Her lids had grown heavy and her eyeballs ached with fatigue, but her mind would not rest. Would not stop replaying that last awful scene with Captain Lord. Would not let her forget the searing pain she’d felt when he had not come down to say goodbye. She threw back the coverlet and went to the window, clutching her chemise to herself. Out in the darkness she could see the neatly fenced pastures, silvered in the light of the moon and stars. She stood there for a long moment.

  Turned and walked with resolution toward the door.

  It opened quietly on well-oiled hinges, swung out into the hall. The corridor was dark, a single sconce a
t the far end glowing in the night. Grace shut the door behind her, crossed the hall, and went to the door of what had been Captain Lord’s room during his all-too-short stay here.

  She reached up, placed her palm against the smooth wood, and shut her eyes.

  They flooded and burned with sudden tears.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and her heart swelled in her chest, squeezing it, constricting the pain into an unbearable knot until she couldn’t breathe. She leaned her forehead against the door. The tears spilled from her eyes, rolled down her cheeks and plopped onto her bare toes. Had the maid changed his bed? Was there any trace of him left on the other side of this barrier? Oh, what had she done? Anguish overwhelmed her, and she pushed open the door.

  His door.

  The room was silent and still. The bed was made, tack-sharp, standing silently in the darkness and backlit by the night outside. Empty. As if he had never even been here.

  My friend.

  And here, right here... was where they had kissed.

  More than my friend.

  Grace had stood there for a long moment. Eventually she had moved to the bed, climbed up on it, hugged the pillow that had cradled his head to her chest and then and only then, had she fallen into a restless and broken sleep.

  Polly had found her in the morning, cocked an unconvinced brow at Grace’s excuses for being in the room, and announced that Sir Graham was eager to be done with England. They would be sailing later tonight.

  And now “tonight” had come, and they would all go aboard Captain Ponsonby’s frigate and make the short run back down to Portsmouth. Grace wondered if she would be seasick again and if so, who would be there to care for her as tenderly as Captain Lord had done.

  Captain Lord, Captain Lord!

  She was still thinking of him, unable to stop thinking of him, as she was rowed out to the frigate, settled into the bosun’s chair, and hauled up the side of the black-and-yellow-painted warship.