“I love you, Lilla.”
He said it matter-of-factly, like it was obvious and she shouldn’t even have needed to ask the question. But it wasn’t obvious, not to her. The only thing that was obvious to her was that he had run away.
“Please,” Isaac said. “Let him explain.”
He coughed again, leaning forward, his throat sounding like razorblades were being pulled out of him.
“There is nothing to explain—”
“Please!” Isaac wheezed. “Just—please.”
Lilla sighed and walked around to the side of the table. With an effort, she forced her fists to unclench. The manic energy was still in her body, but she forced her limbs to be still. Her lip trembled and she thought she might shout or cry. Only Isaac’s pitiful appearance stopped her. Her dying brother had asked something of her. What sort of woman would I be if I denied that?
“Fine,” she said. “Fine. Explain.”
There was a pause in which the three of them regarded each other, three actors in this private drama, only yards away from an elite party. Then Miles’ forehead creased. She had to resist the old urge to smooth the crease with her thumb, as she had done when they were lovers. Images flitted through her mind: her hands in his hair; his naked body standing at the window, the muscles in his legs and back taut and tense; his lips upon her gloveless hand. She forced the images away. She could not feel tenderness for this man. She would not. She knew where that led.
“I went to war, Lilly—Lilla.”
Lilly. Every time he said it she felt a stab of recollection. It was like smelling a flower one associated with a particular poignant childhood memory. Every time one smelt the flower, one invariably conjured up the memory. Lilly was her flower, and Miles was her memory. But she did not want it.Liar, a voice whispered. She pushed the voice and the memory away. She was angry, she told herself. That was all.
“I was planning on going over to fight Napoleon in the last month of our courtship. I couldn’t bring myself to tell you. I was so in love and we were so young and everything was happening so fast. No, please, let me finish.”
Lilla’s fingers tapped the desk. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and then nodded. “Go on, then,” she said.
He interlocked his fingers. It was an old gesture, one she recognized intimately. He was as full of emotion as her, that gesture told her. “I kept hearing stories about the war,” he said. “Horrible stories of men being slaughtered. You know how it was back then. Boys younger than I was then were going over there and being slaughtered. I desperately needed to go. I felt it in my soul. But I could not leave you. I was torn, and soon, I knew, I would be ripped apart by my indecision. And then that fire came. Do you remember? Of course you do. Yes, of course you do. It was like a sign from god.
“I went up the stairs and saved the boy. And then I returned to the room we had shared. When I got there you were bleeding from the mouth, and you were unconscious. I threw you over my shoulder and carried you from the inn. I left you with some women to tend you. And I fled. Yes, I fled. I fled because I knew if I waited for you to wake up, I would never join the war. The day after the fire, I left for France. I returned two weeks ago.”
Lilla didn’t want to believe this story. She wanted to push it aside, to name it as lies. She wanted to tell herself that it was a vicious trick. Hating him would have been easier then. Justifying her anger would have been easier. Tolerating this rage was difficult when Miles looked at her with such open, honest eyes, when his reasoning was something with which she could empathize. She did believe it, though. Everything he said was something the Miles she had known four years ago would have done. Isaac’s somber face and his slight nod when she looked to him confirmed it. He was telling the truth.
“You could have written to me,” she said. “You say you could not tell me, that it would have caused you to stay. Fine. I have my problems with that but fine. But what stopped you from writing me after?”
“War,” Miles said. “Just war.Blood and pain and death.I was in no state to write to anybody. I was consumed with day-to-day survival.”
The pain of memory in his voice called out to something deep within Lilla. She felt the old urge to wrap her arms around him when he was sad, to make everything better with the warmth of her body, to lift his spirits with a well-placed kiss. All of these old urges rose within her. The mad energy within her quieted, and she no longer the need to drum her fingers upon the desk.
But she couldn’t forgive him. The realization rose as though from a mist, and then struck her. She understood him, she empathized with him, but she couldn’t forgive him. Perhaps it was selfish, but the pain she had felt was too stark in her memory. It was knife-sharp, and cut her every time she thought about it.
“I cannot marry you,” she said.
“Lilla, think what you say,” Isaac said. “We are poor. Yes, we are. I am not asking you to love him again. But you know him. And he knows you. He loved you, even if you don’t—” The cough cut him short. His body shivered and blood and mucus sprayed the handkerchief. He inspected the dirty piece of cloth with dreadful eyes. “I will be dead soon,” he muttered. “The physicians have told me as much. I cannot force you, Lilla. But please, make the right choice.”
“We are both scarred, Lilla,” Miles said.
“I do not see a scar,” Lilla replied, pointing at his face. For a moment her hand was inches from him. To reach out, to touch his cheek, to run her thumb along his lower lip as she had done countless times before, in what seemed like a different life … But no. The pain of desertion was stronger within her than the happiness of reunion.
“I have my fair share,” he said. “On my back and my belly. But that is not what I meant. I am scarred in here.” He touched the place on his jacket under which his heart beat. She had rested her head on that chest and listened to that heartbeat before. She had fallen asleep to that heartbeat.
“Let me think on it,” Lilla said. “Give me that, at least.”
“Of course.”
The three of them rose. “Write to me, as soon as you have made your decision,” Miles said. His gait had changed from before the war. He carried himself like a soldier now. She had not noticed before because he had been sitting and then standing still, but he walked with the measured steps of an officer. He stopped at the door and turned. “Lilly, please say yes. I can win your love again. I know I can.”
Lilla didn’t say anything. He waited for her to speak, his eyebrows raised, but she only looked down at the floor. With a sigh he left. Lilla slumped into the chair he had been sitting in. It was still warm from his body, and for a moment she felt close to him. The closeness filled her with warmth even as it filled her with shard-like memories: memories that sliced.
“He is your best chance,” Isaac said.
“My best chance of what, brother?” Lilla asked, unable to keep the exhaustion from her voice. For four years she had been like a windmill, trundling along but feeling nothing. Now the emotion had exploded with her, and it exhausted her.
“Your best chance of making it,” Isaac answered.
Part Two – The Marriage
1
Four months later.
Lady Lilla Sawley sat at the window of the library and watched as November snow blanketed the garden. Her mind was in the past today, in the crypts of pain and love and fear that haunted her dreams. She remembered Isaac, only three months ago, ill but alive. And then the cough had taken him. He had moved into The Sawley estate with Lilla and Miles. A maidservant had told them. Lilla had received the news with odd numbness. She loved her brother, but she had expected it. Everybody had expected it. At the funeral, she hadn’t wept. Only when in her bedroom, with the doors bolted, had she given herself to tears.
The wedding had been quick and formal. The vicar had muttered his words, and then they were leaving
, man and wife. Lilla had wanted to flee the church as soon as she entered it, but common sense had prevailed. Miles, at least, was not a brute. He would not hurt her. He would see that she was cared for. He was also the man that had broken her heart and deserted her all those years ago. That was the trade she made.
She and her husband were not close. As the months waned, Lilla found it more and more difficult to start anew, to wipe clean the memory of his retreating body, eager to desert her, desperate to get away from her. When she studied herself in the looking glass, it was difficult to feel anything but anger and betrayal when she regarded the crescent-shaped scar. Life had tossed her up, battered her, thrown her about. And she had landed as the wife or Lord Miles Sawley, her old lover. Sometimes, she would wake in the early morning, and for a breath of a moment she would not believe it. And then she would remember, and the anger would surface. It would have been simple if anger was all she felt. But there was something else under the anger, cushioning it. It was not happiness. It was more subtle, less warm, but still there. It was the potential for happiness.
She sighed and rose from the chair. The book she had been reading lay face down on the desk. Her body ached from sitting so long. She stretched her arms and wiggled her legs.
She turned swiftly when he cleared his throat.
“Lilly,” he said.
She flinched. He had been calling her by her lover’s name ever since they were married. She resented it even as she adored it. A potent brew of conflicted emotions bubbled up within her every time he said the name. It brought hundreds of memories, each of them tinged with pain even as they filled her transient pleasure.
“Miles,” she muttered. “How long have you been watching me?”
“I just arrived,” he said. A small smile touched his lips. It was the smile he had given her after their first kiss. Everything about him reminded her of the past. That would have been lovely, if it had not also included the fire. “I didn’t expect to see you stretching, however.”
Lilla blushed. The implication hung in the air. How many times had she stretched with him, but in different, heated circumstances? How many times had her body writhed under him, or atop him? She had given her honor to this man. The thought caused remembered pleasure to move through her for a moment.
Then the fire, bright, painful, forced away the pleasure.
“What do you want, my lord?” she said.
“I want you to walk with me in the gardens, Lilly.”
“And why would I do that?”
“Because we are husband and wife, and we never spend time together.”
His voice was strong, but there was a note of desperation in it. He was trying to hide it, but it was there. Lilla felt for him, even as she tried to discard the feeling. She wanted to make him happy, she realized. She wanted to make them both happy. But it wasn’t as easy as that.
She sighed. “I can’t make myself into who I was back then, Miles,” she said, using his Christian name because my lord made him flinch as though she struck her. It was too distant, and he wanted the two of them to be close again. “I wish I could reverse time and make it so we were who we were, but I cannot.”
“Just walk with me,” he said. “That is all I ask. Please.”
Lilla sighed again. The atmosphere between them had shifted these past months. Before, it had been one of combat, of war. She had wanted to tear his eyes out every time she saw him. She couldn’t look upon him without seeing his retreating figure, without feeling the sting of abandonment. But that had waned as he had persisted, and had demonstrated to her that he would not leave her again. Even when she avoided him, he sought her out. He was trying. Now the atmosphere was that of a man carrying a heavy burden, trying manfully to pull it up a hill. Lilla was self-aware to know that she was the burden which troubled her husband. He was trying to pull her forward with him, to soothe that which had burnt for the past four years.
She interlocked her fingers, drummed her forefinger onto the back of the opposite hand. His sky-blue eyes were open and loving. They pulled Lilla in. She sighed a third time. “Okay, I will walk with you. But do not think that I have forgiven you.” The last words came out harshly, with a bite in them.
Miles nodded slowly. “Will you ever forgive me, do you think?”
Lilla shrugged. “I honestly cannot say.”
It was the truth. She could feel the emotions within her with naked brilliancy, but judging whether or not they would still exist at some nebulous time in the future was more difficult. All she knew was the pain and the confused affection and the regret and the timid love that she felt now and had felt for years. It was not an easy thing to make sense of so much turmoil.
“I will still try,” Miles said. “I will never stop trying to make you love me again.”
Part of me still does love you, she thought but did not say.
2
Lilla wore walking boots and held her dress up around her knees as she and Miles walked through the garden. The plants had withdrawn for the winter, and only a few brave blades of grass poked through the uniform whiteness of the snow. Despite the absence of colorful flowers, despite the leafless branches that stuck out like thin, decrepit arms, despite the white shield of clouds overhead, Lilla thought the scene was quite beautiful. It was more honest, and it seemed to match her heart utterly: barren but with hints of life and color and love.
“Did you miss me, when I first left?” Miles said.
Lilla could have lied. She could have told him that the anger was all there was, that she hadn’t thought about him except to curse him. But she didn’t lie. They had been married for four months. Lying now would serve no purpose. She was with this man forever, after all.
“Yes,” she said. “I missed you. I missed you as I imagine an amputee misses an arm. Oh, I know, it is not very ladylike of me to make such a comparison. But it is truth, and when have I been ladylike, Miles? Our entire romance was predicated upon the assumption that I would shun ladylike values. We did things no married man and woman should do. Yes, Miles, I missed you. I felt as though a part of myself had been taken away. It was a part I could not do without, I thought. But then it scabbed over, hardened, and anger took its place.”
“And you are still angry,” Miles said.
“Yes, I am.”
“But not as angry as you was.”
Lilla considered this for a moment, and then nodded. “But not as angry as I was,” she agreed.
“And why is that?”
They had walked to the end of the garden where the grass usually met with the trees that led to Wells, the village on the outskirts of which they lived. Now there was no grass and no trees. There was just a white blanket leading to a crisscrossing maze of skinny brown white-flecked limbs. Miles turned and walked along the edge of the trees, and Lilla followed.
“Because I know the anger serves no purpose. We are married. We will die together. I don’t feel angry as much as tired.”
“Tired of me?” Miles said.
“Tired of everything.Tired of the necessity of breath.Tired of sleep.Tired of waking.Tired of reading.Tired of sitting.Just tired.”
Miles gasped. “You cannot mean that.”
She reconsidered her words. Lately she had been feeling tired, but not to the extent she had just said. She wondered why she was being dramatic, why she was trying to make her emotional state seem frightening her husband. Could it be sympathy? Did she desire his attention, his love, even as she threatened to shun it?
“Perhaps not,” she said. “Fine, perhaps not. But confused. I don’t know—” She pointed to a rock that bulged out of the snow. “For the longest time, my mind, my emotions, were like that. Stone, still. Not calm, by no means calm, but there was an equilibrium. I had become intimately acquainted with rage, and I had settled into a sort of angry calm. Now—” She spread her han
ds at the scene around them. “I don’t know how to feel. One minute I am sorrowful, the next I am angry.”
Suddenly, Miles reached across and touched her scar, near her lip. Lilla was about to pull away, but then something stopped her. An emotion she neither understood nor ignored moved through her. It was as though all the emotions she had felt up until now combined, and forced her to stand still as Miles ran his thumb along her scar.
“I wish I could take that for you,” he said.
She closed her eyes and focused on his thumb. It was warm against her skin, warm against the November cold. She released her dress, letting it fall into the snow, and reached up and touched his hand. It was abrupt, this change, this action. It pushed aside all other considerations. She found herself wanting to pause this moment and allow it to stretch on forever. This was a remnant for their old love. This moment reminded her of her youth, when she had been a young, naïve girl with a head full of roses.
She was only two and twenty, but she felt ancient.
“Why are you touching me?” she whispered, even as she caressed his hand.
“Because I have not touched you for a long time,” he said.
Their voices were hardly louder than the soft breeze which stirred the snow. She gripped his hand, gripped the warmth and the security of it. She had taken such solace in this hand, once upon a time. For the first time since their marriage, she seriously considered that she might take solace from it again.
“Do you still love me?” she said.
She hadn’t known that she would ask the question. It came from another part of her, a part she usually kept buried. It came from the part of her which had almost died when he left her. Almost, but not quite. Now that part of her was rising in her consciousness, taking predominance.
He moved his hand to her cheek and stroked her skin, the way he had stroked her chin after the first time they made love, and they were lying spent and weary and satisfied in a single bed in the backroom of a forgotten inn. “Of course I still love you,” he said. “But that is not the important question. The important question is, do you still love me?”
Romance: Detective Romance: A Vicious Affair (Victorian Regency Intrigue 19th England Romance) (Historical Mystery Detective Romance) Page 43