His eyes followed her hand. “Determination,” he said. “Resolve. Yes, those things are beautiful.”
“I’m talking about my jaw.”
“That is what your jaw looks like to me.”
She felt a fluster of confusion. Was he serious with this mad babble? But he appeared quite serious. He was gazing at her with perfect sobriety.
She suddenly could not hold his eyes. She looked out the window again. If he was mocking her . . . “Obviously you find me attractive,” she said. “And I’m handsome, no doubt. I have all my teeth. But that’s a different thing from beauty. That’s all I mean.”
“Self-possession,” he said. “Dignity. Gorgeous qualities. I see them in your straight spine. In the way you hold yourself, your carriage.”
Did she hold herself so distinctively? She had never realized it. She felt a flush of gratification, quite unfamiliar, stemming as it did from her neglected vanity. “Don’t be silly.”
“I’m the fifth Duke of Marwick,” he said. “Also the Earl of Beckden and the Baron Wellsley. I am many things, but I am not silly.”
She rolled her eyes at the clouds.
“Resilience,” he said. “In the tilt to your chin.” Dryly he added, “It verges on stubbornness, of course, but all the virtues extend into flaws when carried too far.”
She cast him a quick, mocking glance. “In the manner of compliments that edge on criticisms?”
He smiled at her. She looked away again, but now she was holding her breath, hoping (ridiculous of her!) that he might go on.
And he did. “Passion in the vibrant colors of your hair,” he murmured. “I see new shades every time I look at it. I’ve counted at least nine.”
He’d been cataloging the shades of her hair?
“Intelligence in your brow. Thoughtfulness in the way it has furrowed, as you try to figure out whether I’m speaking truthfully. Which I am. And you would be wise to believe me. I’ve been making a study of you for quite some time now. Yours was the first face I’d seen in months, after all. The face I saw through the darkness. And it seems that I know it even better than you do, if you doubt your own beauty.”
She’d been holding her breath, and now she could not catch it. She looked back at him wonderingly, and the expression on his face . . . It was sober and tender and intent. She had wondered, in his garden, if any man would look this way at her again. She’d never dreamed that he might be the one to do it.
But that had been her secret hope.
“You’re mad,” she whispered. She felt shaken. “Perhaps you need the spectacles.”
He gave her a gentle smile. “Humor and wit, in the quirk of your lips. And in your eyes . . .” His smile faded. “Hope.”
She swallowed. He had commented on that before, in the library.
Would you always look at me so? She bit her lip to stop the words, and put her hand over her chest, which twisted painfully. For she knew the answer to that question better than he did. He thought he would never recover his old life. But one day he would. The world would not be content to move forward always without him. And he, eventually, would not be able to endure the sidelines.
He would stop looking at her like this once he remembered who he was.
The coach began to slow. She made herself look out. She did not recognize the house. It was only a single story, weatherboarded in white, barely larger than the cottage in which she’d grown up. A stone barn stood a short way beyond it, through a field of waving grass.
“Of course,” he said as the vehicle rocked to a halt, “the final element, which shows nowhere in particular, and everywhere at once, is your courage.”
She took a deep breath.
“I know you’re ready to face these people—your family, Olivia. But there is no need for you to do it. You can stay here while I speak with them. And then, if they wish to meet you, they can make the approach themselves. I think you deserve that—to be the one who is approached.”
Her throat closed. He had not mentioned kindness. That was his quality, which she lacked. But it suffused every part of him, though he fought so hard to hide it. Perhaps she was the only person in the world who managed to see it so clearly in him. Even he himself seemed blind to it. “Thank you,” she said. “But today . . . I seem to want to do it all.” He thought her very brave, but without him, she would never have dared approach those women on the promenade. By his side, she discovered new parts of herself fashioned from steel and armor, parts that she liked very much. She would take advantage of them now. “I want to get through it all in one fell swoop.”
He moved onto her bench. “For luck then,” he said, and lifted her hand for a single kiss that she felt all the way through her bones.
* * *
Mrs. Holladay, white haired and petite, had the rosy cheeks and bright eyes of a figure in a fairy tale: the white witch who saved children from wolves. But she wore the weeds of a widow, and when she received them at the door, her courteous greeting was sluggish, dulled by obvious fatigue.
Her mourning black, and the lock of hair she wore at her wrinkled throat, silenced Olivia. Marwick spoke for them both, but he only shared his own name, and conveyed that they had come on a matter of delicate but urgent import. “You should sit,” he said, “before we speak.”
Mrs. Holladay ushered them into her parlor, where tea was laid. After handing them each a cup, she said, with a polite but bewildered smile, “How may I help you, then?”
Olivia took a breath. “You won’t recognize me. But my mother was Jean Holladay, your daughter.”
Mrs. Holladay dropped her cup. Tea splashed across the carpet, but she did not seem to notice. She stared, lips trembling. “Oh. Oh. Oh, you’ve come home!” She lifted a hand to her mouth. “If only Roger had lived to see it . . .”
Roger, it transpired, was Mrs. Holladay’s late husband, only two months’ deceased. She rushed to find a photograph of him, then changed course and flew outside. Olivia heard her tasking the coachman to take a note to the neighboring farmstead—the denizens of which must have worked to spread the news very rapidly, for within a quarter hour, the parlor had filled with strangers, all of them claiming to be Olivia’s relations.
Cousins, uncles, nieces and nephews, dear old friends of her mother’s, swarmed to introduce themselves. Amid this strange and ardent welcome, Olivia found herself quite unable to cut to the point of her visit. She felt numb, overwhelmed, a cold point of sobriety amid tears and laughter. Marwick, now seated on the sofa watching her with an inscrutable look, now cloistered in the corner in conference with a farmer (whose trousers were still coated with stray bits of hay), proved no help at all. But when she finally extricated herself from embraces and found a seat again, he somehow managed to appear beside her, asking in a low voice if she was all right.
Of course she was. She reached for her resolve. “Mrs. Holladay,” she said (making clear with a pointed look that she did not mean any of the four other Mrs. Holladays, two of whom had babes in arm). “I must speak with you privately.”
“Of course, dear!” Mrs. Holladay proposed a supper, and this seemed a signal for everybody to disperse, with promises of a quick return, and a dish or two each to contribute.
Once the three of them were alone again, Mrs. Holladay (Grandmother, you should call me) took a seat opposite, taking up her knitting, beaming as her needles clacked.
Olivia took Marwick’s hand. Mrs. Holladay’s rheumy gaze flicked down to take note of it, and somehow, that faint whisper of propriety finally jarred Olivia into speaking the question that, once voiced, sparked a burn of anger: “Why are you being so kind to me? You turned my mother away from your doorstep when she most needed you. Why?”
Mrs. Holladay dropped her needles. “Gracious, child! Turn her away? Did she say that? We never did any such thing!”
Curiously, Olivia felt Marwick’s surprise more than her own. It registered very clearly in the sharp squeeze of his fingers around hers. “But you did,” she said. “I re
member it. You quarreled with her, and then we went away in the dark, and she said we couldn’t stay.”
“But that’s because she refused to listen to us.” Mrs. Holladay sat forward, looking white as paper. “We told her she needn’t put up with him. We told her she should sue him in court. And she refused. She wouldn’t do that to him, she said. As though she owed him anything! And yes, by heaven, we quarreled with her for that—your grandfather would have no part in letting that rascal abuse her. He wanted justice. He would have sold every inch of this land to fund a lawsuit, if she’d only allowed it.”
The woman might as well have been speaking in tongues. But a strange, prickling foreboding came over Olivia. “A lawsuit?”
“Yes, a lawsuit! How else were we to go about it?”
Marwick spoke then. “A lawsuit on what grounds?”
Mrs. Holladay made a disgusted noise. “On the grounds of bigamy, of course! How could he marry that American girl, how dare he do it, when he was already married to my daughter?”
* * *
Olivia sat on a fallen log, by the edge of a pond choked with lily pads. The dark water glimmered in the late afternoon light. As if winter had forgotten about this stretch of Kent, many of the branches still bore leaves, and the air was temperate, scented by mulch and sap.
She heard Marwick coming long before she saw him. Branches cracked underfoot, and then a stone flew past her, skipping across the pond’s surface.
“Well done,” she said.
“I can do better.” He came to sit beside her on the log. After a brief study of the ground, he plucked up another stone and proved his claim.
She rather thought she knew how that stone felt when it made the final plunge. Surprised to be so suddenly out of its depths.
She had listened as long as she’d been able. But when the family had begun crowding into the parlor again, carrying dishes and bottles, full of merriment, her numbness had cracked. She had excused herself to the washroom, then ducked out the door and followed the path through the scraggly wood to this pond.
“They must be wondering where I am,” she said now.
He shrugged. “They’re aghast that your mother didn’t tell you the truth.”
She bit down hard on her cheek. Yes, all right, it was anger she was feeling. Anger and . . . deep, deep injury. “She must have had her reasons.”
He said nothing.
“She loved him.” A jagged laugh spilled from her. “This, above all, is the ultimate proof of it.” To have protected him against his own evildoing, even at the cost of her own happiness.
“She might have loved you better,” he said quietly. “To have put you through such a childhood—”
“Don’t.” She snatched up a rock and hurled it. It did not skip once, but it made a mighty splash as it sank. “She loved me very well. What could you know about it? And who knows? If she hadn’t taken his bigamy quietly, perhaps he’d have sent a man to throttle her.”
“Perhaps,” he said after a pause. “I suppose it does solve the mystery of why he hounds you. If he feared you had the proof of his marriage to your mother . . .”
Tears pricked her eyes. Why now? She had been staring dry-eyed for half an hour. “What a joke. I don’t.”
He turned to her. “Olivia. You do.”
She dashed a hand over her eyes. “Do I?”
He brushed his thumb over her cheek, his handsome face grave. “That’s what your mother meant by that line in her diary. The ‘hidden truth’—that’s the parish register. Your grandmother explained the whole of it. The night your mother brought you here, the family conferred with the rector who had married your parents. He decided to hide the register—a very wise decision, for the church was later burgled. A few pieces of silver went missing, along with the registers—save the one which the rector had locked away.”
“Oh.” The syllable seemed to flop out of her mouth. She stared at the ground where it would have landed.
“So it can be proved,” he said.
She nodded once.
His hand found hers. “Is that all you have to say?”
She glanced at him and felt a strange flutter of anxiety at his frown, which she identified after a moment: concern that she had disappointed him. She pulled her hand free and stared at the lily pads again.
She had never felt obligated to anybody but her mother—and perhaps Elizabeth Chudderley, for whom she’d felt such deep gratitude for employing her without a proper reference. But what was this uneasiness now, but proof that she felt beholden to him? Beholden not only in simple matters, like their shared aims in regard to Bertram. She also worried over his moods. She wanted him to be . . . happy.
But she knew that his happiness lay in his return to a world she could not join. Lovely. She’d fashioned a perfect pit for herself.
She cleared her throat. “It has certainly been . . . odd,” she said. “The afternoon.”
“Odd in the best of ways.” She heard in his voice that he was attempting to cheer her. “Had we a copy of Debrett’s, we could edit it.”
She did not want to think on that right now. It would be a rageful undertaking to reflect on the consequences of exposing Bertram—and she had spent long enough in this dark mood. She was not a woman to sulk. Better to focus on the simpler, happier facts: she had a family. She had a place. She had everything she’d once longed for.
Yet where was her triumph? Why did she not feel compelled to return to the house, to meet everyone, to bask in their welcomes, their affection so easily offered?
They didn’t know her. They had no idea who she was, only that a woman they loved had birthed her. But the man sitting next to her knew her. And he was all she needed. All she wanted.
God help me.
She watched him toss another stone, then let herself take his hand. Only that. “I never could do that,” she said, after the fifth skip finished the stone’s run.
“It just takes practice. And a pond, of course.”
“Then that’s what I lacked. The only pond in Allen’s End was the cow pond—and I promise you, the smell kept me away.”
“Little girls are so picky.”
She laughed despite herself. “I can’t imagine the young heir to the dukedom got his practice in a stinking cesspit!”
“More of a small lake, really.” He grinned, and ran his thumb across her knuckles. “Far more manicured. There was a gardener’s assistant whose only task was to keep it cleared of weeds.”
She tried to match his smile. This was one of the happiest days of her life, wasn’t it? And he was sharing it with her. He was here with her—for now.
“I wonder,” he said, but did not continue.
If her happiness depended on keeping him, she was sunk. “I wonder, too.” She felt very cold, suddenly.
He glanced over at her. “Go on.”
She shook her head. “You first.”
He gave her a half smile. “I wonder what we, both us, would have been like, growing up in a place like this.”
We. Some bittersweet feeling constricted her chest. She tried to pull her hand away, but his grip tightened, and after a moment, she surrendered to it. “I think we would have been spoiled rotten,” she said.
He gave a low, rusty laugh. “No doubt you’re right.”
They sat hand in hand, unspeaking, as the light changed around them. The pond reflected the late afternoon sun, bits of pollen and fuzz drifting in the sunbeams that fell through the trees. Bubbles rose on the water, popped, and disappeared. A fish surfaced, mouth gaping. Somewhere in the distance a bird called out.
“You would have thrived here,” he said. “The brightest girl in the district. Petted and admired by everyone. That’s what you deserved.”
Her throat felt tight. “But I would not have learned to speak Italian, I fear.”
“Oh, you would have found a way.”
She shrugged. Perhaps she would have. But it would have required the desire to learn Italian—and bereft of others’ c
ontempt, of the hostility and suspicion of Allen’s End, what would have planted her so firmly before her books? She might have spent her afternoons playing chase and hunting treasure instead. Shouting and quarreling and jumping rope . . . learning to make friends, instead of learning how to hide herself.
She cleared her throat. “If you had grown up here, I should have had to learn chess. Otherwise who would have explained Blackburne’s Gambit to you? You’re hopeless on your own.” She looked at him from the corner of her eye, and saw that he was smiling. Encouraged, she said, “But you still would have gone into politics. You’d have made a fine MP, in time—a true hero of the common people. We would have called you . . .” The notion amused her. “The salt of the earth.”
He laughed. “There’s a wild idea. But I’m not so certain. It’s a hard road from the paddock to Parliament.”
“You would have found your way.” She dared to tread on dangerous ground. “You did not get your ideals from your father. You discovered them on your own. You would have found them here, too.”
He glanced at her, visibly struck. “Yes,” he said slowly. “All my ideals. You see how they’ve guided me, this last year.”
The words were cynical. But his tone was speculative, testing. She pressed his hand in encouragement. “Those ideals are part of you still. You only took a rest, Marwick. You needed a rest. But soon you’ll take up the gauntlet again—very soon, I think.” And there would be no place for her then.
He gazed at her. “Perhaps. If I remember how to care about such things.”
“You still care.”
“I’ve learned to care about different things now.” Very gently, he reached out to brush her cheek. “You should call me Alastair,” he murmured.
She swallowed. Suddenly it seemed important to say something. “We would have been true friends, had we both grown up here.” She made herself say it: “Alastair.”
“I think you’re right. Olivia.” He stroked her face. “And we might have come here, to this very place, to sit and talk, as friends do.”
“Very often. And perhaps . . .” She smiled. “Not only to talk. This is where you would have kissed me, I think. The first time. When we were both . . . sixteen?”
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