Now, as he walked through the very same door, the contrast was a shock to his system.
Jinx was there, laying beneath his covers like a little doll. His face was pale as the white silk pillow he lay upon, and his hands rested above the bedspread, curled limply as though reaching for something he could not find. Alina was there, too, sitting with her back to Theo and her head on the bedspread.
When the door opened, she stood, turning as though to receive a servant or maid. Theo was as taken aback by the sight of her transformation as he had been by the boy’s. She looked more like a spectre than a woman, standing in a light brown muslin dress that bore blood stains all down the front and arms. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, falling down her back in soft golden waves, but it didn’t make her look like a free maiden in this setting. In the flickering candlelight, with her red-rimmed eyes and her slender form, she looked more like a starved madwoman ready to pounce.
“Mrs. Hartley.”
He stepped into the room. She looked past him, but when he turned, the maid had gone. He closed the door and came a step closer. She didn’t move, just stood there like a waxen statue.
“Alina,” he amended his first words, coming even closer. She was only an arm’s length away now, but she seemed to realize the fact just as he did. She pulled away, blinking as though to dispel an image, and sank into the chair nearest Jinx’s side. There was another chair by the fire, and Theo went to pull it next the bed, using the opportunity to examine Alina’s demeanour. She was in shock, certainly, perhaps worse.
When he was sitting close by again he tried to reach for her hand, but she pulled away. “Have you eaten anything?” he asked gently.
She looked at him like he was the greatest of all dunces. “No.” It was not an invitation for further conversation and suggestion. It was a single word telling him to go far away from her side. He took a deep breath.
“Alina, I’m so sorry. How did it happen?”
She tilted her head, her eyes fixing on her son’s still form. “He’s so little, isn’t he? I hadn’t realized how small he was.”
“He’s a strong lad.”
“Jonas sent me away.” Her voice broke the tension between them like shattered glass. She hadn’t really spoken directly of Jonas since his return.
“What do you mean?”
“In a carriage, this morning. He wanted me to go. He found…a letter.”
Theo realized with a dull ache that the same letter with which Jonas had used to threaten him had been held over Alina’s head, as well. She kept talking, her eyes on Jinx, her lips moving bloodlessly as though unfamiliar with the language they spoke.
“He said I had been unfaithful to him. With you.”
“Alina.”
“He said he could now seek a separation. That he had all the evidence he needed. He said—” There was a break in her voice. “He said I couldn’t take Jinx with me. That I had forfeited him, as well as this life of luxury, with my wild actions.”
“Villain,” Theo growled, bitterness edging into his voice. “How could he separate a mother from her child? Jinx loves you.”
“And I left. I left my boy in that house with that man. I didn’t think I had a choice, but now I wonder—”
“Alina, it’s not your fault.”
“He ran after me, Theo.” Finally, she turned her gaze to his, and the wild grief there was almost too much to bear. “He ran after me into the street and the cart ate him up like a living thing. There was so much blood, and he hardly moved afterwards. He hasn’t said a word or done more than breathe since we put him in this bed. The doctor says to give him laudanum if he’s in pain”—she looked bitterly at the brown bottle on the bedside table—“but he hasn’t moved. I don’t know if he’s in pain, and I fear if I give him the laudanum, he won’t wake back up.”
She lowered her head to the bedspread once again and began to weep there, her body spasming violently with her own grief. Theo let her cry until she was empty of tears. At one point, he put his hand on her back, feeling her thin skin and her ribs through the back of her dress, and he was amazed to find she let him stay there.
When at last she seemed unable to cry any longer, she pulled herself up to a sitting position and began to wipe her eyes with the edge of her skirt. Theo walked to the table and poured a glass of water from the pitcher there, bringing it back to put into Alina’s shaking hands. Her hair was like a halo around her in the dimly-lit room, and her face seemed to have been robbed of all the youthful hope it had held that day on the beach in Brighton. She took two small sips of water and then set the glass aside, speaking through the vestiges of her tears.
“You were good to come tonight,” she said hoarsely. “I did not expect it of you, after all that has transpired. I did not expect it of Jonas, either.”
“I think he is truly worried about the boy,” Theo told her, knowing that Alina needed confidence in Jinx more than abuse to her husband at a time like this. Then, after a moment’s pause, he continued. “Truly, he sent you from the home? He requested a separation?”
“He did,” Alina said dully. “And I do not blame him. He has long endured my apathy in this marriage, and he seeks a union with someone who fits his appetites. If not a union, then perhaps the freedom of having no wife around his neck as a millstone.”
Theo bit his tongue to keep from pointing out that a wife had never been much of a hindrance to Jonas in the past. He had pulled his hand away from her to get her the water, and now he did not know how to put it back. Instead, he said as kindly as he could, “Are you much hurt by the prospect of leaving him?”
“Him?” She looked at him with her grief raw on her face. “No. I see as almost a blessing too great for words. To be given freedom from his watchful eye and his criticism and his…unkindness—it is almost what I have been needing all these years. It was an escape. But now he has allowed me to stay to care for Jinx, and I am glad of that.”
“Of course,” Theo said quickly. “We must find a way for you to keep Jinx.”
“If he would only live…” Alina murmured softly.
But her words had given Theo hope, and with that hope came a courage he had not before known. He would never have chosen this moment, by Jinx’s bedside, as his opportunity to speak the truth, but Jonas’ warning moments ago that this would be the last time he saw either Alina or Jinx echoed in his mind. He reached across the bedspread and laid his hand on Alina’s.
“Alina, I wish to speak to you. Please, allow me to say what is in my heart.”
She turned to him with red-rimmed eyes, those beautiful lips parted in confusion. “What?”
“I have tried to hide my affection for you over the years. Yes,” he said, as she raised her eyebrows in surprise, “I say years because since the first moment I laid eyes on you, I knew you were a treasure. But I would never have put your name in danger by trespassing on your love while you were still tied to Jonas Hartley. I know such a thing would put you in the path of scorn and sadness that you could bear, and I would not have done that for the world. I didn’t dare to hope, actually, or even to acknowledge my own feelings, until news of Jonas’ death. Even then, I thought you too wise to look at a barrister as anything other than a common man, but I have seen in your eyes and in your heart a softness for me that you cannot deny.”
Alina’s breath was coming shallowly, but she didn’t move to interrupt him. Theo pressed on, riding the wave of courage that he’d finally found.
“You always were too much of a jewel to be in the crown of a cruel man like Jonas, Alina. You’re so wise and kind. You’re so beautiful I can hardly look at you. All these years, I’ve watched him parade around a true pearl as though it was costume jewelry, and now, I want to intervene. He has made his hand known—he has demanded a separation. Surely, if—when—Jinx recovers, you will be faced with a chance to take advantage of that separation. I know I cannot offer you the same comforts as Jonas or the same station in life, but I will take of you, Alina. I wil
l love you as you have never been loved, and I will love your son as my own.”
He stopped speaking then, paused as much by the look in her eyes as by the realization that he had said all he wanted to say. There was a depth there that he could understand more clearly than any words she could have spoken—a beating of their entwined hearts. She ran her tongue across her lips, and when she spoke at last, her words were hoarse and slow, well-curated, as though she’d spent hours thinking of them and only now was able to let them out.
“Theo, you have always been so kind to me. You have treated me more gently than I have ever been treated. But the answer to what you ask of me is, and always will be, no.”
***
Alina watched her words land like daggers on Theo’s heart. His face, here in the shadow of Jinx’s bedroom, with whatever conversation he’d had with Jonas fighting against his courage, was a vulnerable and naked thing.
He couldn’t hide the bitter disappointment and confusion that took over his features as her words sunk in. “Alina, you can’t be serious.”
“Oh, but I am.”
It was killing her, doing this to him, but wasn’t that what she deserved? A death to herself, and to all her dreams, so that she could at last face herself in the mirror without the crippling guilt of all she had done. If she killed off this hope, this dream of a life with Theo free from Jonas’ cruelty, then perhaps she would at last go numb inside.
“I know you love me, Alina.” His voice was so firm and kind, not at all like Jonas’ insistent cruelty. It almost won her over, and then he put his hands on hers and the gentle pressure made her want to believe everything he said. “I can see it in your eyes, and I have seen it for months now. You want to be with me.”
She looked at him, her heart saying all that she could not speak aloud. Yes. Take me with you. “Theo, I can’t.”
“You can’t, or you won’t?” There was the bitterness she’d been expecting. He didn’t have the same dangerous anger that Jonas had, but his wounded face still wounded her. “I know that you love me, and you have told me that Jonas is demanding a separation. There is nothing that stands in our way any longer. Yes, you will no longer be a rich man’s wife, but isn’t that worth a little bit of happiness?”
He thought it was because of the money. Alina almost wanted to laugh at how ridiculous that supposition was. After years of living with wealth and prestige as a cold bedfellow, she would never again make the mistake of thinking a worthwhile impetus for affairs of the heart. No, it wasn’t the money. It was her own image mocking her, her own selfishness standing behind her little boy’s fragile form and whispering to her across the bed. You did this. You insisted that freedom and love were worthwhile. You dared to think you could redeem what Jonas had done to you. Your selfishness did this.
She was married, still, to Jonas. She had made an oath before God. She took a deep breath. “I know you well enough to know that you will respect my decision in this matter, Theo, as you have always respected my decisions. Please, do not make this harder than it has to be.”
“I love you,” he said, his voice breaking, “and in that way, you are right. My love for you allows me to accept all manner of unbelievable things that you have said and done. But this—Alina, listen to yourself. You are professing a blind devotion for a man you do not care about. You are choosing to stay in a loveless and dangerous marriage because you are afraid of living a life of poverty.”
“Do you really know me so little?” she said, breaking her mental promise to avoid defending herself in the face of his fury. “You would think me so shallow?”
“What is your reason, then?”
“I have promised God that I will repent all my days if he will only help Jinx recover. I have promised him to give everything up that I love.”
“God would not ask such a thing of his child.”
“I have made an oath of marriage to Jonas.”
“These are all excuses,” Theo said, laying aside her hand and standing, brokenhearted, above her. “Jonas has broken the oath that you made. God is not standing above you with a rod of iron demanding you stay in a relationship with a man as cruel and cold as ice. God is not whipping you in your time of sadness. You are afflicting yourself. I do not know what truly drives you, if it is some misplaced sense of guilt or truly a fear of living outside the protection of Jonas’ wealth and means, but I can see that whatever it is, you have chosen this thing over me.”
He reached forward and put a hand on her shoulder. “Alina, you will always have my friendship, but you must know that I will never stop wanting more. Please, for us. Choose what is right in this matter.”
She turned her face away from him, the tears coming thick and fast.
“I know you cannot believe it,” she said. “But I think I am choosing what is right.”
Chapter 27
Alina hovered by Jinx’s side all that night and into the next. Finally, as the morning light came through the thickly-drawn shades on the second day, she saw his breathing even out and his eyelids flutter weakly on his pale cheeks. He opened them tentatively, his eyes roving the ceiling in mild confusion.
“Mama?”
“Yes, sweet one.” She knelt down beside the bed and clasped one of his hands in hers. “I’m right here, Jinx. I’ve been here the whole time.”
“You didn’t leave?”
Alina’s heart ached at the desperation in his voice. She hadn’t left, but she didn’t know how long Jonas’ generosity would hold out.
“Don’t worry, my boy. Are you hurting much?”
He shifted in the bed and cried out, tears coming quickly to his sweet eyes. “Mama, my back.”
“I know.” She reached for the laudanum, pouring a smaller spoonful than the doctor had recommended. “Don’t move, alright? You’ve been hurt, Jinx, and you need to stay very still.”
He tried to raise himself up on his elbows but cried out again and fell back against the pillows at once. “Don’t go away, Mama.”
She tried to push her tears back, but the they came to the surface nonetheless. “I won’t leave while you’re so sick, Jinx. I would never want to leave you—you know that?”
His eyes had already closed, and he sank into the embrace of the laudanum like it was a cold and dangerous friend. Alina patted his hand gently and laid it across his chest. Suddenly, she felt another presence in the room and turned with a start. Jonas was standing by the door, still as a statue.
“How long have you been there?” she asked softly. “You frightened me.”
“You always were a skittish one,” he scoffed.
“Did you see Jinx speak?” She lifted her face in hopefulness. “I feared he would never wake again. We should get some warm soup and tea up here for when he next wakes. He looks so very thin.”
Jonas was silent for a long time, and when he spoke again Alina’s heart sank to hear the old edge back in his voice. “You can inform the maid. You look horrible, Alina. Go change into something presentable, and then you can come back.”
The words lit a fire of hope in Alina’s heart, and it must have moved to her face for Jonas laughed hoarsely and shook his head. “No, not permanently. Just until the boy is strong enough to face your absence.”
She bit her tongue and rose stiffly. “Perhaps you will change your mind.”
He didn’t answer that, but moved to take her seat by Jinx’s side.
Back in her own room, Alina had a bath drawn and took a quick dip before slipping into a fresh day dress and pinning her hair into a bun. Willa appeared in her room, her face tense and defensive.
“You could have called for my assistance, mistress. I don’t like to see you burdened by such things at a time like this.”
Longing for a Liberating Love: A Historical Regency Romance Book Page 21