Barbara’s vision had gone dark. She felt as though the air had been sucked out of the room. She felt as though her lungs were being choked. She could scarcely breathe as he continued on.
“Well, I acted on reflex,” he said with a shrug. “I went in after her. She was young, she couldn’t have been much older than eight or nine, and her cries were so panicked, I didn’t stop to think. I got her out, anyway. A beam fell from the ceiling, separating us, but she was able to get to the door. I couldn’t. I was trapped inside for a while before I managed to kick out a grate in a window and climb out.” His voice had grown quiet in the telling of the story, but there was no other sound to impede anyone at the table hearing his every word. It was as if the world had gone absolutely still and silent.
“You caught on fire?” Michael asked, awestruck horror in his little voice.
“Mm.” Jeffrey nodded. “Briefly.”
“What happened to the girl?” Jane asked.
“We don’t know,” the Dowager Countess answered for him. “She ran away, supposedly, after being rescued. Left him there.”
“She was just a child,” Jeffrey said.
“Hang on,” Harry said then, leaning forward. “Was this the Atkinson house fire?”
Jeffrey nodded silently.
“Lady Barbara, don’t you remember?” Harry asked, pointing to his sister. “You were shaken up about that fire, weren’t you?”
“I…yes,” she stammered. “I always liked that old house. I made believe it was haunted,” she attempted a smile, though she could feel herself trembling uncontrollably. “I was sad to hear that it burned down. I had no idea Jeffrey…” She glanced at him, but could not finish her sentence.
Her past came rushing over her. Years of recurring nightmares and the memory of smoke filling her lungs with every gasping breath.
Jeffrey. Oh Jeffrey. It was you. It was you all along.
Chapter 30
Jeffrey’s hands were shaking as he told the story. He gripped them into fists to try to hide it, but when even that didn’t work, he shoved his hands underneath the table. Everyone’s eyes were on him around the table, unblinking, judging eyes looking at him with pity and horror.
He knew what they were thinking. Whether or not they found his actions heroic, when they looked at him now they could only conjure up images of a man on fire. Those few moments had defined the rest of his life. Those moments were the ones he wished more than anything that he could erase. It couldn’t have been more than three minutes, the time that he was in the burning building with the little girl. The smoke had been visible from the street even before he ran in, after all. And yet, those three minutes, in his mind, seemed to be years of his life.
He stared at his mother as he spoke. She was watching him with hard eyes. Everyone else gazed at him with pity and horror on their faces except for his mother. As always, her expression was a mask of indifference. Or even resentment.
He remembered being a boy, covered in burns that stung like a thousand jabbing needles into his skin, the sheets of his bed sticking to the raw flesh, and his mother hovering over him.
“Why did you do it, you fool?” she had hissed into the darkness, her voice hardly penetrating the fog of pain that surrounded his every thought. “You’ve ruined everything, and for what? For what?”
That was years ago now, the memory of it was dark around the edges, as one remembers a childhood dream. It was the tone of her voice that stuck with him though, all those years. Anger. She had been angry at him for saving that girl. For sacrificing himself for a nobody, as she had said later.
And yet, he hadn’t been sacrificed, had he? He had woken up every day since the fire and gone on with his life. He’d been successful in the Royal Navy. He’d made a name for himself and received honors from the Prince himself. Yet that was never enough for his mother. Nothing was ever enough.
“You have no idea who the girl was, after all this time?” Jane asked, leaning forward. Jeffrey dragged his eyes from his mother’s to look at her.
“I don’t, no. It doesn’t really matter to me. I didn’t know her, as far as I know she wasn’t anyone important, at least not in the eyes of society. But when I heard her crying, I had to do something.”
“How strange that she should have run away rather than waiting to see if you got out all right.”
Jeffrey shrugged in his best approximation of nonchalance.
“I found the whole thing shocking, to say the least,” his mother spoke up. “I still wonder who that girl was, and how she can live with herself after leaving a man, her hero, to die.”
“Well, thank God he didn’t die, eh?” Barbara’s brother said, taking a comically large bite. Jeffrey, for his part, had lost his appetite.
His joy at being near his soon-to-be bride was ruined by the telling of the story of the moment of his life he most wished to undo. He could feel her presence next to him, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at her. He hadn’t wanted her to know any of this, because he hadn’t trusted himself to recount the story without also divulging that, what had wounded him far more than the fire itself, was the realization that his mother wished he had not survived. That hurt was too personal, too raw, to share with anyone.
The conversation shifted to something else, but Jeffrey had a hard time following it. He forced himself to eat and to train his expression into a mask of polite interest. He felt Barbara’s little hand under the table, resting on his knee. But when he didn’t respond to her touch, she took it away.
He would have had to tell her eventually, he knew. Perhaps it was better this way, to get it finally out in the open once and for all.
After the dinner, Jeffrey kissed Barbara goodbye and bowed to the others, eager to return to the darkness and the silence of his townhouse. But first, he would have to endure the carriage ride with his mother to his childhood home.
Will she try to talk to me about the fire?
The subject had been one that had been silently forbidden between them ever since he had been convalescing from the burns. The closest thing she came to talking about the fire, most times, was to bemoan her fears that the family name would die with them if his looks prevented him from ever marrying.
That’s what it was all about, after all. The name. The money. An heir.
The thought of dying alone without the comfort of a wife who loved him had been depressing enough, without his mother there crying over titles.
The carriage they climbed into was his, technically, though his mother used it more than he did. Whenever the weather could bear it, Jeffrey preferred to ride horseback. He offered his hand to his mother, helping her into the dark interior of the large carriage before following her in.
The upholstery was crimson velvet with golden trim. He found it all to be ridiculous. In fact, when he had bought the carriage, he had thought to make it so over the top and ostentatious that his mother would pick up on the sarcasm of it all. She never did.
She sat across from him, folding her fan in her lap. Her graying ringlets bounced as the carriage jostled to life. She wasted little time in getting to the question that he knew was coming.
“Why had you not told Barbara about the fire until tonight?” she asked, her voice casual despite the fact that this was the first time in years that she had made direct mention of the fire to him.
“I don’t like to talk about it and she didn’t care,” he said, idly pushing the window open slightly to let in a cold night breeze.
“Close that window, it’s freezing,” she said.
Jeffrey pressed his lips together and pulled the window closed again. The air inside the carriage felt stale and old, as if all the oxygen inside had already been breathed and exhaled.
“You mean to tell me that she never asked about how you got those scars?”
“She asked, but she didn’t persist.”
“She looked perfectly shocked when you told the story,” she said.
Jeffrey looked up. As he had told the story
he had not been able to look at Barbara, afraid of the horror and pity she would see on his face.
“Yes well, it’s a shocking story, as you said.”
“Perhaps she expected that it was some accident that had occurred during the course of your military exploits,” she continued.
“What does it matter? Anyway, she knows the truth of it now, thanks to you,” he said bitterly.
“What do you mean thanks to me? It was that impertinent child who asked.”
“Yes, but it was you who insisted that I regale my new family members with the tale of my darkest moment as though it were a novel. Perhaps next time we have dinner with someone I can rudely insist upon you talking at length about the day Father died. Perhaps you also would enjoy the feeling of laying bare your soul over dinner to a rapt audience.”
His mother scoffed. Despite her insistence that she was cold, she snapped open her fan and fanned herself for a moment.
“If you had to throw your life away for a moment of heroics, you might as well tell people about it,” she muttered.
Jeffrey realized that he was clenching his teeth. His jaw ached.
“I’m getting married, Mother,” he said tersely. “Is that not all you have ever wanted? I haven’t thrown my life away after all because, as impossible at it may seem to you, I have found a woman who is not as disgusted with me as you are.”
“Jeffrey!” she snapped.
“Oh, don’t deny it, Mother. You lost all hope for me when you declared me unfit for marriage and fatherhood at seventeen years old. Since then I have been nothing but baggage to you, some sort of vestigial limb hanging off your life with no purpose other than to remind you that our family line was ending and that your life’s work, your wealth, the only thing that ever mattered to you, would be scattered to the winds after me because I made myself too horrifically unattractive to have children.”
“You’re being ridiculous, lower your voice, Jeffrey,” she said, still peevishly fanning herself. He hadn’t realized he was raising his voice.
“Are you warm, Mother?” he asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, he threw open the window.
A gust of cold, camp air swirled into the carriage and into his lungs. He felt invigorated, the trembling in his shoulders attesting to the energy that coursed through him. He had always known these things about his mother, but they had never been spoken aloud.
In a way, it felt like the end of an epoch.
“Close that window!” she cried.
He shook his head. “No. This is my carriage and I will have the window open. Mother, I have lived in the shadow of your disgust and disappointment for my entire adult life. And now, I have managed the one thing you always wanted. I’m free from it, now.”
She rolled her eyes dismissively. “You see? You haven’t changed at all. It’s just these kinds of theatrics that drove you to run into that burning building in the first place. Haven’t you grown up yet?”
“Apparently not.” He leaned back against the seat of the carriage, pushing backwards into the thick upholstery. “Yet another disappointment, I’m sure.”
By then, they were rolling up to the estate of his childhood. The enormous empty house that she still haunted, nursing the memories of her monstrous child twisted and crying in his bed.
No matter what he did, how many medals he received, how much money he made, she would never see him as anything but that ruined child. The one hope he had been harboring beneath all of his hurt was that if he could just find someone willing to marry him, she would finally see him as something other than a monument to her disappointed hope. Now it seemed that even that had not changed her feelings toward him.
“Goodnight, Mother. I trust you can see yourself in?” he said as she sidled out of the carriage.
“Goodnight, Jeffrey,” she called back coolly.
Chapter 31
Barbara stood on her tip toes to reach the tree branch, bringing it down and plucking a small bundle of tiny pink flowers from it. The tree was alive with fat honey bees, meandering from bloom to bloom. It was truly spring now, and the world was alive again after a cold winter. While the breeze still carried the bite of chill on it, there was no denying the season now.
And yet, this season that normally brought such a lightness to her heart, did not manage to dampen the fear and anxiety that now gripped her.
The lake at the edge of the Delistown estate that they walked around was a beautiful glassy blue, deep and dark and still. Tiny flower petals floated along the surface of it. Jeffrey was next to her, his hand clasped behind his back as he walked silently beside her. Something had changed since the dinner. There was a lightness about him, but also a sense of frenetic energy.
It must have something to do with his mother.
She wanted to ask him about it. The way he had stared at his mother across the table at dinner had been so strange. So…challenging? Cold? Hurt? She couldn’t decipher what silent communication had passed between mother and son that night, and she wanted to understand it.
But you have no right to ask him. You have no right to ask him anything.
The realization that he had been the boy in the burning house that fateful afternoon had hit her like a lightning bolt. That afternoon that she longed so much to forget, and had shoved so deep into her psyche that the memory of the actual event was twisted up inseparably from the memories of years of dreams.
It seemed impossible. Out of everyone in the world, what were the chances that the one man she would come to love would be the same man who had pulled her out of a room on fire?
She had entertained the notion, of course. In a fantastical kind of way. That the man she would marry was the man from her dreams. The man of fire and smoke. The man who appeared just when she needed him the most. But she had never considered that he might be, in actuality, the same boy.
She hadn’t known that the boy had not made it out of the building just behind her. She hadn’t known that he’d been trapped. All these years she had assumed that he had been just as physically unharmed by the event as she was. She had wondered if he had dreams of her the way she had dreams of him, but she never thought for a moment that he could have nearly died in that blaze.
“Barbara, what’s the matter?”
Barbara jumped slightly at the voice, so near to her. She had been lost in thought and almost forgot that he was right there with her.
“Nothing.”
He put his arm around her waist, pulling her against him
“You’re lying. Don’t start lying to me now. That’s no way to begin a marriage. You must always tell me everything.”
Oh Jeffrey. If I tell you the truth, will you still love me? The girl who ruined your life at so young an age?
Tears pricked at her eyes and she fought to hide them, nuzzling her nose into the front of his shirt. He was so warm, so strong, his heartbeat a steady rhythm that coaxed her own rapid pulse to slow.
“What is it, darling? Are you having second thoughts about me?” He asked. His voice was so quiet that it seemed to become a part of the landscape, carried on the faint breeze and the chirping of starlings.
She shook her head against his chest. “Never,” she said. “I love you more than anything in the world. More than life. More than myself.” Her voice wavered.
“What’s this, now?” he asked, tilting her head up to look in her eyes and seeing the tears there. He brushed the backs of his fingers across her cheeks. “Darling, why are you crying?”
“It’s terrible,” she whimpered. She had to tell him. There was no way to keep this secret locked up in her chest. It was too big. The truth didn’t fit inside of her anymore. It had to come out.
The dread seized her like a vice.
“What’s terrible?” he asked, concern growing in his face. His lovely face, the face she had dreamed of her whole life. Those scars that ornamented his face had once been so mysterious to her, a subtle reminder of fire, of her dreams, of the symbolism surrounding her nascent
sexuality. The fact that he was touched by fire had been what had drawn her to him in the first place. But knowing that she was the cause of them herself was too great a guilt to bear.
“You won’t love me anymore,” she breathed, a tear escaping her eye and rolling down the side of her nose heavily.
“Nonsense,” he said, his eyebrows furrowed in mounting panic. “There is nothing that could make me love you any less than I do right now.”
A Seductive Lady For The Scarred Earl (Steamy Regency Romance) Page 21