Sea of Secrets: A Novel of Victorian Romantic Suspense (30 page)

“What?” With one leap I was out of bed, snatching at the envelope that nestled inconspicuously against the toast rack. My hands were clumsy and it took me several tries to tear it open.

“My dear girl—”

My eyes dropped to the signature, and all my eagerness deserted me in a rush, leaving me hollow. I sat down on the edge of the bed and read it through, even though it had lost all interest for me.

My dear girl, I hope you are improved this morning. Charles told us of the headache that forced you to retire early. It may speed your recovery to know that your presence at supper was sorely missed! Take today to rest, as many of the other girls will be doing the same, and send word if there is anything I can do for you.

It was from the duchess, of course. So she did not know. Charles must have been very plausible; it seemed I owed him another debt of gratitude.

“Is that all, Jane?” I could not stop myself from asking. “No one else sent a message?”

“No, miss; no one.” My expression must have aroused her pity, because she inquired, “Would you like me to take a letter to anyone?”

“No, thank you,” I said. A sense of injury told me it was not my duty to send the first word. It was for Herron to seek me out, to apologize, to explain why he had abused me in such a shocking fashion. “That will be all, Jane, except that I will take my lunch in my room today.”

“Yes, miss.” Her arms full of sea-green satin, she curtseyed and let herself out.

With a brief prayer of thanks for her unquestioning obedience, I retreated to my bed and dealt listlessly with toast and tea. I knew that I would not be able to face the rest of the company until I was forced to; dinner I could not miss without making some excuse, but at least I would not be subjected to the gantlet at luncheon. The bright chatter about the ball, the precise review of every detail, the debate over how many times Mr. X had danced with Miss Y—I could not endure that. And my father, with his uncanny talent for sniffing out my weak points, would guess that something had gone badly wrong between me and Herron; he had been making sly insinuations for days about the discord between us, and I knew that once he saw me he would not rest until he had ferreted out the whole unhappy story. And then would come the taunting… I could not face it. Not until Herron had mended things.

As the morning passed with no word from him, I began to wonder just how long Herron would be. In my self-imposed solitude I would pick up books, only to put them down after reading half a page, and drift back and forth through my two rooms. He was too ashamed to come to me, I consoled myself; remorse for his own behavior made him hesitant to approach me. Less consoling was the possibility that he had not exhausted his anger with me. I had seen how implacable his rage could be when it was directed toward others; was he going to continue to brood over his grievance against me?

And what, if it came to that, was his grievance? After lunch I found my thoughts turning increasingly in this direction, as my desolation turned to indignation. What had I done to offend him except dress and act like the other girls? If wearing a lovely gown and dressing my hair with curling tongs were grounds for such an explosion, I would have liked to have been warned. To accuse me of wantonness, of artifice, of—what else had he hurled at me?—of participation in some feminine conspiracy! I wondered if Herron’s grief had festered in his mind to such an extent that he could no longer trust anyone, even me.

But as the afternoon passed my anger shaded into sadness. Herron and I had shared so beautiful an accord, had loved each other so deeply. How could it have vanished? For my part, I still felt that painful, sweet pull on my heart at even the thought of him. I was forced to wonder now if he still felt that for me.

By the time the daylight had started to fade I was growing restive. It was obvious that Herron was not going to seek me out; very well, I would seek him. I could not support any more doubts and uncertainties. We had to talk.

Finding him, however, was a test of my endurance. Whenever I put my head into a room to look for him among those gathered, someone would hail me and try to draw me into a conversation about the ball. I detached myself as quickly as possible from these well-meaning inquisitors, and without questioning too blatantly I at last gathered that Herron had been seen at one of his favorite haunts, the cliffs.

Indoors the atmosphere was listless, with everyone lethargic and spent after last night’s revels, but outdoors the air held an electric quality. There was no rain, no lightning, but the sky still lowered; and the wind whipped relentlessly around me, tugging at my skirts and hair. I gulped it into my lungs, grateful for the refreshing cold vitality of it. It helped me convince myself that I felt brave as I approached the lone figure standing at the head of the cliff path.

He turned as I neared him. Then, after one brief look, he faced the sea again. Not a word; not a sign to show that he had marked my presence. His eyes simply took in my existence, then dismissed it as irrelevant.

“Herron?” I said in bewilderment, but he did not move.

“I’ve been expecting you,” I tried next.

He spoke without moving. “Why?”

More than merely discouraging, it was humiliating, addressing his back. “After what happened last night, I thought you would wish to talk to me.”

“I have nothing more to say to you.”

His voice was not even bitter; it was distant, flat, as if he had spent all his emotion last night. I fought the urge to give up and turn back. He so clearly wanted nothing to do with me. I could have dealt with anger better than this complete absence of feeling; anger at least would have shown that I still had some effect on him.

“It’s precisely because of what you said that I am here.” Again, nothing. “At the very least you owe me an apology.”

“I owe you nothing. All obligations between us are broken.”

The meaning was starkly clear. I felt faint, as if all the breath had been squeezed out of my body. “What has happened to you, Herron?”

At this he turned to face me. His face might have been that of a marble saint, so unmoving, so beautiful it was in its cool remoteness. “You are a remarkable creature,” he observed, the lack of any feeling in his voice belying the words. “So persistent in your pretended naïveté, even when I’ve shown you up for the false creature you are.”

“I was never false to you.”

He ignored this. “How completely you fooled me. You seemed so sincere and devoted, and all the time you were manipulating me, conspiring with the rest of my loving family.”

“Conspiring! How, pray? Must you see everything that goes on in this house as a threat to you?” I retorted, aware that an edge was creeping into my voice.

This at last won some spark of response from him. “If you find me so absurd, you needn’t force yourself to endure me any longer,” he said coldly. “You may report to my uncle that your mission has failed, and that he will have to find another toady.”

I reached out to him, hoping that my touch might bring him to his former self, but he shook my hand off almost absently. “Herron, what are you saying? I love you. I thought you loved me.” But in his face I could find no remnant of love.

“I haven’t loved you for weeks,” he said.

Weeks.

He had not said it to hurt me. It was the plain truth.

Weeks.

When I had breath to speak I demanded, “Why did you say nothing? You should have ended it, Herron. It would have been kinder than letting me cling to a futile hope.”

“I’m certain you won’t be lonely for long,” he said, uninterested. “You’ve made it plain that one man is as good as another. Why not Charles? He’s good-looking enough, although perhaps too dim and bloodless to make the conquest a triumph for you.”

“Don’t say such things of him,” I snapped. “Charles is a fine man, Herron; perhaps finer than you.”

“And how quick you are to defend him,” came the dry rejoinder.

“I must, if you are to persist in seeing only evil in everyone around you. First your uncle, then your mother, then Charles—why do you believe we are all conspiring against you? None of us would ever dream of doing you ill.”

He shrugged, losing interest. “You know best, of course.”

I might indeed have been appealing to a statue. Frustration rose in a red tide. “Very well, so you have lost faith in me. But I refuse to believe that you know your family as little as you pretend to. They have always loved you, and you persist in believing them capable of the worst kind of deception and vice. I don’t know what you were like before your father’s death, but it seems to have done something to you—made you suspicious and evil-minded—and I don’t like what you have become.”

To my horror, I saw his mouth curl into a sneer at my vehemence. “You really should be consistent, my darling,” he purred, so nastily that I shrank back. “Only a moment ago you were prepared to swear on your soul that you love me. Which story am I to believe?”

He had never spoken to me in so caustic a tone, and his face was distorted into something that sickened me. I had spoken the truth when I said he had changed.

“Believe what you will,” I said, shaken. “I know that I loved you: guilelessly, and sincerely, whatever you may claim. And I hope that some day you will come to realize that, and will recognize that you yourself were the ruin of it. I am blameless.”

I turned to go, unable to bear the sight of him any longer. That in outward appearance he should remain as beautiful and desirable as he always had, when our circumstances were so changed, was the cruelest mockery. It was nearly impossible to conceive that I no longer had the right to kiss those lips, which I had kissed so many times; that I could no longer expect those velvet eyes to rest on me with delight. My mind could not hold the idea while my eyes still held him in their sight. I had to get far away from this man who was suddenly no part of me.

Before I had taken three steps his voice came from behind me.

“I let you make a fool of me for too long.”

I turned back for an instant. “You made yourself a fool, Herron; I had nothing to do with it.”

He shut his eyes as if succumbing to the weight of intolerable tedium, and turned away.

For only a moment I struggled with the desire to go to him, to shake him until this evil spirit that spoke through him had relinquished his hold and the Herron I loved looked out again through his eyes. I wanted to weep, to beg, to scream at him. But it would do no good. He was lost to me now; there was no changing that.

But I could not continue to stand there wrestling with my soul; blindly, swiftly I moved away, wanting only to put distance between us. The path to the shore beckoned, and I plunged down it, the recklessness of my descent dislodging pebbles and earth under my feet. I wanted the sea. I wanted to plunge into the icy water until the remembered touch of his hands and lips on my skin was blunted into numbness, until the roar of the tide obliterated his murmured endearments in my ears.

And the other voices as well, the ones that sounded like my father, saying how senseless I had been to believe he could love me. I clapped my hands to my ears, but it did not blot out the jeers ringing in my head. I could not stop seeing Herron’s face, once full of trust and tenderness, transfigured into revulsion and scorn.

I was almost running when my feet touched the strand, and I kept running through the churning surf, as cold eddies sucked at my footsteps and the wind lashed at me until my skin was stinging and raw. When my strength failed I slowed to a walk, but I kept moving along the beach, following the foamy line of the tide, away from Ellsmere. Away from Herron.

* * *

When, hours later, I returned to the house, I had reached a point of more than physical numbness. I could not say I had begun to accept the end of Herron’s love for me, but it had taken on an unreal quality; if I exercised the fiercest control over my thoughts and memories, and quashed him every time he tried, specter-like, to appear, I could endure.

This fragile self-possession carried me through the days that followed. Dinner every night posed the greatest challenge, since Herron was always there: after his mother’s ultimatum he had been careful to join the family nightly for dinner, although he said little enough in his uncle’s company. The sight of him at the dinner table on the evening after the ball was excruciating, and I avoided looking at him as much as possible.

The ordeal was made even worse by the certain knowledge that both of us were being closely observed by everyone else present. It was borne in upon me that our estranged behavior was prompting much speculative raising of eyebrows, meaning glances, and whispered comments, and whenever I raised my eyes from my plate I was sure to encounter a host of peering eyes. A shattered heart might be borne—I was not yet ready to make a definite assertion on that point—but it certainly should not be served up before an avid audience every night.

Fortunately, since the ball had marked the climax of the house party, the number of guests was diminishing. Every day the great hall was filled with luggage, and a carriage was always waiting in the drive for those who were departing. The number of places at dinner dwindled every night, and as the third floor gradually emptied my room regained its previous atmosphere of calm and privacy.

That was the pleasant part of the guests’ departure; unfortunately, the end of the house party was not an unmitigated advantage. For one thing, my father showed no sign of departing. Every morning I felt the sinking of my heart as he presented his gloating smile to me over the breakfast table and asked with saccharine concern whether Herron and I had “made up that lovers’ tiff yet.” The duchess chafed, I thought, but did not ask him outright to leave, and I began to wonder if he would become a permanent member of the household.

The other disadvantage of the emptying house was that once more I found myself left to my own devices for the greater part of the time. No longer were the days and nights filled with a busy commotion of social activity; it was not possible to avoid Herron’s company, and my own thoughts, by joining a group of guests and immersing myself in the company of others. My own rooms, once a refuge, were haunted by memories of Herron’s presence; yet I was afraid that if I left them I would encounter him.