Simply Love (9 page)

He had come after her, she realized. She turned her head to smile at him.

“Listen!” she said.

“Some people do not even hear it,” he said after a few silent moments. “The elemental roar of the sea can easily be mistaken for silence.”

They stood side by side listening intently.

But after a while it seemed to Anne that it was her heartbeat she heard.

Or his.

And she was terribly aware that she was alive. Not just living and breathing, but…
alive
.

                  

Sydnam found her company both exhilarating and disturbing.

She asked some very direct questions, ones that his family and close friends carefully avoided, and ones that even in his thoughts he skirted around whenever possible. But he had asked her some rather personal questions too. He supposed that those who knew her avoided asking about the father of her child.

She had hated the man.

Had she been raped, then? Or did she hate him because he had refused to marry her after impregnating her?

She was beautiful beyond belief, especially when she smiled or was lost in the loveliness of her surroundings. Yet she was with
him
. He had asked her to come walking and she had said yes. When he was with her he almost forgot what she had to look at when she looked at him. With her he felt…undamaged.

Looking at her, it was hard to realize that in her own way she was as damaged and as vulnerable as he. He turned his head and watched the waves break into foam at the edge of the beach and then get sucked back by the force of the ebbing tide.

Was
he vulnerable, then? He had spent the past six or seven years making very sure that he was strong in every way possible. But in some ways he knew very well that he had not fully succeeded and never would. He had admitted to loneliness, had he not? Despite fulfilling work and several good friends, he was essentially lonely. Just as she was. And one reason why he liked living here was that he met very few strangers. Looking as he did, it was impossible not to cringe from the look in the eyes of strangers when they saw him for the first time.

While he was enjoying feasting his eyes on a lovely woman, she must look at least occasionally at monstrous ugliness. He had never been conceited about his good looks, but…Well.

“When the tide is fully out,” he told her before he could be consumed by the dreaded self-pity, pointing to their right, “it is possible to walk around the end of those jutting rocks to the main beach. But as the tide is now, this area is cut off and secluded.”

“All this reminds me very much of Cornwall,” she said. “Every mile of the coastline reveals a new and quite different splendor. If we were to climb up on those rocks, would we be able to see the other beach?”

“Yes, but they are high and rather rugged,” he warned.

She laughed.

“That sounds like a challenge,” she said, and strode toward them.

He always enjoyed clambering over the rocks, sometimes with the sea on three sides of him while he gazed at the panoramic view or searched the pools the high tides had left behind for shellfish and other marine life. He liked to challenge himself, climbing out where the absence of one arm and eye and the presence of a somewhat weak knee made progress difficult, even hazardous.

Some things were now impossible to him. But they had to be undeniably impossible, and not just improbable, before he would give up on them.

Painting was one impossibility.

Rock climbing was not.

“Oh, look!” she said when they were up on the rocks, well above the level of the small beach but not yet high enough to see over the top. She had noticed a cluster of seashells in a small sandy indentation at her feet and was stooping to examine and pick up a few of them. She set one on her palm and held it out for him to see. “Could anything possibly be more exquisite?”

“I cannot think of anything,” he admitted.

“Is not nature a marvel?” she said, sitting down on a flat-topped rock and arranging the shells on her knee.

“Always,” he agreed, “even when its effects are catastrophic to the humans who have tried to control or defy it. It is the quintessentially perfect artist and can also produce something as fragile and exquisite as these.”

He seated himself on a rock close to hers and looked down at the beach with the valley above it. Why would anyone choose to live inland when they could live close to the sea?

They sat in silence for a while, the sun warm on their heads, the breeze cool on their faces. How lovely it was, he thought, to have a companion here with him. And it struck him that though he had friends in the neighborhood, he never went walking or even riding with any of them. Whenever he came here, he was always alone—until now.

But in the future he would always remember that she had been here with him. He would remember her as she was at this moment, the brim of her bonnet fluttering slightly in the breeze, her posture graceful but relaxed, her long, slim fingers touching one of the shells almost reverently, the rocks behind one of her shoulders, the sea beyond the other, one shade darker than her dress—the same dress she had worn yesterday.

She lifted her head and met his gaze.

“How did it happen?” she asked him.

The question could have referred to any number of things. But he knew exactly what she was asking.

“I was an officer,” he said, “in the Peninsula Wars.”

“Yes,” she said. “I knew that.”

He looked away from her.

“It was torture,” he said. “I was on a special mission with my brother and we were trapped in the mountains by a French scouting party. There was the possibility that one of us could escape with the important papers we carried if the other acted as a decoy and courted certain capture. Kit was experienced while I was decidedly not.
And
he was my superior officer. I volunteered to be the decoy so that he would not have the painful duty of ordering me to do so. We were not in uniform.”

And that fact had made all the difference, of course. If he had been wearing a uniform, he would have been treated with courtesy and honor as a British officer by his captors.

One of her fingers was smoothing over the shell she had held up for his inspection.

“They wanted information about Kit and his mission,” he told her, “and they set out methodically over the next week or so to get it from me. They started with my right eye and worked their way down. Kit and a group of Spanish partisans rescued me when they had reached my knee.”

“They were still torturing you,” she said. It was not a question. “You had not given them the information they needed, then?”

“No,” he said.

Her fingers curled about all the shells and held them enclosed in a white-knuckled fist on her knee.

“You are incredibly brave,” she said.

Her praise warmed him. He had been expecting her to say something like—
oh, you poor man.
It was the usual reaction. It had been his family's reaction. Kit had spent years tormenting himself and blaming himself.

“More stubborn than brave,” he said. “I was the youngest of three brothers, the quiet, sensitive one among two vigorous, boisterous siblings. I wanted to prove something when I insisted that my father buy my commission. Sometimes we get more than we wish for, Miss Jewell. I was indeed given the chance to prove something and I did—but at rather a high cost.”

“They must be proud of you,” she said. “Your family.”

“Yes,” he agreed.

“But you did not stay with them?” she asked him.

“Families are wonderful institutions,” he said. “I value mine more than I can possibly say. But each of us has an individual life to live, our own path to tread, our own destiny to forge. You can imagine, if you will, how my family wished to shelter and protect me and do my living for me so that I would never again know fear or pain or abandonment. Eventually I had to step clear of them—or I might have fallen into the temptation of allowing them to do just that.”

She opened her hand to reveal the shells again, and he reached over to take them from her and set them carefully in a pocket of his coat.

“Do you have a family?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said.

“Ah, then you know what I mean,” he said.

“I have not seen any of them for more than ten years,” she told him.

Had she not said her son was nine years old? There was clearly a connection.

“They rejected you?” he asked her.

“No,” she said. “They forgave me.”

There was a silence between them while a pair of gulls cried loudly overhead and then landed on the rocks not far away and pecked at something they found there.

“Forgave?”
he asked softly.

“I was with child,” she said, “but I was unmarried. I was a fallen woman, Mr. Butler. And an embarrassment, at the very least.” She was clasping her raised knees now and gazing off at the horizon.

To her family? Their own embarrassment meant more to them than she did?

“But they must have wanted you to come home if they had forgiven you,” he said. “Surely?”

“They have never once mentioned David in any of the letters they have written,” she said. “Presumably they understand that if ever I were to go home he would go with me. They have never extended an invitation.”

“And you have not thought of going anyway?” he asked. “Perhaps one does not need an invitation to go home. Perhaps they would be pleased if you took the initiative.”

“I have no wish to go there,” she said. “It is no longer home. That is just a habit of language. Miss Martin's school is home.”

No. A workplace, no matter how pleasant, could never be home. Glandwr was not his. He doubted the school was hers. Like him, she had no home of her own. But at least he had hopes of acquiring one and the wherewithal to do so.

“What happened?” He almost reached across to set his hand on her arm, but he stopped himself just in time. She certainly would not appreciate his touch.

“I was governess to Lady Prudence Moore at Penhallow in Cornwall,” she said. “She was the sweetest, sunniest-natured young child anyone could hope to meet—living in the body of a growing girl. Her brother was doing his best to—to
interfere
with her, and I knew there was no point in appealing to the marquess, her father, who lived in a world of his own, or to her mother, who doted on her son and hated her daughter for being simple-minded. Her sisters were powerless though they loved her. And Joshua—the present marquess, her cousin—was living in the village some distance away and came only once a week to visit Prue. I lured Albert away from her. I wanted desperately to save her. I thought I could deal with him myself. But I could not.”

For a few moments she rested her forehead against her knees and stopped talking—though really she did not need to say any more.

“David was the result,” she said, lifting her head. “I wish…oh, I
wish
he had not come of such ugliness.”

Again he wanted to touch her but did not.

“I will say what you said to me,” he said. “You are incredibly brave.”

“Just foolish,” she said. “Just one of numerous women who believe they can reason with such men and change them. Some women even marry them believing that. I was saved from that fate at least.”

And yet, Sydnam realized, if the bounder had married her, her son would now be Marquess of Hallmere, and she would be the widowed marchioness, someone of considerable social significance and wealth.

“But the child was saved,” he said. “Lady Prudence Moore, I mean.”

She smiled rather wanly out to sea. “She married a fisherman a few years ago,” she said, “and has two sturdy sons. She writes me sometimes, helped by her sister. She writes with impeccable correctness in a large, childish hand. And if there is a type of happiness that is prolonged, Mr. Butler, then she is living it.”

“Because of you,” he said.

She got abruptly to her feet and brushed sand off her skirt. He got up too, but his preoccupation with her painful story had made him careless. His right knee gave out from under him and he had to twist sharply in order to use his left arm to save himself from falling. It was an awkward, undignified moment that embarrassed him. And even as he straightened up he was aware of the hand she had stretched out to steady him—though she had not actually touched him.

They gazed into each other's eyes, uncomfortably close together.

“Clumsy of me,” he said.

She lowered her hand to her side.

“When I decided to climb up here,” she said, “I did not think…” Her teeth sank into her lower lip.

“I am glad you did not,” he said quickly. “We are both maimed, Miss Jewell. But we both know the importance of refusing to live as cripples.”

She did something then that took him so much by surprise that he stood rooted to the spot, high on the rocks that divided the beaches, one foot slightly above the level of the other. She lifted her hand again and set her fingertips against his left cheek.

“We have both learned to see to the very heart of pain, Mr. Butler,” she said. “And so we have both changed—for the better, I believe. We are not cripples. We are survivors.”

She seemed to realize then what she had done, and even in the shade provided by the brim of her bonnet he could see her flush as she removed her hand hastily and rather jerkily.

“Has there been any man since—since Moore?” he asked her.

She shook her head quickly.

“No,” she said. And then after a brief pause, “Has there been any woman since your…I cannot call it an accident, can I?”

“No,” he said. “None.”

Awareness of their long, lonely celibacy pulsed between them, though neither of them put it into words. How could they? They were still virtually strangers to each other—and a man and a woman.