“Oh, Agnes, dearest,” Dora said as soon as they had watched their visitors walk away along the village street, “ought I to have said no? I really cannot—”
“Of course you can,” Agnes said, slipping her arm through her sister’s. “Imagine, if you will, that they are all just ordinary people, Dora—farmers and butchers and bakers and blacksmiths.”
“There is not a single one of them without a title,” Dora said with a grimace.
Agnes laughed.
Yes, and one of them was Viscount Ponsonby. Whom she really ought not to want to see again. Her only previous experience with combating churning emotions had come last October, and she’d found it neither easy to deal with nor pleasant. And on that occasion he had not even kissed her.
One would expect to have learned from experience.
***
George had been having the old nightmare again, and with increasing frequency. It was the one in which he reached out to grasp his wife’s hand but could do no more than brush his fingertips against hers before she jumped to her death over the high cliff close to their home at Penderris. At the same moment he thought of just the words that might have persuaded her to return from the brink and live on.
The Duchess of Stanbrook really had committed suicide in just that way, and George really had seen her do it, though he had not in reality been quite as close. She had seen him running toward her, heard him calling to her, and disappeared over the edge without a sound. It had happened a mere few months after their only son—their onlychild—was killed in Spain during the wars.
“Has the dream been recurring more frequently since the wedding of your nephew?” Ben asked.
George frowned and thought about it.
“Yes, I suppose it has,” he said. “There is a connection, do you suppose? But I am genuinely happy for Julian, and Philippa is a delightful girl. They will be a worthy duke and duchess after my time, and it seems there will be issue of the marriage within the next few months. I am content.”
“And that very fact makes you feel guilty, does it, George?” Ben asked.
“Guilty? Does it?”
“We should call it the Survivors’ guilt,” Ralph said with a sigh. “You suffer from it, George. So do Hugo and Imogen. So do I. You feel guilty because the future of your title and property and fortune have been settled to your satisfaction, yet you feel your very contentment with that somehow betrays your wife and your son.”
“Do I?” The duke settled an elbow on the arm of his chair and cupped his hand over his face. “AndhaveI?”
“Sometimes,” Hugo said, “you feel wretched when you realize that a whole day has passed, or maybe even longer, without your thinking even once about those who did not live while you did. And it almost always happens just when you are at your happiest.”
“I do not believe a whole day has passed yet,” George said.
“A day is a long time,” Imogen agreed. “Twenty-four hours. How can one turn off memory for that long? And would one wish to? One thinks one does until it happens for a few hours.”
“This is precisely what I mean,” Ralph said. “It is guilt pure and simple. Guilt over being alive andableto forget—and smile and laugh and feel moments of happiness.”
“If I had died, though,” Vincent said, “I would have wanted my mother and my sisters to live on and have happy lives and to remember me with smiles and laughter. Not every day, however. I would not have wanted them to be obsessed with remembering me.”
“One good way to forget,” Flavian said, “is to fall off your h-horse and land on your h-head after someone has shot you through it and then have someone ride over you. Behold the blessing of my poor memory: no g-guilt whatsoever.”
Which they all knew to be a lie.
But if he had died, he would have been quite happy at the notion of Velma’s marrying Len—his betrothed and his best friend, respectively. At least hethoughthe would have been happy. Except that no one could be happy when he was dead. Or unhappy either, for that matter.
Anyway, he had not died—but it had happened anyway. Velma had come and told him. Len had not. Perhaps he had decided against it when he heard what happened after Velma came. Perhaps he had judged it best to keep his distance.
Now Len was dead, and they had not spoken in more than six years while he still lived. And Flavian felt guilty about it—oh, yes, he did, unfair as it seemed. Whyshouldhe feel guilt? He was not the one who had done the betraying.
Usually these late-night sessions made them all feel somewhat better, even if they solved nothing. Flavian did not feel better the next morning, however. He had gone to bed feeling as if he had leaden weights in his shoes and in his stomach and in his soul, and he woke up with one of his headaches and deep in one of his depressions.
He hated them more than the headaches—that feeling of dragging self-pity and the fear that nothing was worth anything. It was the one shared mood the Survivors’ Club had all fought against most fiercely during those years they had spent together at Penderris. Bodies could be mended and made to work again, at least well enough to enable the person inside them to live on. Minds could be mended to the degree that they worked efficiently again for the one who inhabited them. And souls could be soothed and fed from an inner well of inspiration and from an outer sharing of experience and friendship and love.
But one never quite reached the point at which one could relax and know that one had made it through to the other side of suffering and could now be simply content, even happy, inside a balanced mix of body, mind, and spirit.
Well, of course one did not. He had never been quite naïve enough to expect it, had he? Surely, even when he had been head over ears in love with Velma, and she with him, and they had become betrothed at the end of those brief weeks of his leave and had expected a life of happily-ever-after, surely even then he had not believed it to be literally possible. After all, he had been a military officer, and there had been a war to fight. And his brother, David, had been dying.
