She strode off in the direction of the far side of the park.
***
Flavian did not go all the way to Gloucester. After half an hour or so, he fancied his horse was favoring its right foreleg. Ralph hopped down from his saddle, uninvited, to take a look, making it necessary for Flavian to get down and have a look too. There was nothing obviously wrong, and Imogen, who had been riding a little behind them, remarked that she had not noticed the horse limping. But Flavian declared himself afraid to risk riding farther from home and perhaps laming the horse altogether. He would go back and get Vincent’s head groom to examine that leg just to make sure.
He would not hear of everyone else’s turning back with him. No, no, they must continue on their way and enjoy Gloucester.
Ralph gave him a hard look before riding on with the others, but he said nothing. Ralph was the only one who had remarked upon his absence with Mrs. Keeping a few evenings ago.
“Got lost between the music room and the drawing room, did you, Flave?” he had asked.
Flavian had raised his quizzing glass.
“Quite so, old chap,” he had said. “I shall h-have to ask the viscountess for a ball of yarn to unwind so that I can f-find my way from room to room.”
“Or you could ask Vince for a loan of his dog,” Ralph had said. “Though it is said three is a crowd.”
Flavian had put his glass all the way to his eye to survey his friend through it, but Ralph had just grinned.
He rode slowly back to Middlebury. Last night the conversation had deepened when Ralph had told them about the letter he had received earlier in the day. Damned letters! It was from Miss Courtney, the sister of one of Ralph’s three friends who had been killed moments before he himself was severely wounded on the battlefield in Spain. It was not proper for a single young lady to write to a single gentleman, but she had done so periodically ever since her brother’s death, claiming the privilege of a sort of honorary sister. Now, at the rather advanced age of twenty-two, she was to marry a prosperous, well-connected clergyman from somewhere near the Scottish border.
“But she still has atendrefor you, Ralph?” Ben had asked.
“Probably not,” Ralph had said, “else she would not be marrying Reverend Whatshisname, would she?”
But they all knew she had had atendrefor Ralph when he was still no more than a lad and she was still in the schoolroom. And that she had worshipped her only brother and turned to Ralph in the desperation of her grief, writing to him at Penderris Hall, seeking him out in London after he had gone back there. He had not answered most of her letters, pleading ill health in the few brief notes he had written, and he had avoided her whenever he could. He had even gone to the extent of excusing himself at one ball to fetch her a glass of lemonade and then leaving her thirsty by walking right out of the house and quitting London the next day.
“You feel guilty,” George had said last night, “for not having married her yourself long since.”
Guilt again! Nothing but damned guilt. Did life exist without it for some people? Flavian wondered.
“They were inordinately fond of each other,” Ralph had explained. “Max and Miss Courtney, that is. There were just the two of them. If I hadreallybeen Max’s friend, as I always professed to be, I would have looked after his sister, would I not? It is what he would have expected of me.”
“Even to the extent of marrying her?” Imogen had said. “Surely he would not have wished the sister he loved so dearly to be married for duty alone, Ralph. And that is what it would have been on your part. She would have known it, if not at first, then eventually. And she would have been unhappy. You would have done her no lasting favor.”
“I might at least,” he had said, “have shown her some compassion, some affection, some...God damn it all to hell,I used to be able to feel such fine emotions. Sorry for the language, Imogen.”
Ralph had been claiming for years that the worst of his many injuries had been the death of his emotions. He was wrong, of course. He felt guilt and sorrow. Clearly, though, there was a great chunk of his emotional life missing that only he could know about.
“One day you will feel love again, Ralph,” Hugo had told him. “Have patience with yourself.”
“As spoken by the world’s g-greatest lover,” Flavian had said, raising both an eyebrow and his quizzing glass in Hugo’s direction and winning for himself one of Hugo’s most ferocious scowls in return.
“Ralph already feels love,” Vincent had said. “He lovesus.”
And that had brought tears to Ralph’s eyes.
He and three longtime friends had ridden off to war at the age of seventeen with glorious ideals and even more glorious visions of brave deeds of honor to be accomplished in military combat. A short while later, three of them had been blown into a red shower of blood and guts and brains in an ill-conceived cavalry charge that had been met with the great guns of the French army. Ralph had watched in helpless horror before he too was felled.
“It sounds like a decent marriage Miss Courtney is making,” George had said. “I daresay she will be happy.”
Flavian had not mentioned his own letter from Marianne, his sister. She and her husband and their children were at Candlebury, she had explained, and would remain there over Easter before proceeding to London for the Season. Velma had arrived at Farthings Hall. Had he heard? Marianne was going to call there with their mother. Did Flavian intend coming there after he left Middlebury Park? She sincerely hoped so. The children would be ecstatic to see him, as their uncle had been their favorite person in the world since he took them to the Tower of London last year and then to Gunter’s for ices.
Flavian was not fooled by the brief, almost offhand mention of Velma. It was as obvious to him as the nose on his face when he crossed his eyes that his family and hers were hoping to rekindle the grand love story that had ended in tragedy after he had got knocked from his horse in battle and left his mind on the field when he was carried off it, and Velma and Len had consoled themselves by marrying each other. How fortunate for such hopes that Len had died a scant seven years later. It had been very obliging of him.
Velma had married Len because he, Flavian, was incapacitated, dead for all intents and purposes even though he was still alive in body. No one had expected him to recover, even the physician who came at regular intervals to shake his head and cluck his tongue and look grave and learned. They had all said so in his hearing, and whereas he did not understand even half of what people were saying, what hedidunderstand was almost invariably the things he would rather not have heard. He was mad, his mind gone forever. Someone was going to have todosomething about it one of these days instead of clinging to a hope that just was not realistic. Velma and Len had been the first to face up to reality. They had turned to each other in their mutually inconsolable grief and found some comfort in the fact that together they would be able to remember him as he had used to be.
That was the story that was always told within the family, anyway. His mother, his sister, his aunts and uncles and cousins to the third and fourth remove trotted it out at every family gathering. It made an affecting story and always drew tears to more than one set of eyes. The poignant epilogue to it all, of course, had been the fact that he had more or less recovered his wits after all during his long stay at Penderris. It always reminded one of his aunts—bedamned if he could remember which one—of Juliet awaking from her drugged sleep just after Romeo killed himself, believing her dead.
