What had possessed him?
Would he come tomorrow, as he had said he would—ifhe remembered? What would he say? What wouldshesay?
Oh, how was she to stop her heart from breaking?
8
They did not talk while they were still on the village street. After they had passed between the gates, George turned off the driveway without hesitation to thread his way among the trees. Flavian followed, but under protest.
“Have we not w-walked far enough this afternoon but m-must now take a long way home?” he complained.
George did not answer until the trees thinned out slightly and they could walk side by side.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.
“About what?”
“Ah,” George said. “You must remember to whom you are speaking, Flavian.”
To George Crabbe, Duke of Stanbrook, who had once traveled all the way from Cornwall to London in order to fetch a raving, violent lunatic who had bumped his head in Spain and knocked everything out of it except the compulsion to hurt and destroy. Who had somehow, over the next three years, given each of his six main patients the impression that he spent all his time and care upon that one. Who had assured Flavian soon after his arrival at Penderris that there was no hurry, that there was all the time in the world, that when he was ready to share what was in his mind, there would be a listener, but that in the meanwhile violence was unnecessary as well as pointless—he was loved anyway just as he was. Who found a doctor patient and skilled enough to coax words out of Flavian at last, to provide strategies for relaxing and stringing words together into whole sentences, to help him deal with his headaches and his memory blanks as an alternative to simply panicking and lashing out.
George was the one who knew the six of them perhaps better than they knew themselves. Sometimes it was a disconcerting realization. It was also endlessly consoling.
But who knew George? Who offeredhimcomfort and consolation for an only son killed in battle and a wife dead by her own hand? Were his recurring nightmaresallthat he suffered?
“L-letters,” Flavian said abruptly as they came out of the trees close to the lake. “I w-wish they had not been invented.”
“From your family?” George asked.
“Another one from Marianne,” Flavian said. “It was not enough to write to t-tell me that she was going to Farthings to call on V-Velma. She then had to write again to inform me that shehadcalled. And my m-mother had to write to give me her version of the s-same visit.”
“They were all pleased to see one another, were they?” George asked.
“They were always t-terribly f-fond of her, you know,” Flavian said. “She was always sweetness itself. And they thought I t-treated her badly, though they do concede I knew no better. I did treat her badly too. I threw the contents of a g-glass in her face once, just as I threw a whole glass at you. It was w-wine. And in her case I did not miss.”
“You were very ill,” George said.
“They s-supported her decision to b-break off with me and marry Len instead,” Flavian said. “They seemed to think it was a f-fine thing for the two of them to do because he had always been so close to me—a man doing something n-noble for his best friend and all that. They thought it was all some sort of romantic t-tragedy. It is a pity Shakespeare was not still alive to wr-write about it. They wept oceans apiece over her at the time, and then they s-sent for you by s-special messenger when I behaved badly and reduced the drawing room to k-kindling.”
“You were very ill,” George said again. “And they did not know what to do for you or with you, Flavian. They had not stopped loving you. They heard I took in the most desperate cases, and they sent for me. They prayed I could perform a miracle. They did not stop loving you. But we have spoken of this many times before.”
They had, and Flavian had come to believe it was true—to a certain degree.
“They want me to b-believe,” he said, “that V-Velma loved me—all the time, without ceasing, even while she was m-married to Len. And that Len knew it and encouraged it and l-loved me too. It is all a b-bit distasteful, is it not? N-Nauseating, even? And s-surely not true? I h-hope it is not true.”
“Is that what Lady Hazeltine told your mother and sister?” George asked. “Perhaps they thought it would comfort you to know that those two always remembered you with tenderness.”
They were walking past the boathouse. Flavian alarmed himself and even made George jump when he slammed the edge of his fist against a sidewall, making it boom like a great gun and causing splinters of wood to shower off it.
“God damn it,”he cried. “Doesno oneknowanything?”
“Do you still love her?” George asked quietly into the silence that ensued. Always quietly. He never rose to passionate outbursts.
Flavian picked a splinter out of the side of his hand and pressed his handkerchief to the little bubble of blood that appeared there.
“I just asked Mrs. Keeping to marry me,” he said.
George did not exclaim in disbelief. It was virtually impossible to shock him.
