There was a short silence.
“Lady Hazeltine?” she asked.
“Velma, yes,” he said. “It s-started the year we were fifteen.”
He lowered his arms and turned from the window. Agnes was wearing her nightgown again, a flimsy, pretty new one. The room was chilly. He strode over to her dressing room and in the near darkness found a woolen shawl. He brought it back, wrapped it about her shoulders, and led her back to the bed. He seated them side by side on the edge of it and took one of her hands in his. He closed his other hand into a fist and rubbed it over his forehead.
“I lost a whole chunk of memory,” he said. “And then it came b-back and woke me, and shut down again. It is how it used to h-happen when I was still at Penderris. Not so much now, though. I always assume I have remembered everything.”
“Have you recalled it again?” she asked, turning slightly so that she could hold his hand with both of hers.
Yes, it was there. In the open. It was not going to wink out again.
“Len—Leonard Burton, my school friend who later became Earl of Hazeltine—had not c-come to stay that summer, as he usually did,” he said. “He had to go home to Northumberland for some family event. I can’t recall what. Marianne had just made her come-out and was off at a house party with our m-mother. David stayed in the house or close to it most of the time. He did not have the energy for much else. So I wandered about the park alone—riding, swimming, fishing, doing whatever took my fancy. I was easy to p-please. I always enjoyed just being home.”
“And you visited Farthings Hall?” she asked.
“I do not think so,” he said. “Not to see Velma, if that is what you mean. We were never really f-friends, except perhaps when we were very young. She was a girl.”
He frowned at his bare feet, which were stretched out before him.
“Shecame to Candlebury, though,” he said. “To see David, she always claimed. They were to be officially betrothed when she was eighteen, and m-married when she was nineteen—that had been planned by both sets of parents when she was still in the c-cradle. No one ever questioned it. She ought not to have come. There were only the two of us—David and me—there apart from the servants, and she never brought either a groom or a maid with her. She came by all sorts of different routes too. She had an uncanny knack of coming acrossmeon her way to the house.”
“Was it just coincidence?” Agnes asked.
“I thought so,” he said. “She was always so s-surprised to see me and so full of apologies for disturbing me. But she always stayed to stroll or sit with me. Sometimes she spent so long with me that she never did get to the house to see David. Whenever shedid, though, he would send immediately for a m-maid to sit with them and then for a groom to accompany her back to Farthings. She told me she liked David, even l-loved him, that she l-longed to be old enough to m-marry him so that she could look after him.”
He could remember being annoyed the first few times she had found him and not simply ridden on and left him to his own company. But he had beenfifteen, for God’s sake. It had not taken him long....
“And then I started touching her,” he said, “and kissing her, even though she used to cry afterward and tell me we absolutely must not do it ever again. Because of D-David. Then one afternoon we went farther than kisses. Considerably farther, though not... all the way. And that was the end of it. She cried and t-told me she loved me. I told her I loved her too but that it was over, that we m-must not meet like that again. And I m-meant it. I could not do such a thing to my brother. I knew he adored her. I d-don’t think I set foot outside the house for a week, and then I went to stay with another school friend who had been p-pestering me to visit him. It meant l-leaving David alone, but I was having a hard time looking him in the eye anyway.”
“And all this you have just remembered?” Agnes asked him.
He frowned. Velma had come to Candlebury that summer because his mother and Marianne were away, and David was more or less housebound, and Len was home in Northumberland. She had come to seehim. David could have held little attraction for a fifteen-year-old girl, not when he had a more robust brother, and not when that brother would surely be Viscount Ponsonby of Candlebury Abbey in the not-too-distant future.
But could she be blamed for such conniving?
“No,” he said. “This I remembered, and the apparently random meetings during the next three years, and the t-temptation. She was a lovely girl, and I was a l-lusty boy. But the date for their betrothal was coming c-closer, and D-David was happy, though he once confided in me that he thought p-perhaps it was selfish of him to hold her to a promise made by our parents and hers so many years ago. She was always sof-fondof him, though, whenever they were together.”
“Whathaveyou remembered, then, Flavian?” she asked.
He swallowed once and then again. She was holding the back of his hand against her cheek, he realized.
“When Velma turned eighteen,” he said, “and plans were being made for a betrothal party and an announcement to be sent to the London papers, David suddenly refused to marry her. He said it would be unfair when he was not w-well enough to give her the life she deserved. He set her free to find someone else. He hoped she would go to London for a Season and make a b-brilliant marriage. She was inconsolable, and he was heartbroken. And all this I remembered too.”
She set her lips against the back of his hand.
“Our families immediately devised an alternate plan,” he said. “It seemed almost as if they were r-relieved, as if they were far h-happier with the idea of Velma’s marryingme. And then D-David s-spoke privately with m-me.”
He shivered and got to his feet to go and stand close to the window again. His hands found the pockets of his dressing gown and shoved inside.
“He asked me if it was t-true,” he said. “And he asked me if I l-loved her. And he t-told me that I had his blessing anyway, and that he would not stop loving me. Though he did add, as a sort of j-joke, that if he only had a bit more energy, he m-might challenge me to pistols at d-dawn.”
He opened and closed his hands inside his pockets. Agnes said nothing.
“She had told him—and sworn him to secrecy,” he said. “She had told him that she and I had l-loved each other p-passionately for three years and were l-lovers, and that I had assured her we would s-still be lovers after she married David, but that she had decided she could not c-continue with the deceit. She had b-begged him to set her free to m-marry the man she loved.”
He could hear Agnes draw an audible breath.
