“And for us too?” she asked him, turning her face back to his.
He raised their hands and kissed the backs of hers.
“I understand,” she said, though he had said nothing, and he believed she probably did.
Magwitch, the butler, and Mrs. Hoffer, the housekeeper, were standing side by side outside the open front doors. Within, Flavian could see a row of starched white aprons on one side and a row of white Vs—shirtfronts, he guessed—on the other. The servants were lined up to receive them.
He was home. As Viscount Ponsonby.
David was gone, a part of family history.
***
Agnes really did think the house and park beautiful. Indeed, she thought Candlebury Abbey must be one of the loveliest places on earth. She would be happy if she never had to leave it.
They spent three days together, she and Flavian, wandering about the park together, hand in hand—yes, indeed. She made no remark upon it when he first took her hand in his as they walked, and laced their fingers. She almost held her breath, in fact. It seemed so much more... tender than walking with her arm drawn through his. But it was no momentary thing. It seemed to be his preferred way of walking with her when they were alone.
The park was larger than she had thought at first. It extended beyond the bowl-like depression in which the house was situated. But all of it—lawns and meadows and wooded hills, paths and rides, all of it—was designed to look natural rather than artificially picturesque. The lake and the waterfall too were natural, and the stone hermitage to one side of the falls was not a folly but had at one time been inhabited by monks for whom the abbey was too crowded and busy a place.
“I always l-liked to think,” Flavian said, “that they all left behind them something of the p-peace they must have found as they meditated here.”
She knew what he meant. It seemed to her that they found peace together at Candlebury during those days—almost. Except that there was a depth of brooding in him just beyond where she could penetrate with her companionship. It was understandable, of course. She had expected it.
He had shown her about the house and about the ruins of the old abbey. But there was one set of rooms he avoided, and he pretended not to notice when she stopped outside the door, waiting expectantly for him to open it. He walked on past, and she had to hurry to catch up to him.
They had a few callers, among them the rector of the village church. But although the rector expressed the hope that he would see them at church on Sunday, Flavian returned a vague answer that sounded like a resounding no to Agnes.
“We will not go to church on Sunday?” she asked after the rector had left.
“No,” he said curtly. “You may go if you wish.”
She looked closely at him and understood in a flash. The churchyard must be where the family graves were. And his brother’s grave. The set of rooms they had not entered while exploring the rest of the house must have been his brother’s.
The loss of parents, siblings, spouses, even children was something all too many people experienced. The death of loved ones was all too common an occurrence. It was almost always sad, painful, difficult to recover from, especially when the deceased had been young. But it was not rare. She had lost a husband. His brother had been dead for eight or nine years. But Flavian had never let him go. He had come home from the Peninsula because his brother was dying, but he had left before David actually died. Flavian had been on his way to rejoin his regiment when it happened and had not returned until after he was wounded.
Those details at least were not among his missing memories. She knew he felt deep shame and unresolved grief.
“I will not go to church without you,” she said. “Is there a way to get to the top of the waterfall?”
“It is a b-bit of a scramble,” he said. “We used to make d-dens up there as boys and hold them against trolls and pirates and Vikings.”
“I can scramble,” she told him.
“Now?”
“Is there a better time?” she asked.
And off they went, hand in hand again, and she might almost imagine that he was happy and relaxed and at peace.
They shared a bedchamber, the one that had been his as a boy, without any pretense of having a room each. A small room next door had been made into her dressing room. They slept together each night, always touching, usually with their arms about each other. They made love, often multiple times in the course of the night.
Life seemed idyllic.
And then, one night, Agnes awoke to find herself alone in bed. She listened, but there was no sound of him in his dressing room. His dressing gown was gone from the floor beside the bed. She donned her nightgown and fetched a shawl from next door. And she lit a single candle.
She looked in the drawing room, in the morning room, in the study. She even looked in the dining room. But there was no sign of him. And when she peered out of the drawing room window, she realized that she would not see him even if he was out there. It must be a cloudy night. All was pitch-dark.
And then she thought of somewhere else to look.
