“It is,” she agreed softly. “It is thedamnedestthing.”
“How did they know you were there?” he asked.
She raised her eyebrows.
“The French,” he explained. “They were behind enemy lines when they took you, were they not? Your husband thought it safe enough to take you that far. How did they know you were there? And how did they know he was important enough to take? He was not in uniform.”
“It was a scouting party,” she said. “The hills were full of them, theirs and ours, on both sides of the line. The line was not a physical thing, like the wall between the park here and the land beyond, and it changed daily. There is nothing tidy about war. Even so, he was assured that that particular part of the hills was safe for me.”
He straightened up and turned, all impatience and arrogance once more.
“There is that evening of cards with the Quentins tonight,” he said. “Shall I have the carriage wait for you? I will take my curricle. Or would you prefer that I make some excuse for you?”
“The carriage, please,” she said. “I may choose to live alone, Lord Hardford, but I am not a recluse.”
He looked at her over his shoulder. “Are you ever tempted to be?”
“Yes.”
He regarded her in silence for a few seconds. “Oneoughtto consider the women,” he said. “Your husband was not the only brave one in your marriage, Lady Barclay. Good day to you.”
And he strode from the room, the dog trotting at his heels. A few moments after the sitting room door closed behind him, Imogen heard the outer door open and close too.
Your husband was not the only brave one in your marriage....
If only she had died when Dicky had, the two of them together, just seconds apart. If only they had killed her, as she had fully expected they would—as Dicky had fully expected they would.Courage,that last look of his had said to her as clearly as if he had spoken the word aloud.
Courage.
She sometimes forgot that that was thelastword his eyes had spoken.Mehad come a few second before it.Me, Imogen.And even those unspoken words she sometimes forgot—or did not trust because they had not been spoken aloud. Though she and Dicky had always known what was in the other’s mind. They had been that close—husband and wife, brother and sister, comrades, best friends.
Me.And then,Courage.
She sat where she was while a grayish film formed over the cold tea in her cup—and the Earl of Hardford’s.
***
He pretty much hated himself, Percy decided as he shut the garden gate behind him and, without conscious thought, took the cliff path until he came to the gap. He scrambled down the steep track to the beach, heedless of possible danger, and strode the short distance to the cave. He went inside without stopping, daring the tide to come galloping up over the sand to trap him in there and drown him. The cave was much larger than he had expected.
Yes, he did, he decided as he placed one hand on a protruding rock and gazed out into daylight. He hated himself.
“You came all the way down this time without help, did you?” he asked Hector, who was lying across the mouth of the cave, his head on his paws, his bulging eyes looking inside. “Well done.”
Why was the dog so attached to him when he was a worthless lump of humanity? Dogs were supposed to be discriminating.
He had just confessed to the big dark blot on the otherwise relatively serene progress of his life—the great terror from which he had never recovered. A boy’s disobedient folly gone wrong. The ghastly humiliation that had dogged him into adulthood, though he had always hidden it well by the simple expedient of staying far from the sea and confronting every other challenge that came his way, the more dangerous the better, with a reckless disregard for his own life. It was mildly ironic, he supposed, that when he had inherited the title totally unexpectedly two years ago, it had come with a house and park that not only were in Cornwall but also were perched spectacularly upon a high cliff top.
That boyhood episode had been virtually theonlydark blot on his life. Well, there had been his father’s death three years ago, and that had been excruciatingly painful. But such losses occurred in the natural course of one’s life, and one did recover over time. It seemed to him that he had spent all the rest of his life studiouslyavoidingpain and really doing quite a good job of it. But who would not do likewise, given the choice? Who would deliberately court pain and suffering?
He was not in the mood for making excuses for himself, though. His adult life had been one escapade piled upon another. Since coming down from Oxford almost ten years ago, he had taken care to remain uninvolved in all except shallow, meaningless, often downright stupid frivolity. He was thirty years old and had donenothingin his life of which he could feel proud. Well, except his double first degree with which he had donenothingsince getting it.
Was itnormal?
It certainly was not admirable.
He had said something—this very morning. He frowned in thought for a moment.
Living is not merely a matter of staying alive, is it? It is what you do with your life and the fact of your survival that counts.
