And the devil of it was, he believed her.
And in doing so, he had plunged deep into the very heart of darkness with her—a place he had been at great pains all his life to avoid.
I killed him.
***
Imogen arrived two days early at Penderris, and she had come by post chaise, alone, with only one small bag. Nevertheless, George, Duke of Stanbrook, did not bat an eyelash. He must have seen the chaise coming and was out on the terrace waiting to hand her down.
“Imogen, my dear,” he said. “How delightful!”
But then he took a penetrating look at her and drew her all the way into his arms and held her tightly.
She did not know how long they stood like that or what happened to the chaise. The tension gradually eased out of her body as she breathed in the scent of him and of home—or what had been a safe haven of a home for three years and was still her refuge and strength.
He took her hand on his arm when she finally stepped back and led her inside, talking easily to her just as if her early arrival and the manner of it were not quite untoward. He talked to her in a similar manner for the rest of the day and all of the next, until Hugo and Lady Trentham arrived halfway through the afternoon, also early. They had set off from home a day before they needed to, Gwen, Lady Trentham, explained, all smiles and cheerfulness, because they thought perhaps they would need to travel by easier stages than usual with the baby. They had been wrong, however, and here they were.
Hugo, large and imposing and as severe looking as ever with his close-cropped hair and tendency to frown, slapped George on the shoulder and pumped his hand while declaring that he was now the slave oftwofemales. “A more than willing slave, though, I make haste to add,” he said as he turned. “You have arrived even earlier than us, Imogen? That makes me feel better.”
And he beamed at her and opened his arms and then stopped and frowned and tilted his head to one side. “Come and be hugged, then, lass,” he said more gently, and once more she was enfolded in safety.
But there was Gwen to be hugged too and Baby Melody Emes to be admired—her nurse was just carrying her inside and Hugo was taking her between his huge hands, fairly bursting with pride.
The others arrived the following day. Ben and Samantha, Lady Harper, came first, from Wales. Ben walked into the house and up the stairs with his two canes, but he propelled himself about much of the time after that in a wheeled chair, having decided that it was not an admission of defeat but rather a moving forward into a new, differently active phase of his life.
Ralph arrived next with his very red-haired duchess, whom Imogen had not met before and who begged to be called Chloe. Imogen had not seen Ralph either since he inherited the dukedom on the death of his grandfather last year. His face was still badly scarred from a war wound, but there was a new serenity in his face.
Vincent came with Sophia, Lady Darleigh, and their son, and as usual it was hard to remember he could not see, he moved about so easily, especially with the help of his dog. Flavian came last with Agnes, Lady Ponsonby, and the announcement almost as soon as they stepped through the door that he was expecting to be a father within the next six or seven months and they must be very gentle with him because it was all a strain upon his nerves. And he spoke, Imogen was interested to note, with very little of the stammer that had stubbornly stayed with him even after he had recovered most of his faculties after his head injuries healed.
“In that case, Flave,” Ralph said, “then I need gentle handling too. Never mind Chloe. She is made of sterner stuff.”
And they exchanged shoulder slaps and grinned at each other in a male, self-satisfied, slightly sheepish way.
All of them—except Vincent—looked with narrow-eyed closeness at Imogen before hugging her. All of them hugged her more tightly than usual and looked into her eyes again before being caught up in the general hubbub of greetings. And even Vincent, after he had hugged her, gazed into her eyes—he had an uncanny knack of doing that—and spoke softly.
“Imogen?”
But she merely kissed his cheek and turned to hug Sophia and exclaim over how much Thomas, their one-year-old, had grown.
Two days passed and two nights, during which the seven of them sat up late, as they invariably did during these weeks, talking more deeply from the heart than they had all day.
On the first night Vincent reported that his panic attacks came far less frequently as time went on. Just sometimes it came over him, the realization that his blindness was not a temporary thing from which he would eventually recover, but a life sentence.
“I will never see again,” he said. “I will never see my wife or Thomas. I will never see the new babe when it arrives—ah, I was not supposed to mention that there is another on the way because it is not quite certain yet. I shall have to confess to Sophie when I go up to bed. But why is it that though I accepted my condition long ago and have a marvelously blessed life and rarely even think about being blind, it can suddenly hit me like a giant club as though I were only just noticing?”
“The trouble is, Vince,” Hugo said, reaching across Imogen on the sofa the three of them shared to pat his knee, “that most of the timewedo not notice either.”
“Vince isblind?” Flavian said. “Isthatwhy he walks into d-doors from time to time?”
On the second night, George admitted that he still had the dreams in which he thought of just the right words to speak to his wife to stop her jumping off the cliff and was close enough to catch her hand in his and pull her back from the edge—but always the words and the hand were just too late. In reality, though he had seen it happen, he had been too far away to save her.
Imogen had hardly spoken since her arrival except in purely sociable platitudes. Indeed, she had talked more with the wives than with her friends. But on the third night no one had much to say. It happened that way sometimes. Their lives were not always brimming over with problems and difficulties. Indeed, five of them at least seemed remarkably contented with their lives, even happy. And three of them—oh, goodness,three—were expectant fathers. Their future reunions were going to be very different. Even this year there was Thomas toddling about and jabbering in a language even his mother and father did not understand, though Hugo offered some marvelous interpretations as he tickled his daughter under the chin to see her wide, toothless smile.
Now on the third night, Imogen drew an audible breath during a longish, companionable silence and closed her eyes. “I told him,” she blurted out.
The silence took on an element of incomprehension.
But of course, they knew nothing. She had told them nothing. It seemed incredible to her that they did notknowall that had been so central to her life for longer than a month.
