“I will never be an officer again,” Ben said tersely.
Looking at him, Samantha realized fully just how that fact hurt him. Perhaps it even explained why he had not taken a firmer stand with his younger brother over his home. Running Kenelston would not be a big enough challenge for him. Perhaps nothing would ever again.
“No,” her grandfather agreed, “I can see that, lad.”
He talked a bit about the coal mines—he owned two of them in the Rhondda Valley—and about the ironworks in the Swansea Valley, where he had just spent a week. Ben asked a number of questions, which he answered with enthusiasm. And then he rose to take his leave.
“How long do you plan to stay, Major?” he asked.
Ben looked at Samantha. “Another two or three days,” he said.
“Then maybe you will come with my granddaughter to dine with me at Cartref tomorrow,” her grandfather said. He turned to look at her, a smile on his face but some uncertainty in his eyes. “Will you come, Samantha? I have a cook as good as Mrs. Price. And I would like to hear your story and to tell you mine. After that you can live here in peace from me if you choose. Though I will hope you do not so choose. You are all I have, girl.”
She looked at him in some indignation until she remembered what he had said earlier. He had written to her before her marriage and she hadsent messages. What had her father done? And after her marriage he had stopped writing for fear that she would be embarrassed by his humble origins and by the way his fortune had been made. She at least owed him one evening in which to plead his case.
But he had still abandoned his own infant daughter. There could be no excuse for that.
“Yes,” she said, “I will come.”
“And I would be delighted, sir,” Ben said.
The older man came toward Samantha, his hand extended again. But when she set her own in it, he smiled at her, that look of uncertainty still in his eyes.
“Allow me?” he said and leaned forward to kiss her cheek. “She was very, very beautiful, you know. I had her for four years and have loved her forever.”
She did not follow him from the room.
He had been talking about her grandmother. Yet he had been married to someone else after her.
She and Ben sat in silence until they heard the carriage drive away. Tramp was at the window, his tail waving as if in farewell.
“He has loved her forever,” she said bitterly. “Yet he abandoned the only child he had with her.”
“Listen to his story tomorrow,” Ben said. “And then make a judgment if you must.”
“Oh, Ben,” she said, turning her eyes on him, “IwishI could wave a magic wand and make your legs all better so that you could resume your military career and be happy and fulfilled.”
He smiled. “We are all dealt a hand of cards,” he said. “Some of the originals get discarded along the way and new ones get picked up, sometimes not the ones we hoped for. That does not matter. It is how we play them that matters.”
“Even if it is a losing hand?” she asked him.
“Perhaps it never needs to be,” he said. “For life is not really a card game, is it?”
20
They went swimming after all. And they dined together after Mrs. Price and Samantha’s maid had left for the day. They spent a few hours in bed before Ben returned to the village inn. They made love twice, slowly the first time, with fierce passion the second.
But there had been something a little…desperate about both encounters, Ben thought as he lay alone in bed at the inn later. Nothing had been quite the same. Real life, in the form of Bevan, had intruded. A small part of his story had been told, and more would be told tomorrow—Samantha had consented to listen. Her life, he suspected, was going to be very different from anything she had dreamed of when circumstances had led her to remember the run-down little cottage in Wales she had inherited.
She had a grandfather, a rich and influential man who, it appeared, cared for her. Whether she could care for him depended a great deal upon the story he would tell tomorrow, but she craved the closeness of some family tie, whether she fully realized it or not. Ben suspected that shewouldcome to care for Bevan. And she needed time and space—and respectability—in which to do that. And in which to recover fully from a seven-year marriage.
It was time to leave. Almost. He had promised two more days after today.
Though they had not spoken of it, they had both been conscious tonight of the fact that their affair, their early summer idyll, was almost at an end. Ben laced his fingers behind his head and gazed upward at the ceiling. Part of him was longing to be gone, to be done with the whole business. He wished he could just click his fingers and find himself on the road back to England. He hated goodbyes at the best of times. He dreaded this particular one.
Tomorrow was Sunday. The first day of a new week. Very nearly the end of his week. He had no idea where he would be next Saturday night, except that it would be somewhere far from here. And he had no idea what he would do. No, that was not strictly true. He was going to go to London, though not in order to participate in the social whirl of the Season or to allow Beatrice to matchmake for him. He was going to explore various ways of employing his time, perhaps in business, perhaps in diplomacy, perhaps in law. He would talk to Hugo, to Gramley, to various contacts he had in the Foreign Office. It did not matter that he did not need to work. Hewantedto work. And he would work. His elder brother had done so, after all.
But an obstacle stood between him and the rest of his life. There was the end of an affair to live through and goodbyes to be said. It was Sunday tomorrow. He had promised to go to church with Samantha. They were to dine at Cartref later in the day. And then, after tomorrow…
