“May we sit in the summerhouse for a while?” she asked, and when he looked at her he could see that she was blinking back tears.
He needed a wife. Suddenly, dizzyingly, he could not remember why she could not under any circumstances be Gwyneth.
He led the way without replying or showing that he had noticed her tears. There was a lock on the door. There was even a key somewhere—or had used to be. But the door had never been kept locked. What sort of a message wouldthatsend to their neighbors on open days? his father had once replied when Nicholas had askedabout it. The boathouse had never been locked either. And nothing had changed, he found now. He opened the door and stood back so that she could precede him inside.
—
The sun had warmed the inside of the summerhouse. There was no discernible dust on the ledges or furniture. The floor was clean. There was no musty smell. The Ravenswood gardeners must clean here regularly, Gwyneth thought as she sat on one of the comfortable chairs she remembered from her girlhood, when she had used to come here sometimes with Nicholas. Devlin sat on the sofa and looked at her. His shirt was buttoned to the neck, but he was wearing no cravat or neckcloth. The shirt itself was rather untidily bunched beneath his waistcoat and hastily donned coat. His hair was still disheveled.
She tried to remember the Devlin of six years ago, the one who had kissed her down among the trees below the pavilion. But it was impossible to transpose that youthful face onto this dour man. And why would she want to? She was no longer the girl who had returned his kiss. And he was far more attractive now. A strange word, that—attractive.It had very little to do with looks or perfect grooming or personality. But she had not come here to analyze a word in her mind.
“I have been doing a lot of thinking,” she told him. “About honesty and lies.”
He sat back, crossed his legs so that his booted ankle rested on his knee, and spread one arm along the back of the sofa. It was an informal, relaxed pose, but he looked anything but relaxed. His gaze upon her was steady and steely.
“It is so easy to be dishonest and to tell lies,” she said. “Even if only to ourselves.” This had sounded eloquent and earnest andpassionate when she had thought about it in the past few days. But something always happened between thought and speech. He would be yawning in a moment. Or just walking out, and she would be left to nurse her heart’s truth in silence for the rest of her life.
“Women are raised to tell lies,” she said. “Almost every parent and nurse and governess would be shocked to hear that and protest that quite the opposite is true. They teach the children under their care always to tell the truth, never to lie. But girls and women are taught to obey their fathers and then their husbands without question, to devote their lives and energies to supporting them and making their lives comfortable and never, ever doing anything to embarrass or shame them. Some boys clearly are raised to believe that the truth is something that can always be bent to suit their desires, provided it is done with discretion and brings no open shame upon themselves or their women.” Oh, this was as dry as dust.
“Did you come here to advocate formy mother?” he asked her. “And to tell me that perhaps my father went too far in his bending of the truth?”
She sighed. “I came to advocate for myself, Devlin, and am doing a terrible job of it. Women are taught that a man must make all the first moves and we must pretend to have no thoughts or feelings or even opinions of our own. The best we can do is to usewilesto achieve what we want. We are never allowed simply to speak our heart’s truth.”
“Yet you asked me to kiss you last week,” he said. “And today you asked me to marry you.”
“Yes.” It was downright hot here in the summerhouse. “I spent six years telling myself that I was over you. I convinced myself that with a little effort I could fall in love with someone else, or at least hold someone else in high enough regard that I could commit therest of my life to him. It has proved not to be so. I still may marry someone else, for I do not fancy the alternative. But before that happens, I must speak the truth. It has always been you, Devlin, right back to the days when you used to come to Cartref to spend time with Idris and did not even know I existed.”
“I knew,” he said.
She frowned, but he did not continue. “I was very much in love with you long before the day of that fete,” she said. “But I did not believe you had any interest in me. And I have never been comfortable with the idea of usingwiles.”
“You never needed to,” he said. “I was interested.”
“That day,” she said. “It was magical. That is not a strong enough word, but I cannot think of another. It was... magical.”
“That is exactly the right word,” he told her. “Itwasmagical. Not real. Insubstantial. An illusion.”
“Was it?” she asked him. “Devlin, if... If everything had not happened, would you have come the next day to talk with Dad? Would you then have made me a formal offer? Would we have married? Would we still be happy? Happier, maybe? Because we did not reallyknoweach other then, did we? Not to the depths of our souls. We would have had those years and all the years to come to grow together. Was it thatone incidentthat made all the difference to our lives?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “It was the one thing that crashed the world and made me understand what an innocent fool I had been all my life. Fornothingwas as I had thought it. I had been living a grand illusion. A great lie. There is more honesty, Gwyneth, in an army fighting and killing for a cause no one can quite put into words than there ever was here.” He made a sweeping gesture with the arm he had draped along the back of the sofa, indicating the world beyond the summerhouse.
“Was Stephanie not what you thought her?” she asked.
He looked impatiently at her. “She was achild.”
“And a person,” she said. “Your sister. Yourbelovedsister, I believe. Was Philippa not what you thought her? Or Owen or Nicholas? Or Ben?”
His eyes narrowed. “Ben is the rock upon which I have steadied myself for more than six years,” he said. “He was not part of the corruption. He was the acknowledged son of a whore. There was no lying there.”
“And he was the son of your father,” she said. “WasInot what you thought me?”
He laughed harshly. “It was the other way around, Gwyneth,” he said. “It wasIwho was not what I thought myself to be. I was part of the whole illusion—a Ware of Ravenswood Hall. That wonderful, perfect, benevolent, always genial family that brought happiness to all within our orbit.”
“It was not all illusion,” she said. “That day, for example. The day of the fete. It gave an enormous amount of enjoyment, even happiness, to a lot of people, people for whom life is often somewhat tedious. Your father and your mother made that possible, and you and your brothers and sisters helped make it happen.Everythingwas not a lie.”
“To me it was,” he said.
“You fought back against it by telling the truth,” she reminded him. “Regardless of the consequences. You have suffered those consequences. But it was yourfatherwho did wrong. He suffered too in his own way, I suppose. So did your mother, who had enabled him, along with numerous other people, her own mother and father and brother among them, because that was what society expected them to do. Youtold the truth.Are you going to punish yourself for the rest of your life for that? You cannot suffer the consequences ofthe lies. You neither told them nor condoned them. You cannot take the burdens of the whole of your family and a large segment of polite society upon your shoulders.”
