“I believe he decided that at my age I do not need one,” Clarissa said. “He also understands that we need to talk. I am sorry about all this, Matthew. Perhaps I should have predicted it, but I really did not. I hope this is the end of the matter, but I would not wager upon it. Ben is going back home to Penallen the day after tomorrow. Owen is going with him.”
She went to sit at the table, in the place she had sat last time, and Matthew took the chair across from her.
“Perhaps your family’s reaction to any change you decide tomake in your life is something you needed to discover,” he said. “There is a quotation hovering at the outer edges of my mind. Ah. I have it.No man is an island.By John Donne, the poet, though that particular work was not poetry. Perhaps what you wanted to do this summer was never something you were going to be able to decide all alone, Clarissa.”
“Every man is part of the main,” she said, recalling the words as closely as she could from a little later in that passage by Donne. “Presumably he meant every woman too. I think perhaps it would be altogether better for your peace of mind, Matthew, if you stopped seeing me. I would absolutely understand.”
“Is it what you want?” he asked her.
Her hand came partway across the table and then started to withdraw. He took it in both his own before she could do so.
“My family’s concern and the concern of my friends and neighbors here is rather touching from my point of view,” she said. “It shows me how much they all care. However, from your point of view it is more than a little insulting. There would not be all this bother if you were Lord Taylor of such-and-such, with a grand stately home and property. My family was mildly encouraging of the budding courtship of Lord Keilly earlier in the spring. This must all be humiliating for you. Yet when all else is stripped away, I am merely Clarissa Greenfield and you are Matthew Taylor, children of neighboring gentry.”
He drew a couple of breaths but still seemed not to have filled his lungs. “I am going back,” he said.
He saw the incomprehension in her eyes change to understanding. She set her free hand over their clasped hands. But she said nothing. Typical of the way she had always been, she waited for him to continue.
“I am going to talk to Reginald,” he said. “If he will talk to me, that is.”
He felt sick to his stomach, as he had been feeling ever since Philip’s visit. He had tried to ignore his new knowledge. There was little point now in raking up all those old troubles. His brother had probably lived a happier life without him. He himself had lived a happier life free of his family. His childhood and boyhood were like a bad dream that had faded almost to nothingness. He had been at peace with himself and his world. His life for more than twenty years here had been exactly as he had wanted it to be.
He felt even worse now that he had put it into words—I am going to talk to Reginald. As though he had burned a few bridges behind him. As though he could not now change his mind.
“And I am going to visit their graves,” he said. “Poppy’s and Helena’s.”
If he could find them. They were probably completely overgrown. He had not even had a headstone made for them. His stomach gurgled quite audibly.
“How will you get there?” she asked.
“I will hire a horse or a carriage,” he said. “It is what I do whenever I have a distance to go.”
“Let it be a carriage from Ravenswood,” she said. “Let me come with you. I can visit my parents for as long as you need.”
Their eyes met across the table.
Strangely, it was what he had dreaded most, the journey there. The anticipation. Ten miles without anything to think of except what it was going to be like to see his brother again after all these years and what he was going to say. Wondering what it would be like to walk into the churchyard to hunt for a grave he had treated with such disregard he had not even made arrangements to have itmarked. And then there would be the long journey back to Boscombe, alone with his thoughts again.
“I cannot go tomorrow or the day after, though,” she said.
“The day after that?” he said. “It would be a great imposition upon your good nature, though.”
“Matthew,” she said softly, and tears welled into his eyes.
He felt horribly humiliated. He snatched his hands from hers and scraped back his chair to scramble to his feet. But she was on hers before he was and had come around the table. One of her arms came about his waist, the other around his shoulders, and she moved against him and tipped back her head to look into his face.
“You are my friend,” she said fiercely. “I love you.”
He rested his forehead in the hollow between her shoulder and neck and closed his eyes as his arms came about her. She was not talking about romantic love, of course, despite the kisses they had shared out by the hills and at the lake. But there was a love that was a little more than just friendship. She loved him. And of course he loved her. Always had, always would. He had avoided putting a name to the type of love it was—except when he was eighteen years old and lived his whole life on raw emotion. Love was love. It did not always need to be defined or subdivided.
“I beg your pardon,” he said after a minute or two, lifting his head and looking into her face. “I have learned to live my life without any extremes of emotion. I have liked it that way. It has given me balance and tranquility.”
It had not struck him in all that time that perhaps he had repressed a great deal that mattered in life in favor of what was not, after all, real peace.
She raised the hand that was around his shoulders and cupped itabout the back of his head. She smiled at him and kissed him. And he tightened his hold on her and kissed her back.
Someone coughed inside the workroom and then fumbled noisily with the door handle before opening it. Matthew had almost forgotten Ben was still in there. He released Clarissa at the same moment as she released him.
“Have you ever considered having an exhibition of your work?” Ben asked. “At a summer fete, for example? Or are they not intended for people to gawk at? You are a true artist, you know. You are not a mere dabbler.”
