He stood as she approached him and then sat again after she had seated herself. But he should have moved over, he thought belatedly. She was seated on his blind side. He was not usually so clumsy.
“When I was forced to leave my employment as Lady Prudence Moore’s governess,” she said, “I moved into a small cottage in the village of Lydmere. I eked out a living by giving private lessons, though I was also forced to accept the financial support Joshua offered me. I had my few pupils and my young son to keep me occupied almost every moment of every day. But I was still very aware of my aloneness. When I shut the cottage door behind any pupil who happened to come, there were just David and me. I sometimes found it…hard.”
“It was a good thing for you, then,” he said, “that you were eventually offered employment at a boarding school.”
“Yes,” she said, “it was the best thing that had happened to me in a long while. Do you like living alone?”
“I am never quite alone,” he told her. “There are always servants. I almost always have friendly relations with them, especially my valet.”
He could not see her unless he turned his head right about. He felt at a distinct disadvantage.
“Will you like living alone here?” she asked him. “Will it bring you the happiness you crave?”
Just an hour ago, when they had stopped in the gig at the top of the hill, she had assured him that he could be happy here. During the past hour they had walked with a spring in their step and talked and laughed and sometimes been comfortably silent with each other. They had been warmed by sunlight and summer. When had melancholy descended upon them both?
He had been trying all afternoon not to think about the fact that this was her last day at Glandwr—that tomorrow she would be gone, that everyone would be leaving before another week had passed. At first he had counted days in his eagerness to have them gone again. Now he was counting days unwillingly and for a different reason. But for Miss Anne Jewell he had just run out of numbers. He thought ruefully of all the wasted days when he had not seen her. But even if he had been with her every moment of every day, this would still be the last one.
“My life will be what I make it,” he told her. “That is true for all of us all the time. We cannot know what the future will bring or how the events of the future will make us feel. We cannot even plan and feel any certainty that our most carefully contrived plans will be put into effect. Could I have predicted what happened to me in the Peninsula? Could you have predicted what happened to you in Cornwall? But those things happened to us nevertheless. And they changed our plans and our dreams so radically that we both might have been excused for giving up, for never planning or dreaming again, for never living again. That too is a choice we all have to make. Will I be happy here? I will do my very best to be—if,that is, Bewcastle is willing to sell to me.”
“Whatwereyour dreams?” she asked him.
He turned his head then until he could see her. She was sitting slightly sideways on the seat, facing toward him, and she was gazing at him with large eyes made smoky by her long lashes and the shade of her bonnet brim. She was apparently gazing quite deliberately at his bad side. He could have suggested that they change places, but he would not do so. It would be safer thus. He would be constantly reminded that she had shrunk from him up there at the stile—yes, that was exactly what she had done—and that he must not allow his feelings for her to stray beyond friendship.
“They were reasonably humble ones,” he said. “I wanted to paint. I wanted a home of my own and a wife and children. No, let me be perfectly honest, since you have asked. I wanted to be agreatpainter. I wanted to be displayed at the Royal Academy. But there were choices, you see—there are always choices. I also wanted other people to see that I was as brave and as manly as my brothers. And so I talked my father into purchasing a commission for me. And the more my family protested that it was not the life for me, the more stubbornly I insisted that it was. Now I must live with the consequences of the choice I made. And I will not call it the wrong choice. That would be foolish and pointless. That choice led me to everything that has happened since, including this very moment, and the choices I make today or tomorrow or next week will lead me to the next and the next present moments in my life. It is all a journey, Miss Jewell. I have come to understand that that is what life is all about—a journey and the courage and energy always to take the next step and the next without judgment about what was right and what was wrong.”
“Were you as wise before your injuries?” she asked him.
“Of course not,” he said. “And if I am alive ten, twenty years from now, the words I have just spoken will seem foolish to me or at least shallow. Wisdom comes from experience, and so far I have had only twenty-eight years of it.”
“One fewer than me,” she said. “You are younger than I.”
“What were your dreams?” he asked her.
“Marriage to someone for whom I could feel an affection,” she said. “Children. A modest home of my own in the country. I did achieve at least a part of my dream. I have David.”
“And did you have a potential husband picked out?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
He would not ask the next question. The answer was all too obvious. The man, whoever he was, had abandoned her after discovering that she was with child by someone else.
Was he someone from Cornwall?
“But you are right,” she told him. “We have to continue with the journey of life. The alternative is too terrible to contemplate.”
He was uncomfortable with the silence that ensued. He could tell that she had not moved. She must still be sitting sideways beside him, then. He could simply have got up, of course. He still had not taken her inside the house. But some stubborn part of himself kept him where he was. Let her look her fill. It was not as if she had not seen him before.
“It is not a pretty sight, is it?” he said abruptly at last—and then could have bitten his tongue out. What could she possibly say in response to such self-pitying words except to rush into uttering foolish lies to console him?
“No,” she said. “It is not.”
The words amused more than they hurt him. He turned his head about again and smiled at her.
“But it is part of who you are to those who know you now,” she said. “That cannot be avoided, can it, unless you become a hermit or wear a mask. I daresay that for you it is a terrible thing to be blind on the one side, to have no arm, to be unable to do many things you once did without thought. And it must be a terrible thing to look in a mirror and remember how you once looked and will never look again. You were extraordinarily handsome, were you not? You still are. But those who see you now—especially, I suppose, those who did not know you before—soon become accustomed to seeing you as you are. The right side of your face is not pretty, as you say. But it is not ugly either. Not really. It ought to be, perhaps, but it is not. It is part of you, and you are a man worth knowing.”
He laughed, his face still turned toward her. Truth to tell, though, he was deeply touched. She was not, he sensed, speaking just to console him.
“Thank you, Miss Jewell,” he said. “In all the years since this happened, I have never found anyone, even my family—especiallymy family—willing to speak so frankly about my looks.”
