“We ought to have brought the blanket,” he said.
“The grass is dry.” She rubbed it with one hand. “And it is sheltered from the breeze here. It feels almost warm.”
He sat beside her and lay back to gaze up at the sky.
“Sydnam,” she said several minutes later, bending over him to look into his face, “you will take us?”
“To Gloucestershire?” he said. “Yes, of course. You know I will.”
She gazed down at him.
“I suppose,” she said, “I ought to tell you what happened.”
“Yes,” he said, “I think you ought.”
He lifted his hand and touched the backs of his fingers to her cheek.
“Come down here,” he said, and spread his arm across the grass so that she could rest her head on it. When she had done so after tossing aside her bonnet, he wrapped his arm about her and drew her head onto his shoulder.
“I think you ought to tell me,” he said again.
“I was going to marry Henry Arnold,” she said. “But we were both very young—too young to marry—and my father was having financial difficulties and I offered to take employment as a governess for a couple of years. I went to Cornwall and thought for a while that my heart would break—I had known Henry all my life and missed him more than I missed any of my family. We were not officially betrothed, but everyone knew we had an understanding. Everyone was happy about it—both his family and mine.”
And he had abandoned her. Sydnam waited for the most painful part of her story.
“And then,” she said, “soon after I had made a visit home and we had celebrated Henry’s twentieth birthday, I was forced to write home to tell…what had happened to me. I wrote to Henry too.”
And the blackguard had rejected her.
“My mother wrote back,” she said. “She told me that they forgave me and that I could come home afterward if I wished—I assumed she meant after the baby was born—but that perhaps it would be better if I did not.”
Sydnam closed his eye, and his hand played with her hair. How could any mother not have rushed to her side at such a time? How could any father not have rushed to call to account the rogue who had ruined her?
“Henry did not write,” she said.
No, he would not have done.
“And then, just three weeks after her first letter,” she said, “my mother wrote again to announce that Sarah, my younger sister, had just been married—to Henry Arnold. One month after my letter must have arrived. Just time for the banns to be called. She added again that perhaps it would be best if I did not come home—and I assumed she meant ever.”
Sydnam’s hand lay still in her hair.
“I did not know how many more blows I could take,” she said, her voice more high-pitched. “First, Albert. And then the discovery that I was with child. Then my dismissal by the Marchioness of Hallmere—Albert’s mother. And then rejection by my own mother and father. And finally the betrayal. You cannot know how dreadful that was, Sydnam. I hadlovedHenry with all my young heart. And Sarah was my beloved sister. We had confided all our youthful hopes and dreams in each other. Sheknewhow I felt about him.”
She buried her face against his shoulder. He turned his face to kiss the top of her head and realized that she was weeping. He held her close, as she had held him just two days ago. He did not attempt to speak to her. What was there to say?
She was still at last and quiet.
“Do you wonder,” she asked him, “that I have never gone home?”
“No,” he said.
“My mother writes at Christmas and my birthday,” she told him. “She never says a great deal of any significance, and she has never once mentioned David, though whenever I write back I tell her all about him.”
“But shedoeswrite,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I tell you what I would do,” he said, kissing the top of her head again, “if Albert Moore were still alive. I would find him, and I would take him limb from limb even with my one hand.”
