Surely, he had misheard.
She would never have kept something so vital from him.
“Chris?” he asked, voice rising along with his agitation.
She lifted her head at that, expression so anguished. “I-I was pregnant...with your babe.”
Alistair staggered back, the impact of her words like a horse hoof to the chest.
They both knew what had occurred between them...the anticipation of their marriage vows. He had loved her so much, so dearly. And they were betrothed. Handfasted.
Why are we waiting for a signature in a parish record?she had whispered to him on a sultry Tuscan evening.Can we not become husband and wife now? We have plighted our troth and handfasted one another, after all. Your ancestors married in such a way. Why can’t you and I?
He had needed no further encouragement.
Shefeltlike his wife. And he wanted her—the life that they would have together.
Their coming together—clothed only in moonlight and the hum of cicadas—had been a first for each of them. A glorious promise of the awaiting future.
Somehow, he had never once considered that their indiscretion had incurred consequences.
Perhaps because he had supposed that Chris—his beautiful, forthright Chris—would never have kept a secret of such magnitude from him.
“I didn’t realize, not until I was on a ship bound for London. My seasickness simply would not abate. And then mycourses didn’t come. I d-didn’t know...I didn’t know what to do.”
“Me!” He pointed at his chest. “Ye return to me, lass! That is what ye should have done!”
She leaned back against the rocks of the cairn, sobs shaking her shoulders.
Pivoting, Alistair faced the entrance tunnel, hands coming up to clasp the back of his head.
His heartbeat pounded in his ears.
And yet Chris’s words still reached him, clogged with tears and heartache.
“Return to you? I was angry and hurt. It felt like a betrayal of my very self to return. And so I continued to Oxford, assuming you would write. That you would perhaps be on the boat behind mine, apologetic and remorseful. That I would receive something from you other thansilence.” The word emerged on a knife’s edge—a heartbreak of syllables.
“Ye should have written regardless.” Alistair turned back to face her.
“I know that now...I have been granted many,manyyears to ponder the folly of my actions.”
But where is the child?he thought.What happened to our babe?
The thought of it nearly broke him. That he had a son or daughter wandering the globe, unaware of Alistair’s paternity. That he had missed so many years of a child’s life.
“Not hearing from you, I assumed the worst,” she continued. “I supposed that you had stopped loving me, that our love had not meant as much to you as it had to me—”
“Lies. I never stopped loving ye.”
“But how was I to have known?!” She pinned him with her gaze, red-rimmed and anguished. “You didn’t write!”
“Again, ye should have written me!”
“Well...I didn’t. I hadn’t the courage tobeg. My maid—a gossipy thing from Bristol—began to spread the rumor that I appeared to be increasing. And I simply...I panicked. What was I to do? I understood only too well the fate of women who bear children out of wedlock. It was unbearable to think that all my dreams of archeology would be dashed. That my father would be shamed. Not to mention the child itself, born a bastard. Dr. Stephen Newton—a family friend who I had always viewed as a sort of kindly uncle—stopped in on a particularly bleak day. I ended up confessing the whole sordid tale to him, and he offered to marry me. His wife had passed a few years before, and he longed for companionship. And so I accepted—anything to give myself and my unborn babe a normal life.”
Alistair stared at her, part of him surprised that she hadn’t morphed into a different woman—one he had never known—the words and sentiments coming out of her mouth were so foreign.
“Ye married another man, knowing he would claim paternity of my bairn? Ye denied me a relationship with my child?!”
