‘I have marks on my soul.’
‘As do we all,’ she said.
Liam nodded, the weight he had been ignoring—that of her potential repudiation of his life and his actions—lifting from his heart.
‘I ended up blind drunk, beaten, in a gutter in Brest. Still unable to forget. The crew of a ship bound for Boston passed by, Angus among them. And he stopped. I asked him once, why, and he told me he’d recognised the look in my eyes. He’d had it when he lost his wife. He convinced me to take a place onboard, working for my passage, and luckily the captain agreed that, despite my state that day, I would be useful.’
‘Did you find any peace in Columbia?’
‘Yes, I suppose, for a while,’ he said, slightly taken aback at the question, as though it were somehow more personal than what he’d just revealed. ‘I found a measure of freedom, and in that, some peace. Life was harsh, and hard. But knowing your survival depended on yourself and those with you... Being so close to nature... It felt primal.Natural.But when I found Angus, and Peter, dead...’
Liam shook his head, hoping to chase away the images he could never erase from his mind.
‘What little peace I’d found, it shattered.’ The realisation he had never voiced, never acknowledged, became real in that moment. ‘I wanted my life as it was then to be my life always. I tried so hard to convince myself it was right, that it was everything I wanted... I refused to see the violence, the greed, the death and the suffering there. It was to be my utopia, where I became myself, with no expectations. When I found their bodies, it was as if a veil was lifted. I saw the world as it was, truly, and I saw myself as I was. Not a new man, but the same man who had run all those years ago. Still heartbroken, still...incomplete.’
‘Not even the other side of the world was enough?’
‘I remember standing at the edge of a lake one night,’ he breathed, the image as clear as ever in his mind. The words tumbled from him, as if, yet again, with her mere presence Rebecca coaxed them from him. ‘Some months after arriving in Columbia. The water was black ice, surrounded by pines, and there were the tallest mountains you can imagine, capped with snow that seemed like beacons in the darkness. And the stars... There were more stars than sky. It felt like if you reached up, you could touch them. It was the most awesome sight I’d ever witnessed. And yet...I couldn’t help but think of Thornhallow. Of the way the sunrise turns the heather pink, and the twilight erases the boundary between Heaven and Earth.’
‘Why did you leave it to rot, then? If you love this place so?’
‘I don’t love Thornhallow. I hate it. All I can feel is pain, my father’s cruelty, and it is as suffocating as it was then. It’s the land. It’s in my blood. My soul.’
Rebecca nodded, and he knew she felt it, too.
‘With time...new memories... If you found a measure of happiness here...perhaps, you would not feel it so.’
I don’t feel it so...not anymore.
Not since she’d come here. Since she had infused her own light into the walls, as if chasing away his father’s darkness, his own darkness, and the terrible memories of Hal and his mother. He wanted to tell her that, to tell her...so much more.
Instead he nodded, wound himself around her and kissed her, willing the unspoken words to somehow flow into her heart.
It is with you I have finally found peace. And myself.
Dawn was still hours away when Rebecca crept out of Liam’s room, wishing as she had every day that she could stay there, basking in the warmth and tenderness of his arms forever. But that, too, was an impossible dream.
As she slid back into her rooms, her body and heart aching, demanding at least a few hours of rest before the coming day, Rebecca could not shake the feeling that everything was about to change. That the moment she’d dreaded—the moment when everything came abruptly to an end, when the world demanded things be righted—was fast approaching.
That was your last night. You know it in your heart.
Chapter Nineteen
‘Ah, Mrs Hardwicke.’
Mr Brown’s sharp voice startled her as she stepped out of her office some hours later. Rebecca nearly jumped out of her skin, but composed herself in a second, and smiled.
‘If I may have a word?’
‘Yes, of course. Good morning, Mr Brown,’ Rebecca sighed.
The butler looked like he was on a serious mission, and she would have preferred to deal with whatever it was after breakfast—but, given his expression, that was not an option.
What terrible news awaits me now...?
‘Should we adjourn to my office?’
‘No need, Mrs Hardwicke. No need,’ he said, surveying her in his usual unnerving manner. ‘I have just come from His Lordship. It seems we are to have guests. The Marquess of Clairborne, an old school friend.’
