But she did not immediately respond to the suggestion. “Yet your tone when you said it implied that somethingdidhappen,” she said. “Something painful. Something more than just a reluctance to leave your home behind and launch into a new chapter of your life. Oh, I do beg your pardon. Sometimes I let curiosity get the better of me. It is none of my business what happened, if anything did. None whatsoever.”
He never spoke of it, even to his own family, who knew all the facts. He did notwantto speak of it. It was a pain he would always carry with him, he supposed, pushed deep, where it belonged. He almost never even thought of it. What was the point? The past could not be changed. He guessed that they all still suffered too, in their own ways—Devlin, Pippa, Owen, Steph. Ben.His mother—though somehow she seemed to have dealt with it. She had all her family back, though it had scattered at the time amid great bitterness. Several years after their father’s passing she had married Matthew Taylor, who, Nicholas guessed, had been her girlhood sweetheart. She was undoubtedly happy now.
“My world came to an end,” he said lightly, and turned to her with what he hoped was a grin. “What more melodrama could you possibly ask for?”
“I do not ask for melodrama,” she said. “Or for any other explanation, Colonel Ware. But you did somehow induce me to share my pain last week, and your answer then has given me great comfort.”
He winced. “About remembering the happiest day of your life when you are feeling down about your basic lack of identity?” he said.
“Yes, that,” she said. She smiled brightly. “I would indeed like to explore the forest. Is it a magic place?”
He sighed. “Let us sit here awhile,” he said. He shrugged out of his coat and spread it on the grass for her to sit on. She sat in what was becoming a familiar pose, knees raised, arms wrapped about her legs, and gazed out over the lake. He sat beside her a short distance away. He could not believe he was about to do this, but apparently he was.
“I was always very like my father,” he said. “More so than any of my brothers and sisters. And it was not just in looks. I had his nature too—outgoing, fond of talking with other people, sunny natured. I was what people called charming. I was aware from a very young age that I was well liked, that I never had to try hard to be noticed in a roomful of people or to draw smiles my way. People used to call me a young replica of my father, and I basked in the comparison. He was loved wherever he went and adored by people of all stations in life. He was the proverbial life and soul of every gathering he was in, small or large, but he did not seem self-centered. He liked other people and was willing to talk with anyone. He was good-looking, warm, and vital. There was no falseness in it at all, no insincerity. And it all came naturally. He was specially gifted.
“His family all adored him too, me most of all. I loved to believe that I was just like him, that I always would be. He could do no wrong in my eyes. I thought I was the most fortunate boy in the world, and the happiest, to be his son and just like him.”
He stopped talking to draw a few deep breaths. She neither said anything nor looked his way. Hardly realizing that he was talking aloud, he recalled that last day of their happiness, the day of the fete, when everything had proceeded perfectly all day long, and the family gathered in the ballroom in the early evening prior to the final ball. Most of the expected guests who had been at Ravenswood all day had gone home to change their clothes and snatch a brief rest, but they would return soon, for the ball was everyone’s favorite part of the day. His father, strikingly handsome in his evening clothes, had beamed on all his family with great love and pride, and they had all beamed back. There was always something a bit poignant about the ball. It was a happy occasion, yes, but it was also a bit sad because it was the end, and they would have to wait a whole year for the next. That year in particular there had been a hint of melancholy for Nicholas, who had arrived at his eighteenth birthday and was to leave for his new life in September. Who knew if he would be able to return for next year’s festivities, or the following year’s for that matter? Or ever? The wars against the aggression of Napoleon Bonaparte had been heating up, after all. He had tried consciously to enjoy every moment of what had remained of this fete, his last for perhaps a long while.
Little had he known just how much of an ending it would prove to be.
She listened without interrupting.
“He spent the spring months in London each year to attend the parliamentary session,” he said. “He took great pride in observinghis obligations as a member of the House of Lords. We all remained in the country with our mother, almost counting the days until his return. He was always so happy to be home again. He always shed a few tears and set us off too, until we were all laughing and hugging him and gasping in wonder over the gifts he brought with him.
“But that particular year, while we were all as busy as ever, our mother most of all, preparing for the fete, a stranger appeared in the village and settled there in an empty cottage. She was a young and pretty widow, come to find some peace in the countryside while she mourned her dead husband and recovered her spirits. She knew no one, but she was treated kindly and invited almost everywhere. She had an elderly relative living with her for respectability.”
Winifred hugged her knees more tightly, almost as if she sensed what was coming. She would not have guessed all, however.
“How innocent we all were,” he said. “She was our father’s mistress, or one of them, whom he had invited to join him close enough to Ravenswood that they could continue their liaison. It became clear later, of course, that he had always lived a double life, but he had been marvelously discreet about it. Not a whisper of it had reached us. He had never tried to mix the two lives—until then. Perhaps his life had become too predictable and therefore dull. Perhaps he had a special fondness for this particular woman. Perhaps he had always had mistresses and whores reaching all the way back to Ben’s mother, before his marriage to our mother. We had all been assured that Ben’s mother was our father’s exclusive partner at that time and that he had lived a life of monogamous virtue since his marriage. It was what Ben himself believed.
“The new resident was invited to the fete and to the ball and came to both. During the ball our father took her out to the hill for some air and to see the view from the top in the moonlight. Devlinand Gwyneth, who had finally acknowledged their love for each other that day, discovered them inside the temple folly. They werenotfocused upon the view or the moonlight, however. They were focused upon each other.
“Devlin must have been shocked to the core. He exploded. He would not allow the two of them to return quietly to the ballroom and postpone a confrontation until the morning. He followed them and publicly denounced them to the whole gathering—family and neighbors alike. It was really quite catastrophic. My uncle, my mother’s brother, marched the woman away from there and back to the village. She was gone by the next morning, never to be heard from again. My maternal grandfather tried to restore some control over the situation by announcing that the ball was over and ordering Devlin to go to his room to calm himself before meeting the whole family in the library after everyone had left. But it was too little too late. Our world was at an end. It shattered about us.”
Winifred Cunningham had lowered her head to rest her forehead on her knees. “I am so sorry,” she said. Her hair was parted with great precision down the back of her head. A braid hung over each shoulder and hugged her ears.
“I had no business telling you all this,” he said. “It is I who begyourpardon.”
“I did ask,” she said. “And sometimes it is a relief to unburden oneself to a virtual stranger.”
Was that what she was? He supposed it was. She was merely the daughter of a portrait painter staying at Ravenswood with his family for a couple of weeks while he painted the dowager countess. She was more than a stranger, though. She might be his sister-in-law soon, a fact that ought to make more of a stranger of him, not less.He had had no business bringing her here. Or of enjoying her company so much. And hedidenjoy it. There was something fresh and new and spontaneous about her. She was intelligent and liked to speak her mind and talk on topics that would give many ladies the vapors—or else bore them silly.
“I went away a few months later,” he said. “I began the career I have had ever since, and I do not regret it. But during my leave-taking, I would neither shake hands with my father nor allow him to hug me. I would not even look at him. My mother had turned to marble since that night. Devlin was gone—banished by our mother on that very night. Ben had unexpectedly gone with him. Only Pippa and Owen and Stephanie remained at home with our mother. Two of them were still children. Pippa was at a very delicate age. She had been expecting all the excitement of a come-out Season in London the following spring. It was no longer to happen, by her choice. She had turned to marble too. Our father died four years later of a sudden heart seizure. He had been as jovial as ever in the meanwhile, I have been told, though there must have been a hollowness to it. I did not return home in all that time.
“And that is my sad story, Miss Cunningham. For years after I left, I hated the man who had been my rock and my inspiration all my life. I despised him. And I was terrified that I was no different from him and would become a replica of him. What had been my fondest dream since early childhood became my worst nightmare. I was a good military officer, I believe. I concentrated upon being just that, since my father had never been in the military and so it was a clean slate for me. But in all else I was crippled. I would suddenly see him in what I did and hear him in what I said. I was afraid to smile at other people, to talk with them, to relax withthem. I had a horror of being called charming, though it happened all too frequently anyway. I steered clear of women except in the most superficial way. In a word, I was a mess.”
She had lifted her head and turned her face toward him. “Past tense?” she said.
“I am thirty-four years old,” he said. “I know I amnotmy father. I even know he was not an evil man. He could not have deceived us so totally for so long if he had been. His affections were genuine, as was his pride in us all, even our mother. He was just a—flawedman. A complex man. I do not make excuses for him. He did a great deal of harm, most of it to the very people he professed to love the most. But he was as he was. And I am as I am. People still tell me how much I am like him, and it is always said as a compliment. But I amnothim in all the ways that matter.”
Except that he was here on the island with an unchaperoned woman, who should be watching Owen shoot arrows in the poplar alley. Damn Owen! He was neglecting her. Perhaps because he was taking her affections for granted? Or because he liked her as a friend but really did not want to encourage her to believe there was more to their relationship? And why washenot at Cartref with Grace and Mrs. Haviland? It was true he had not been invited, and it had sounded like a gathering just for ladies, but he could have gone anyway, especially since it must be common knowledge that he was courting Grace. He had chosen to remain behind to help Devlin.
“It will always be there, the sadness,” he said. “I never saw him again after that farewell, when I rejected his overtures of love. I never forgave him. He died before I had a chance to relent. But life continues. After a few difficult years, to say the least, we are a close family again, even a happy one. I suppose we all have scars, but we deal with them privately and carry on. I am especially pleasedto see my mother so happy—happier than she ever was, I believe. For of course she must haveknown. It would have been virtually impossible for hernotto know. But she protected the innocence of her children and did a superb job of it.”
“Always remember,” Winifred said, “that almost everyone who knows you now did not also know your father. They see you as yourself, as they ought. Just as most people who know Mama now did not know her when she was Lady Camille Westcott, cold and proud and intent upon being the perfect lady and aristocrat and not a very nice person at all, if she is to be believed. Mama is dearly loved now, and rightly so. She is everything she used not to be, yet strangely she must still be the same person. You are you as you are now, Colonel Ware, and the person you will become through the rest of your life. Yet you are still that boy who charmed all who knew you. That boy wasyou, not your father. And listen to me turned preacher.”
He laughed and she joined him.
