She softened slightly. “I think you would make an excellent father. And an excellent husband—to the man you’re in love with.”
“I’m sure I could be a good husband to you too.” Oh, why was he persisting? She had made her wishes plain enough. But loss had made him fearful of further loss. And, in that moment, he could not tell who felt more distant from him, God or Micha, and who he needed most. “I care for you deeply, Sheba. I could give you a home, financial comfort, ironclad respectability. And there are things I would never want from you.”
She rose, her skirts whispering softly against the flagstones where he had lain, furious and despairing, last night. “Thomas,” she said, with more exasperation than he was used to seeing from her, “has it not occurred to you that I mightpreferto be with a man who wants those things from me?”
“I’m sorry. I’ve been thoughtless. But I hope you know I would not stand in the way of anything you—”
“Oh please.” Once again, she cut him off. “Do you really think a vicar’s wife who, forgive my language, fucks around, would be any more acceptable than a vicar’s wife who is a man?”
Of course she was right. This was the wildest nonsense and, on some level, he had always seen it as such. Yet he still couldn’t let it go, this whisper of a future that looked almost like the future he wanted. The one anyone could have but him. “And Hope?” he could not help asking.
“What about Hope?”
“You don’t think she—”
“If you try to tell me she should have a father, I will be very inclined to slap you.”
“No,” protested Thomas, weakly. “I simply thought she might benefit from the protection of my name.”
Sighing, Sheba put a hand to her brow, the gesture unexpectedly expressive for someone he thought of as naturally rather restrained. It made him realise how well he knew her but also how little, the woman she had been, the lives she had lived, who she was deep inside, free from the world’s judgement. “She might, Thomas. She very well might. And perhaps I have not always made the right choices when it comes to her. Maybe I should have become your brother’s mistress rather than cast us both into uncertainty. But I don’t want the only thing I teach my daughter about the life of a woman to be that it must be one of sacrifice.” She smiled an oddly fragile smile. “She may wish to be a mother herself someday.”
Thomas opened his mouth, then closed it again. “I’m sorry,” he said, at last. “I’m so sorry. I’ve been—I’m being—a very poor friend to you.”
At last, the rigidity left her posture. “I understand you’re not yourself. And why would you be?”
“I just ...” His voice cracked. “I feel so terribly alone. What’s wrong with me?”
“Nothing’s wrong with you,” returned Sheba, only slightly impatiently. “You’re heartbroken. That’s one of the most ordinary things in the world.”
The tears were spilling down Thomas’s cheeks, and he was too consumed by shame to even think of brushing them away. “But how can I have found all this faith and certainty and understanding, for it to still be insufficient? Am I so selfish, so covetous and greedy and flawed, that God’s love will never be enough for me?”
“I’m not the expert here, but if it was supposed to be, would He have bothered to create a companion for Adam in the first place?”
“I ...” Thomas pressed the sleeve of his coat to his eyes. “I don’t know. I think myself in circles until all I am is lost. Why has this been asked of me?”
Her mouth thinned. “Maybe it hasn’t.”
He gazed at her, temporarily shocked from his grief. His tear-dimmed gaze had transformed her into a pale watercolour, all greys, like the night she had come to him in the rain. “What?”
“Maybe your God is perfect, as you say.” She spread her hands in a helpless, frustrated gesture. “Maybe His love is also perfect. Maybe His understanding is infinite, and His mercy as boundless as the sea. Maybe all this is true. But we live in an imperfect world. And there is only one way to live in an imperfect world, whether it’s His will or not.”
“Which is?” asked Thomas.
Those mirror-cool eyes held his for a long time. “You find a fucking compromise.”
Chapter 26
Micha had found a white rock close to the tide line, rising from amidst the brown-grey pebbles like the back of a whale. Perched on the edge of it, he watched the waves as they rolled, blue-green and silver-capped, beneath those familiar ghost-pale cliffs. In his hands he held a brown glass bottle, purchased that afternoon from a druggist he had passed in Dover. He had paid for it, not with George’s money, but with coins passersby had offered in return for quick portraits he had sketched of them. Sailors mostly, only too happy to have some memento they could send back home or offer to a sweetheart in the hope that a sweetheart she would remain after long months at sea. While Micha had started drawing mostly to distract himself, he had in the end almost come to enjoy it. He had certainly not intended to ply any sort of trade.But better this one,he thought,than the alternative.
As for the laudanum, he wasn’t sure if it was weakness, desolation, or even a kind of sick defiance that had impelled him. Maybe it was simply habit. Closing his eyes, he turned his face into the sharp edge of the wind. It was easier, infinitely easier, to ache for laudanum than it was to ache for Thomas.
After a moment or two, he stood and hurled the bottle out to sea. Hard enough that he heard it smash before the tide swept over it.
“Fuck,” he whispered. “Fuck.”
Sitting back down, he curled his fingers into his hair and wrenched at it, wanting to feel anything—anything—that was not this loss. This emptiness. This endless fucking pain.
It was then that he heard the crunch of footsteps behind him.
