“Some sixteen-year-old in his calf love—”
Her fingers clenched into her skirts. The voice snarled in her mind as loud and vicious as though he was really there, blackeyes boring into her, cold as unmined coal in the chill earth. Halfway to hell.
It was good her aunt’s attention was on the boat and the boy. There was no masking this wave of despair. They came like squalls, out of nowhere.
The thing that was hardest to forgive…oneof the things…was him poisoning…poisoningeverything.
Bad enough that another man’s taste and another man’s touch kept sliding insidiously into her mind. But to call it calf love, a young boy’s mooning…
She shook her head, breathing out sharply. Her aunt glanced over at the motion but said nothing.
Tomorrow she would be gone. Tomorrow evening she would arrive at that beloved, familiar home. And in the morning, she’d walk on the marsh in the fresh, unresting air, curlew cries blown among the wiry grasses…
Probably soon there would be an announcement in theMorning Post.Lord Cotereigh to marry Lady Frances Elston…She would never see it. How small and trivial it all seemed. London and the papers and the stuffy nonsense of balls. Her parents didn’t read thePost. London’s news made little difference at the seaworn edge of Sussex. Maybe her aunt would write, fretting for long hours over the words to use, the ones that would cause least pain. But Madelaine wouldn’t care. It couldn’t hurt her. She wouldn’t accept him if he came crawling on his knees. Not now she knew him.
He didn’t deserve her.
Yes, that was a comforting thought. It was pleasant when she could make herself believe it. Her fingers loosened and she breathed out, longer, softer. He didn’t deserve her. She could make a very rational and convincing nest out of that.
When she got home tomorrow, if it wasn’t too dark, she’d walk to the churchyard and go to the memorial plaque in the wall.Alfred didn’t have a grave, but his parents and hers had funded that plaque, debating for a while over what style the stonemason should cut the letters and exactly where it should be positioned and how large and if it should be granite or marble or slate, as though any of that mattered. It said:Alfred Charles Ardingly, beloved son and husband, lost at sea.She could close her eyes and see it exactly. She would go to it tomorrow, in the dusk, with the grass dew-damp and the birds singing of the night to come. She would kneel before it and…
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
If he watched her, would he forgive her? He would agree, wouldn’t he, that Lord Cotereigh didn’t deserve her? That she was right to hate him? Alfred, who had only ever been joy and kindness and warmth, he would agree she deserved better and that her heart…her heart had made a terrible mistake.
Surely he would forgive her.
“Oh dear, my poor dear…”
Which was how she realised she was crying, a silent tear tracking down her cheek, stinging like saltwater, the taste of the sea. Her aunt rifled through her reticule and passed her a handkerchief. Madelaine took it with a sniff, clearing her throat, blinking. She forced a smile and waved back at Tom, who had, with the uncanny senses of a small boy, spotted someone selling hot buns in the distance.
“How he’s still so skinny with the amount he eats, I’ll never know,” said her aunt, kindness in the way she didn’t look at Madelaine’s watery smile. She pushed herself to her feet with a small groan, rifling once more through her reticule for her coin purse. “One for you, dear?”
“No. I…I am not hungry. But thank you.”
“You better promise me you’re not going to waste away over that…thatman. Or I’ll come to Sussex and feed you myself.”
She gave her best smile. “I promise, Aunt. Though that is hardly a threat. More a promised treat.”
Tom was waiting, head turning between the approach of Lady Pemberthy and the bun-seller, body straining like a dog on a leash. Madelaine watched them walk together. A different boy, who’d led a different life, might have taken the older woman’s hand.
But all that had been beaten out of him…
“So perhaps I’m broken. Doesn’t that make me an object of your compassion, my Mary Magdalene, my goddess Eleos?”
No. He was a grown man, quite capable of knowing right from wrong.
Butyes…she grieved bitterly over everything that had been done to him. If his mother had lived, if he’d never met Jonathan Tait, if he hadn’t been abandoned to bullies and the lash…
Then he’d still be Lord Cotereigh, heir to the Earl of Arnon, and far too high and mighty for a parson’s daughter.
Tom came back smelling of spices and sugar and warm raisins. He tore a piece from his bun with a grubby hand, shoved it into hers, and ran off before she could dare to thank him.
She raised it slowly, breathing deep, smiling and trying not to cry. She had no appetite, but she ate it anyway, her aunt settling her bulk down beside her again with a satisfied sigh. She ate her own bun with relish, scattering crumbs to the sparrows.
The next morning, as she settled into the dim interior of the post chaise, Madelaine imagined she could still taste cinnamon. She brushed the seat’s velvet nap with her gloved fingers. What luxury, borrowed for a day.
The bun had been sticky, marring the fingers of yesterday’s gloves. She would wash them when she got home. She would mend and darn and wash… She would make herself a new dress, cream muslin trimmed in coral ribbon… And Tom… When shesaw Tom again, he might say his haitches and be a gentleman’s son…
