If he’d read between the lines of Caroline’s letters, he would have found a way to go home. Caroline would have lived, and he’d be at Gleneagle.
If a trunk hadn’t been delivered to his house, he would never have gone to the Society of the Mercaii. Veronica MacLeod would have been ruined. She might have ended up on the streets, a gentlewoman spurned by her family.
Instead, she was his wife.
If he hadn’t read one particular article in the newspaper, he would never have begun a correspondence that led to his avocation, and in a way, his survival.
Shielded by the overgrown oaks and aspens of Doncaster Hall, he stood and listened to the droplets of rain falling from the leaves. A discordant melody having no rhyme, meter, or pattern. A reminder, perhaps, that he’d lost his own patterns in the last five years.
Once, the seasons had measured his life: planting, harvesting, drying tobacco being the framework for everything else. Now, he didn’t have that. Gleneagle and Virginia society had provided structure. Both had been a testing place for his manners, his charm, and his abilities.
Few of the great families were left; the stunning beauties were pale, wan, and ravaged by war, and wealth had disappeared. Any opportunities had bled into the earth along with the lifeblood of most of Virginia’s proud young men.
Here he was, though, a lord in a country he’d never considered home, heir to an estate and a fortune that made Gleneagle’s once not-inconsiderable affluence look paltry in comparison. He was steward of an empire requiring his participation and interest.
How was he going to be what Edmund decreed he should be, what Veronica no doubt deserved? How was he going to manage to be a proper Lord Fairfax, a decent, caring husband?
His nightly walks were commonplace to him now. In London, he’d almost welcomed the danger of them, even being so incautious as to head toward the center of the city, daring someone to accost him. No one had, and he’d been curiously disappointed.
He took the path down the hill to a shallow brook, tinted silver by a looming moon. He climbed to the top of a nearby hill, surveyed his gray-white kingdom, and felt loneliness pull at himas if it was a carrion bird pecking at his innards. At times, he wanted simply to dissolve into nothingness, or grip something tight and hold on to it in desperation.
Would the wagons arrive tomorrow? He’d already spotted an outbuilding he could convert to a work space. The structure had once been used to make whiskey, he’d been told, and was unsuitable to house animals. All he wanted was a tall, steep-roofed structure, with space enough to work on his navigational designs. The building, still referred to as the distillery, would fit his needs perfectly.
He kept walking. The night air was cool, but not so much he was uncomfortable. In the last five years, he’d endured worse conditions.
Montgomery, are you well?
“Caroline,” he said softly, and she appeared in the night like a creature crafted of moonbeams.
He knew she wasn’t real. None of the ghosts who visited him from time to time were real. Nor were they frightening. They didn’t come to castigate him or offer blame. They came to ease his heart, to numb the pain because he missed them so desperately he’d created them to make life bearable.
Walking through the Scots night, he acquainted himself and his ghosts with the terrain, the feel of the curving earth beneath his feet. He headed toward an outcropping of stone, only gray shapes layered over black, and listened to the sound of the river.
“It’s not the James,” he said. His ghosts didn’t answer.
You’re a lord,Alisdair said, a note of amusement in his voice.
“You would have been,” he answered. “If you hadn’t died.” Silence greeted that announcement.
He felt, rather than heard, Caroline’s disappointment. She never understood that brothers had a duty to aggravate one another.
Your wife knows you’re in pain,Caroline said.
He turned toward a lighter patch of tumbled rock. If Caroline were there, she’d be standing in the most prominent place. She liked the attention, always had a bit of drama about her. Was that why he’d ignored her? Because he’d no patience with histrionics?
You should tell her about us, Montgomery,she said.
He smiled. “That I see you? That I hear you?” he asked, facing the river, speaking to them in the silence of his mind.
You don’t, you know,she said, softly, so much compassion in her voice his heart felt as if it were being sliced in thin little strips.
“I want to,” he said.
Only the wind answered him, blowing his hair back, catching his coat, and billowing it around his torso. He closed his eyes, feeling the sharp bite of pain, the endlessness of it.
A little while later, he retraced his path back to the house, knowing sleep would come late that night, if at all. He’d become accustomed to his sleeplessness, accepting it as part of the price he paid for survival.
He’d known some poor souls who’d suffered head injuries in the war. They’d never been the same. Some had stared off into space as if seeing the past or the future. One or two had simply retreated into himself, arms wrapped around his knees, rocking back and forth as if trying to capture the time when he’d been a babe in his mother’s arms.
