Her eyes slide closed. “’Tis a blessed miracle, that. I cried for days when AJ told me.”
“Why don’t I remember it?”
“You were young. Just a lad.” She trembles. “We were meant to protect you, to offer you a refuge. You’d just lost your mother, and your father worked every waking moment in the city. When we offered to take you for the summer, your father was relieved. But after the accident”—she blinks back tears—“he hated us. Cursed us and cut us off. You were all he had left and we sent you home broken. Nearly killed you.”
William runs a hand up his left thigh still pulsing with residual ache. “My leg. It came from that.” His gait has been uneven for as long as he can remember. After his father died, William had no one to answer his questions, so he just accepted his lot. “So that accident, the one they blamed on AJ Winthrop…it was you and me in that carriage?”
She nods. “People assumed AJ rigged the carriage to lose control like that. Besides, AJ and I had been arguing the night before, I’m told. AJ had a terrible habit of knowing what was best for me and unfortunately so did I. So that morning, you and I snuck out for a bit of fun.”
“And I sent us over the cliffs.”
“No! You were a child, William. No more than five years of age, and I was the adult who should have acted as one. Instead I gave in to my wild impulses, as I often do—such as marrying the man who’s in front of me. Or taking the clifftop roads at blinding speed, then handing the reins to a young boy.”
William lays a hand on her shaking one. “Or diving in front of a Packard to save a stranger.”
Her eyes close and she squeezes his fingers. “Saving Cecil…that was my heart’s way of saving you, I believe. An urgency burned inside me when we went over those cliffs…keep reaching. Keep leaping. Keep grabbing for you. And it kept on urging until I grabbed another little boy—a stranger—and pulled him to safety as I longed to do for you.” Her shoulders shake.
She’s still broken, still cracked—not holding water anymore…but showcasing flowers. There’s an elegant peace about her, even as she grieves her past mistakes.How did you heal?he wants to ask, but it feels invasive.
She takes his hand in both of hers, inspecting the nails and the knuckles. They are dirty and calloused, yet she studies them as something precious. “Will you do something for me, William Thatcher?”
“Of course. Anything.”
“Don’t settle, lad.”
“On what?”
“On half the truth. On avoiding difficult matters because you think they might hurt.”
William licks his lips. “Iknowthey will. And n-n-not just me.” A shiver. It isn’t hurting anything for him to stay in Cornwall. Not truly.
She places her slender hand over his calloused one. “Please, Will. Please don’t deny me the pleasure of helping the one I broke so long ago find healing.”
When Merryn bids him goodbye, she kisses him on each cheek, lets him know he’s welcome to return, and tucks the Hardy book into his hands.
Chapter 47
There’safableWilliam’sfather told him years ago about two wolves, the good one who brought peace and the evil one who brought despair. Both lived inside the same man and were constantly at war with one another. “Which will win?” a boy William asked.
“Whichever one I feed,” his father said.
As he leaves Merryn Winthrop’s cottage, William is determined to feed the good one. Some days it’s only scraps, little bits here and there. He starts with a daily practice of pausing to read the words etched into the sign on the back wall as he enters the door of Dunn Cottage.
He hideth my soul
In the cleft of the rock…
He pauses to feel the warmth of that presence, the sacred sanctuary he’s found here, and it restores his soul.
Soon that good wolf grows stronger, and it begins to do battle with the other one.
William reads that Thomas Hardy book cover to cover in those quiet summer evenings, pleasantly surprised at the novel’soutcome. Thomas Hardy, Helen had always told him, wrote salacious tales of marriages gone awry and chapter after chapter of shock value and theatrics.
This book is, on the whole, rather a quiet love story. The hero is dedicated and steadfast. Silently present for the heroine. And he might, William decides, be the sort to ring Bathsheba Everdine on the telephone just to hear her voice while they are apart. If he lived in William and Helen’s time, that is.
It heals something deep within to know that this, of all love stories, was Helen’s favorite. He reads with her in mind, piecing together this observation she made or that comment.
He thinks of Merryn every time he runs now, with that uneven gait giving him discomfort. For years that mysterious injury left him feeling cast off—shunted from boys’ homes to apprenticeships—but he’d been wanted. She’d loved him enough to let him drive a carriage and see the coast. Enough to leave him this sanctuary of a house…and her story.
