He shook his head, released her shoulders, and got off of his bloody fucking knees. He sat on his arse and rubbed at those useless knees.
“I wasn’t a soldier when I killed the man who had touched my son. And my only regrets are that I didn’t do it sooner, and I didn’t do it myself. I paid a very bad man to kill another very bad man.”
Her eyes had been wide and unblinking as he confessed. Now they narrowed, and he heard only the most heartfelt conviction when she said, “I’m glad you killed him. I’m glad you had someone kill him.”
He nodded.
“You did well,” she said.
Yes, the killing was a good. A month after Diana’s death and without the protection of her money or her person, her lover had found himself in jail, friendless. But Henry knew that a man might someday leave a cell, that men everywhere were corrupt.
It was most unfortunate that the poet took his own life in that cell. A great talent lost. His jailers never explained how he had obtained the knife to slit his own throat.
It had been the best money Henry had ever spent, but he should have spent it much sooner. He had been narrow-minded and selfish, not thinking of other children, only his sons. He had been a coward and not used the law, not wanted the scandal. He could not have the Delamere name connected to this vileness. But he should have taken the law into his own hands years ago, when he had first taken the boys from their mother.
So much innocence lost in those intervening years. He would live with that guilt forever.
And he had been a coward in more ways than one. He had not fought for his boys’ love. He had surrendered them toDiana so when evil had come sniffing around, he hadn’t been there to thwart it.
He’d been too late. Too late to protect Hal. Too late to repair things with him before he died. Too late.
“Was it Charles?” Susannah asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. But Hal . . .” He could only nod.
His nodding turned to weeping. He crumpled to his side, and she was over him, holding him. They lay like that in the rain, him sobbing, her holding him, pinning him to the earth. She put her cheek against his sleeve and kept her arms around him.
He shed the tears of decades. They fell from his face and into the grass where they mixed with the rain. He cried for himself, for Hal, for Charles. For Mina.
Then he cried for himself again and for his guilt. That wretched nightmare guilt that had shriveled him into almost nothing, a floating piece of ice in a dark sea.
But he felt Susannah against him. And he was grateful she was on this earth at the same time as he, that she existed.
Finally, his tears slowed. He wiped his nose with his sopping sleeve. He pushed himself up, and she came with him. When he was sitting again, she let go of him, but she was right next to him, facing him, her legs folded to the side. She was so close.
He would take anything she gave him.
“Thank you,” he said.
She shook her head. She put her fingers to his temple and stroked his hair there. “I’m the one who must thank you, love.”
If he had not just wept for half an hour, he would weep again.
“Love,” he said instead, stupidly.
“Yes. I love you,” she said.
He moved to kiss her, but she was moving towards him at the same time, and they knocked their foreheads together. But despite that, he got a hand on the side of her face, and they kissed.
“I love you,” he said, words he had only ever spoken to Mina before.
“Wait,” she said.
“Nothing you say can possibly change my mind.”
“Wait.” She took a deep breath. “The girl you’re planning to marry is my daughter.”
There was far too much in that sentence that was confusing, wrong, extraordinary. He wanted to close his eyes, to sort things in the darkness, but he couldn’t close his eyes because he wouldn’t be able to see Susannah and she might disappear, melt away in the rain.
