“Surely it took from you things you loved,” she persisted. “Things you had to discard, quickly, entering into such a new life. Pieces of yourself you cannot now have back, no matter how you wish it.”
She’d neatly turned the entire conversation back on him with the precision of a seasoned interrogator. “I became what life made of me.”
Shetsked. “Did you dream of military life as a small boy, or had you other dreams once upon a time? Gentler dreams? Surely you did not spring fully formed into such as you are now.”
No, although the core traits had always been there. He’d been serious-minded as a lad; that was no different. Too, he’d always been determined, sometimes stubbornly so, to excel at whatever he tried his hand at, although not for the adulation of others so much as quiet pride in himself.
He’d enjoyed his studies to the delight of his father, who saw in him the potential to succeed him as steward, a position requiring an educated mind as well as a love for the land. He had liked in particular the challenge of puzzling out other languages, the marvelous way that the shapes of sounds could be reconstructed or reordered in new ways altogether to convey the same fundamental substance. He’d picked up the classical languages and French with gratifying ease. Other languages—and texts in those languages—had offered windows into worlds far distant from the Kentish shore. Much as he’d loved Chestfield and Whitstable as a boy, he’d also dreamt of seeing more. Which he had, with the Rifles.
But he’d also loved, too, going out with boat or nets with his grandfather and uncle, how with their hands they gathered in the sea’s bounty. He still remembered the sheer joy of slipping away from the adults sometimes to fish on the sly in upland streams with other village boys or to shoot the flintlock his father had taught him to use for those occasions when he was granted permission to shoot in the estate park. By twelve years old he’d been an excellent shot, owing as much to his drive to master it as natural skill.
Things he’d loved as a boy were weaponized—but of his own volition, mostly. Or perhaps more accurately, with his tacit cooperation. He’d not left those things behind so much as had them reshaped irrevocably into something new.
But... he’d also been tenderhearted to a fault at times about things over which he had no control. That was stamped out of him almost at once after coming into the Rifles.
So aye, Lucy’s point stood.
When he gave her no answer, she resumed walking, and he followed suit.
“Here is what I think.” She stooped briefly to pick up a shell, brushing silt off it and tilting it, examining the inside. “Iremember too well who I was before. At present I find it too painful to reconcile those memories with what remains. Perhaps someday I will make my peace with that. Perhaps not. It was only eight months out of twenty years, after all, for all that it might as well have been eighty.Youhave spent a decade or more of your life choosing not to remember at all, who you were.”
Shell in hand, she marched briskly off after those cryptic words. He did not immediately try to catch up.
She went only as far as a rocky outcropping. There she leaned, looking out to sea. When she finally looked back his way, he walked slowly to rejoin her.
She drew in a breath, held it. Released it heavily. “I am sorry. That was quite rude of me. I intended no offense.”
“I took none.” He hadn’t, truly. The two of them understood one another in a way that didn’t always need careful words.
“It is only—” She blew out another breath. “I do not know exactly what is between you and my sister now. Or what was, months ago. And once upon a time, I’d have marked it as none of my business in either case. But not after... not after the sacrifices she made, finding me. Not when— She’s all I have left now.”
And that was the source of at least some of her sharpness with him. He’d never found it in himself to be irritated, recognizing that. It was very similar sentiment as that which had driven Isobel to France, searching for Lucy.
Lucy wasn’t quite finished. “It requires honesty with oneself first to be honest with another.”
“Aye. Sound advice. Do you plan to follow it yourself, then?” He matched her wry tone of earlier.
She smiled, a genuine smile that reached her eyes. “Just because I enjoy dispensing directives does not mean I’ll accept them, thank you.”
Something of his conversation with Lucy lingered for the remainder of the day alongside Isobel’s song. Repairs to the crofter’s cottage were nearly complete. He would need to decide soon what came next. And he and Isobel had never spoken of anything beyond the present. Or rather, the near future as pertained to the work he was doing for her.
They’d discussed building additional shelter so that the sisters might acquire a few more animals next spring. He’d drawn up some plans for it. And when that project finished? He could find work here as an oysterman if he stayed. It was years since he’d done it, but adolescent memories of it were in his fingers. It was an honest trade, all the more appealing after what he’d done before now.
But he and Isobel had not had such conversations. It was ironic in its way after the stripped-down honesty of what had occurred between them in France.
He’d never had much language for what love was. He had loved his family, certainly, and they had loved him, but the structure of that love had become indistinct with time. Memories of his mother especially were faded and soft at the edges.
Two lonely people in an untenable situation: That was what he and Isobel had been in France. Anything more than a few stolen nights by lamplight was impossible. But in making his way northward to her, he’d been hoping maybe it wasn’t entirely impossible after all.
Several years of his life had been given over to maintaining necessary lies, his own and others’. Somehow he’d stumbled ontosomething real in its midst. Or rather, Isobel had stumbled into his path. He’d never allowed himself to want something, and he’d believed that the absence of love in his life made no difference to him. Isobel unwittingly exposed that for a lie.
It had been creeping up on him for some time. Or— No. It was merely realizing he loved her, not the fact of it. He’d likely already been halfway in love with her before she left France; he just hadn’t recognized it at the time, and afterwards he’d pushed it well below the surface.
After the Compton case concluded, it was Isobel he’d sought. He’d rationalized it with a variety of excuses at first, but in the end it was to her he’d gone because she’d been the only thing that made sense to him anymore.
In France she’d still been shadowed heavily by her grief for Jamie. Undoubtedly she would mourn him always. She had loved Jamie.
He was not jealous of a dead man. He’d know himself beyond fortunate if he could spend the rest of his life and hers valuing her capacity for love and honoring the man who had loved her first. But he had nothing to offer her right now that she didn’t already have for herself.
