Beth drew in a long breath and tried to find a comfortable position. She’d begun this journey alone, thought she liked it that way. She’d gone to extremes to try to preserve that and keep everyone else out under the guise of keeping them safe.
But she’d been wrong—and maybe that’s what those weeks of solitude had really shown her, as she had no one but the Lord. That it wasn’t about what she could do on her own. It never had been.
It was about how much stronger she was in community. With her family, with her friends. With the one who had sparked a fire in her heart. Nothing mattered without them.
If only it hadn’t taken such tragedy for her to realize it.
20
7 AUGUST 1906
Senara refilled the glass of water on the end table, humming the last bars of a ballad as she did. And chuckling when she looked over at her charge and saw Beth’s scowl. The drawing room had become Beth’s prison over the last week, and she knew well her young friend was ready to burst free of its walls and spread her wings again, even if only to another room of the house.
But she had to admit—to Mam, certainly not to Beth—that it had done her own heart good to have someone to take care of. Organizing them had been interesting, but it had never been that which fueled her. It was caring for people. She took a minute to open the windows to the sunny summer breeze and took her seat beside Beth’s sofa again with a smile. “There now. Too beautiful a day for you not to enjoy it.”
“I’d enjoy it far more if I were out in it.” Probably thinking to prove it, Beth pushed herself up and walked with careful steps to the window. “Just for a few minutes?”
Poor thing. She was healing, but her movements were still stiff, and she was clearly sore, though better than she’d been a few days ago. “A morning in the garden does sound like just the thing, doesn’t it? Let me fetch our hats and we’ll go out.”
Five minutes later, they were settled on the wrought-iron chairs—Beth’s padded with cushions—and Senara had pulled out some mending that she’d offered to do for Mam. “Did Lady Emily mention when she’d come again? Not that you could possibly be tired of my company.”
Beth laughed, at least. “Tomorrow, I think. She wanted to get caught up with her correspondence today. Not that anyone in her family has responded to a single letter from her, but she won’t give up on them.”
Senara could only shake her head and jab needle into cloth with a bit more force than necessary. She knew firsthand how some families could be. But it was one thing to dismiss their employees out of hand, without entertaining thoughts of forgiveness. It was another thing entirely for them to treat their own daughter that way. She couldn’t fathom it. Here Senara was, having legitimately done something wrong, and her own parents still stood beside her. “I don’t understand why they’re acting so with her. What’s she done, that they’re giving her such a silent treatment?”
Beth shook her head, gaze distant. “Chose a side other than her brother’s. She tried to tell them that he’d behaved atrociously here last month. That he was involved in Johnnie Rosedew’s death and had threatened me. This was their answer—she was grievously mistaken, Nigel is a saint, and until she apologizes to him and patches things up with him . . . Well, I believe their words were something along the lines of, ‘It’s high time you learn what it means to be a Scofield, and you’re not welcome with us again until you do.’”
It didn’t ease Senara’s frown any. “The tack they should be taking with him. Not her.”
“Exactly so.” With a gusty sigh, Beth leaned forward and snatched from the mending basket an apron whose hem was unraveling. “I’m bored enough to think sewing looks interesting. Where are the needles?”
Senara chuckled and passed her one. Beth had always had a fine hand with sewing, when she bothered with it, but the call of the out of doors had usually been stronger, at least in the days when Senara lived at home. She’d become a bit more domesticated in recent years though, Mam had said. Not that Senara had really seen it this summer, what with all the treasure hunting.
It took only a few minutes of surreptitious glances, though, to see that Beth’s childhood skill had increased with age as one would expect. She’d probably stitched a slew of lovely, useless samplers at finishing school. The Clifford girls hadn’t yet mastered such skills—but then, they were still so small. Needles looked so awkward in their little hands. And oh, the way Rose had always stuck the tip of her tongue out when she was concentrating on it!
She missed them. She missed them so much. She missed tucking them into their beds and singing lullabies, she missed chasing them around the grounds, she missed looking deep into their eyes as she gave them their instructions for their next visit with their mother and seeing their sweet spirits flashing there.
It struck her down to the bone just now—she’d never see them again. Those precious girls. She’d never get to watch them sew years from now and see how they’d progressed. She’d never get to measure their heights against the doorframe again. She’d never more get to kiss bumped knees or soothe angry tears.
This was the price of sin.
“You could tell me, you know.” Beth’s voice came softly to her ears, gentle as a breeze and just as inviting. “Why you can’t go back. I can see you’re missing them.”
Senara drew in a long breath and kept her gaze on the patch she was affixing to Tas’s trousers. Her instinct was still to protect Beth from such truths, as she’d have done a decade ago. But Beth was a young woman now—a young woman who had been looking in a new way at a young man. A young woman who needed to know, then, what consequences there could be for the choices she made.
Not that she was equating Lord Sheridan with Rory. She couldn’t imagine him ever behaving so selfishly. Even so. “I . . . made a poor choice. With a man. And was dismissed for it.”
There. She managed to say it with an even voice.
“Oh, Nara.” Beth’s hand moved into her vision and covered her own. “Was it that Rory chap?”
Her gaze flew up.
And found Beth’s face earnest. “There was always something about the way you mentioned him in your letters home.”
She sighed out the breath she’d drawn in and looked down again. “I was a fool. I thought he loved me, that we’d marry. I thought . . . I thought he was my path, Beth. That with him I could have a family of my own, that . . .” She let her needle still. Let her eyes slide shut. Reached up and tugged her necklace from under her collar so she could squeeze the key into her palm, as she’d always done when such thoughts troubled her. “It’s all I ever wanted, you know. A family of my own. Much as I love the Clifford girls, I’m not their mam. I was just a hired servant dismissed in a moment, despite all the years of love I’ve poured into them. And now I’ve squandered it all, ruined it all. Lost my chance for the only thing I ever wanted.”
“Oh, Nara.” Beth squeezed the hand still in her lap. “Don’t give up on the future yet. If the Lord can redeem the mess I made of everything, He can certainly use your failures too.”
So easy for her to say, especially when she had a marquess staring at her as if she were the only girl on the planet. A marquess who had made good on his promise to keep Ainsley’s family safe. A telegram had come just this morning saying they were settled into their hotel in Paris and having the time of their lives.