“How could I? Do you have any notion of how devastated you looked the day in the park when Sir Hugo said that Jonathan Hathaway might be alive? It was as if the ghosts of your past had risen up all at once. I thought he might have been an old lover, and you said nothing to contradict that suspicion. Instead, you withdrew into yourself when you might have come to me.”
“I know it was wrong of me,” I said slowly. “But I wanted to put it all behind me as quickly as possible. I had shut the door upon that time, the most terrible time of my life. I never imagined I would see Jonathan or Harry again.”
“Then why did you accept Sir Hugo’s request?” he challenged.
“Because I wondered . . . Jonathan was Harry’s closest friend. I thought, perhaps, if this man who appeared at Hathaway Hall were Jonathan, he might know . . .”
“Might know what?” Stoker demanded.
“Whether it had always been a game to Harry or whether he had really loved me,” I burst out. “Harry had stood before God and man and promised to love and care for me to the end of his days, and within six weeks, he was gone. He left me, alone and defenseless, in the face of disaster. Why?”
Stoker looked nonplussed. “What do you mean ‘why?’ Because he is an unmitigated ass.”
“Is he? Or did he find some flaw in me? Something fundamentally unworthy of love?”
“How can you think that?” Stoker shook his head.
“Because not one person has ever stayed,” I told him, my voice breaking. “Not my mother. Not my father. Not my husband. Everyone who ought to have been with me left—not because they were forced. Because they chose. What does that say of me?”
“It says that you have been unlucky, not unworthy,” he said sternly. “Do you think I haven’t had precisely the same thoughts about Caroline? My own wife committed adultery with my dearest friend and left me to die in a jungle. She turned the whole world against me simply because she could not accept that she was the authoress of her own crimes.”
“You have your brothers,” I pointed out.
“Do I?” His smile was mirthless. “We cannot speak without argument. I can go years without seeing one of them. I may be legally a Templeton-Vane, but I am the cuckoo in the nest, the reminder of my mother’s one indiscretion. Do you think I was ever permitted to forget that?” He leaned near, his jaw tight. “Do you think there is a single person in the whole of this world who could understand you better than I?”
“No. But if I had told you—”
I broke off and he leaned nearer still, his emotion palpable. “Go on.”
I shook my head. “I don’t even know. I simply wanted it all to go away. And you have been so strange with me, so obviously at odds, and I did not know why. Now we are come to this, where you are so angry with me, you can hardly bear to look at me.”
He blinked. “Angry with you? Veronica, I am angry with myself. No, you did not confide in me about Harry, but I did not confide in you about Caroline. You discovered the truth because she intruded into our lives.[*] When the tables were turned and I realized you had a secret that you held rather than entrust to me, my first reaction was rage—not because you did not tell me but because I wanted you to.”
“I do not understand you.”
“How could I, in all justice, demand from you a trust I had never willingly given? I never told you the worst of what Caroline made me feel. You saw the scars but never the wounds. It was little wonder you felt you could not confide in me.”
“I wanted to,” I told him.
“I know. And every day that you did not felt like another knife twist to the gut,” he replied. “Another proof that I am not a man upon whom you depend.”
“The fault is not yours,” I insisted. “It is mine. I have been my whole life in the habit of solitude, of trusting no one but myself. The one time I allowed myself to rely fully upon another, he betrayed that trust so completely, I vowed never again to put my happiness in the hands of another.”
“Yet another reason to break Harry Spenlove in half if I ever see him again,” he said through gritted teeth.
Before I could reply, the door was flung back on its hinges and Harry stood in the doorway. His clothes were mussed, the knees of his trousers heavy with mud, twigs adorning his hair. But he was smiling broadly, the smile of a buccaneer.
“All right, then, who wants a rescue?”
CHAPTER
29
I lunged for Harry, muttering the sorts of words never found upon ladies’ lips, but Stoker caught me just before my ankle irons would have yanked me backwards.
Harry looked hurt. “I say, that is no proper way to greet a fellow who has taken great pains to set you free. Again. I fell in a mud puddle,” he said, surveying his trousers with distaste. “At least I hope it was mud.”
Stoker sniffed deeply. “I think it safe to say it was not.”
Harry sighed. “For a civilized country, England is absolute death to a nice wardrobe.” He produced a key from his pocket and bent to unlock Stoker’s wrist irons. “There you are, old man. The other key is still broke off in your ankle iron, so you must make the best of it with a hacksaw,” he advised, producing the tool in question. He freed me then, and I resisted the urge to box his ears.
“Would you mind,” I said icily, “explaining exactly what you are doing here?”
He rolled his eyes heavenwards. “I have already told you. I am rescuing you. I am being heroic, Veronica. It has been my ambition ever since I read of the ancient Greeks. Theseus, Perseus—all capital lads with all sorts of daring. Although, I must say, I always imagined the ladies being rescued demonstrated a good deal more gratitude. You are not exactly being appreciative, Veronica.”
Stoker flicked him a glance. “She is always bad-tempered when she is hungry. She needs feeding.”
“Ah!” Harry patted his pockets and produced a pair of gently squashed sausage rolls wrapped in a handkerchief. “One for each of you. And I’ve a pork pie in another pocket, but I think I might have sat upon it.”
I devoured the sausage roll and Stoker waved at me to take the second as well. I would have resisted, but then I recalled the succulent seductions of his duck dinner and took it without remorse.
“Better?” Harry asked when I had finished.
“Much,” I admitted. “I apologize for my churlishness. The rescue is appreciated,” I told him humbly.
He grinned and turned to where Stoker was still working away at his ankle irons. “We ought to be speedy about this. If Isabel returns, well, I shouldn’t like to be caught is all I will say upon the matter.”