He shook his head, a muscle working in his cheek.
She was quiet for a long moment. Their steps down the cliff road were slow and measured, nothing like their hurried pace the previous day. He heard her take a breath. “May I ask…forgive me if I’m being too bold, but…what caused your speech impediment?” She paused. “It is an impediment, isn’t it?”
He didn’t answer straightaway. He couldn’t. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d ever imagined himself discussing with her.
“Were you born with it?” she asked. “Or—”
“I fell,” he said gruffly.
“From a horse?”
“From there.” He pointed to the cliffs in the distance, the ones that curved along the sea some miles away. They were different from the cliffs beneath the Abbey. No jutting outcroppings of stone existed to aid someone in descending to the beach. The cliff face was stark and sheer, dropping straight down to the violently frothing surf below.
“There?” The whistling wind nearly stole her voice. “But how?”
“We were climbing down, and…and I fell. I hit m-my head and I dropped…into the sea. Alex saved me.”
They’d been joking with each other as they went, spirits high on the thrill of it all. Neville had turned to say something. A clever, laughing remark. In that same instant, the rock had crumbled beneath him.
“Mr. Archer?” She slowed to a halt. “When?”
He came to a reluctant stop in front of her. “Long ago. When I was a boy.”
“What in the world were the two of you doing up there? Surely you must have known it was dangerous.”
Of course they’d known. But the climb down the cliffs had seemed worth the risk. It had been the only way to access the beach below, and the boat that was docked there. They’d used it to row down the coast to Greyfriar’s Abbey.
At the time, the Abbey had been the home of Sir Oswald Bannister. He was the orphanage’s foremost patron—and rumored sire of several of its inmates.
Justin was one of them. Alex was likely one too.
Add to that, the lure of legends that spoke of buried pirate’s treasure, and the four of them could scarcely resist venturing onto the Abbey’s grounds several times a week. Sometimes they made mischief for Sir Oswald. Other times they searched for the treasure.
In the end, only Neville’s fall had been able to stop their pursuits.
“Thornhill and Finchley were there, too,” he said. “We d-didn’t care about the danger. We weren’t afraid.”
“Boys never are when it comes to foolish schemes. My own brother might have broken his neck a dozen times over if my mother and I hadn’t taken him in hand.”
Neville’s gaze lifted to hers. There was a storm in his breast, as tumultuous as the one brewing over the sea. “I didn’t have a…a m-mother. Or a sister. None of us did. We were p-parish orphans.”
“All of you?”
He didn’t say anything.
It was reply enough.
Miss Hartwright absorbed the information in silence. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”
His throat contracted on a swallow. His gaze flicked out to the sea. To the treacherous cliffs beyond. The ones he’d fallen from so long ago.
“What happened afterward?” she asked.
“I don’t remember.” His mouth flattened. “For a long while, I…I didn’t even remember falling. Only waking up in…in the orphanage.”
It was only later that it had come back to him. First in nightmares, and then in waking memory. The terror when he’d fallen and hit his head. The rush of salt-damp wind as he’d plummeted down, sucking away his breath before he’d ever hit the water. And the sea itself. A living organism—cold, dark, and relentless. It had swallowed him whole in the seconds before he’d lost consciousness.
He remembered those early nights in the orphanage, coming awake all at once in his narrow bed, his sheets soaked with sweat. “I c-can’t breathe,” he’d gasped, when he could speak at all.
But there had been plenty of air. It had been compassion the orphanage lacked.
“They sent me away,” he said.
“To where?”
He resumed walking toward the stables. “A…convent.”
Clara readjusted Bertie in her arms as she followed at Mr. Cross’s side. The little pug was used to being carried about like a valuable parcel, and made no objection to being held warmly under her cloak. “A sort of hospital, do you mean? Here in Devon?”
He shook his head. “St. Crispin’s in…Abbot’s Holcombe. Mr. Boothroyd arranged it. The sisters n-nursed me.”
His words were slow, and drawn out, as if he were retrieving each one from the bottom of a murky well. Clara gathered that it was difficult for him to speak in long sentences. To explain things to her with any degree of complexity. His frustration at the process was palpable. Were his hands not in his pockets, she was certain she’d find that one of them was again clenched into a fist.
“You knew Mr. Boothroyd as a boy?”
“Yes.” He looked straight ahead, his jaw set. “The orphanage… It was a b-bad place. He…he helped us.”
Clara fell quiet again. It was all very complicated. Far more than she’d have guessed from her first, or even second, impressions of the residents and guests assembled at the house party.
And yet, she wasn’t entirely surprised.
There was an element of darkness to the group. Of lingering tragedy. She’d felt it from the moment she arrived at the Abbey, so high atop the cliffs overlooking the sea. At the time, she’d attributed it to the Gothic architecture of the place, and to the wind and rain that stormed all about it.
But it was the people that created the atmosphere. Mr. Thornhill with his burn scars. Mr. Finchley with his world-weary blue gaze, so much older than all the rest of him. And even Mr. Archer. The way he looked at his wife. The way he stayed close to her and held her hand. It was love, of course. But there was something else there as well. The thirst of a man too long deprived of water.
And what of Mr. Cross? The most mysterious gentleman of all.
He wasn’t like the others. And she began to understand why.
“How long did you remain at the convent?” she asked.
“Until I c-came here. When Thornhill…bought the Abbey. Nearly f-four years ago.”
Four years?
She couldn’t hide her dismay. “Do you mean to say you’ve only lived at the Abbey for four years? That you’ve spent most of your life living in a convent?”