“You’re telling the truth?” she asked, her voice sounding small.
“Do you truly think that I would invent such a thing?” He put his free hand to a tree trunk, the torrent within him closing around his organs from inside.
He struggled for breath, but it was choked beneath the weight in his chest, crushing him.
Damn her, she could see it. Even in the darkness, she could see.
“You are telling the truth,” she murmured. “Oh, Archer.” She stood helplessly and moved beside him as he strained to breathe against the fog in his lungs.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He tried to answer, but what came out was something like a sob. Fuck. Fuck, but he was going to succumb to it.
She tentatively put her hands down on his shoulders and brought him toward her until he was enclosed in her embrace.
An age passed while she breathed with a slow forceful rhythm, as though she could model for him the proper working of lungs. I’m sorry. Breathe with me. I’m here. Slowly. Just breathe.
Finally, excruciatingly, he found the strength to straighten up and break away from her.
He was soaked through with sweat, and the breeze in the air sent such a chill through him she could likely hear his bones rattle above the rustle of the trees.
“Apologies,” he murmured, mortified at the display she had just witnessed.
She reached out and put her fingers lightly to his hand. “Please. It’s me who is sorry.”
He turned back to his snuffling horse. “Come. We should return. You can leave in the morning.”
“Archer,” she said quietly, staying rooted where she stood.
He turned back to her, impatient to put this all behind him.
“It’s a great comfort to know that she simply had a love affair. I feared for her all these years. I’m so relieved to know that she was loved. And by someone like you.”
The words were kindly meant, but he’d rather she stay silent than congratulate him for the pain he’d wrought so long ago.
“Do not be tempted,” he said, “to cast me as some romantic hero. The story is not a happy one.”
Something in his manner made her think he wanted to tell her more, but couldn’t make himself.
“But you married,” she said softly. “And you had a son. What was his name?”
His eyes looked fixedly just beyond her. “Benjamin.”
She had always found his eyes remarkable—their essential gentleness, which he could never quite mask even at his most lordly and imperious, was what had endeared him to her, made him handsome. Now they clouded with an anguish she could hardly stand to look upon.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I won’t make you speak of it.”
But instead, he drew a ragged breath and began to tell the story of a boy who met a girl and fell in love.
How one summer afternoon in his eighteenth year he wandered into the woods on an afternoon’s aimless stroll and discovered her with her bare feet dangling in the stream.
She was six years older, a nursemaid employed by Poppy’s uncle to care for his recently orphaned young niece. She’d grown up in Paris, the daughter of a merchant who’d died when she was young. She’d been sent to a convent for an education, and to find work, she’d come alone across the sea to Wiltshire.
He knew he could never have her. His father had made clear it was his duty to secure a wife who would enhance the family’s crumbling finances, despite the fact he was the second son. She was alone, foreign, a Catholic, in service—unsuitable to a family that had carefully tended its bloodlines for generations.
Poppy was silent as he told his tale. How they’d met in the woods for two summers until he’d convinced her to run away with him—taken her to France and told his father of his marriage only months later. How the duke had sent solicitors to Paris threatening annulment, disinheritance. How little they had cared.
How Bernadette had painted while he apprenticed with a merchant trader who specialized in wine. The arrival of their baby. A laughing, merry boy with a mane of golden curly hair who loved to ride on his father’s shoulders to the market, babbling nursery songs in French.
How they’d been happy. Until one day a letter came informing him of the death of his mother and elder brother in a carriage accident. You will be Westmead, his father wrote. Whatever our differences, your responsibility to this family outweighs them. You must return.
“He told me to leave them in France,” he said bitterly. “He wanted an annulment, or at least discretion. But I was defiant. Determined that if he wanted me, he must accept my family. I brought them here. I brought them here.”
Suddenly she knew with sickening clarity how this story ended. Westhaven’s west wing had been ravaged by a fire many years ago. The old duke had died soon after the blaze and the family had not returned. The official cause had been a dirty chimney. But local legend had always had it that the duke had set the blaze himself, in a drunken fit after the death of his wife and eldest son.
“Oh, Archer,” she breathed. She reached for his hand, but he waved her away.
“He waited until I was out with the estate agents. By the time I saw the smoke, we were a half hour’s ride away. By the time I made it back, the stairs had collapsed. It was too late.”
She could not think of what to say but knew she must say something. “You couldn’t have known. He’d have to be mad.”
“No. He wasn’t. For all the talk of my father’s insanity, it was never him who succumbed to madness. It was me. For weeks, I couldn’t rise from my bed. By the time I came to grips, my father was dead of a bad heart and I couldn’t bear to speak of what he’d done. So he accomplished what he wanted. And that’s my fault.”
“You can’t blame yourself,” she said softly. “You were grieving.”
“I was weak. Out of control. Unable to go about the basic tasks of living and frankly better off had I been among the dead. I spent months that way. And when I did come half to rights, I couldn’t stand to remember. I threw myself into investing with a kind of single-minded madness and I let my wife and boy … just disappear. And for that, I can’t forgive myself. I have no wish to.”
His face rearranged itself as he said these words. The pained light in his eyes went cold, and he straightened his face back into the aloof veneer of the duke who strode around and never slept and kept his papers in exacting little stacks.
And so she completed the story for herself. About a man who had shut himself up very tightly, and assumed control very rigidly, to pay an act of penance.
She wondered if he could see, like she could, that it wasn’t working. That the mask that he wore was beginning, little by little, to slip away.
She wondered what would happen when the inevitable occurred.
When it fell away entirely.
The experiment was over. He had thought a decade’s absence from this place was enough to cauterize the wounds.
It was not.
His mind was fog, his chest a chasm, turning septic.
He had not told her the whole truth of it. It was not just his labors that saved him. It was also pain, and with it strength. The possibility of a place inside himself that bore no relation to the house of Westmead. A place he longed for now.