Toward Love's Horizon

by Michele du Barry

  Drifting in a half-awake, half-sleeping limbo, Angela prayed that Jane would live and the baby escape its prison unscathed. A spatter of raindrops, the rising wind, and a banging shutter drowned the noises inside the centuries old house and finally she slept.

  Gasping in sheer panic Angela woke, struggling to draw another breath into the tortured lungs beneath her cracked ribs. A weight as heavy as her burden of guilt pressed steadily and firmly against her mouth, nostrils, eyes; shutting out the room and every sound.

  The woman that only this morning had wanted to die now fought like a loosed demon to stay alive. Flawlessly embroidered linen and down crushed against her face and her flailing hands struck broad shoulders, glancing off ineffectually. Her movements slowed and an excruciating, unwanted void smothered her, lit by bright incongruous sunbursts that flared briefly and died away to nothingness.

  To awaken, with the pearl-gray, watery light of day trickling into the room, was a jolt when she had not expected to wake at all. The white pillows were properly beneath her head and the bed undisturbed—as if nothing had happened! Angela ached all over and the quick breath of amazement she took reminded her sharply of everything that had happened yesterday. It couldn’t have been a dream. It was so real—that feeling of not being able to breathe, that was somehow terribly familiar, as if it had happened before.

  But it must have been a nightmare for who would want to kill her? She was surrounded by friends and people that cared about her, and besides, with Jane having her baby the house had been bustling with activity. No one could have surreptitiously slipped into her room to smother her.

  Jane! She struggled upright with difficulty immediately aware of the silence in the house. But what did that silence mean? Had the baby finally come or—No! She couldn’t even think that!

  Angela’s fingernail snagged a thread on the quilt and she looked with dawning horror at the two nails broken off to the quick. She had fought so desperately against last night’s attack. But maybe it had happened in the woods with Owen, her common sense told her, as she opened her clenched fist and looked with complete disbelief at what it contained.

  She knew positively that that hadn’t been in her hand all day and night. The silver button embossed with the Remington coat of arms had a small three-cornered scrap of dark-blue cloth attached to it and it could only be from the coat Owen had worn yesterday.

  “Owen! He just couldn’t!”

  Angela sagged, suddenly deflated, against the treacherous pillows, a thousand jumbled, tumultuous thoughts vying for her attention. And to make matters worse a sharp knock sounded on the door and when she found herself unable to answer, it opened.

  Owen filled the doorway, rumpled, unshaven, his face lined and shadowed with fatigue. He stepped menacingly into the room, closing the door, with surprise evident in his eyes.

  “When you didn’t answer I thought you were asleep.”

  Angela choked on her heart which had leaped distressingly into her throat and shoved her hand hastily beneath the covers hiding the damning evidence of the nightmare that was no nightmare but reality. Why? Why? She couldn’t think! Had he expected to find her dead? Was he here to finish the job?

  “Angela, are you all right?” He bent over her and took the hand she thrust out to ward him off, holding it tightly in his warm grasp. There was a small tear in his cuff, a three-cornered tear where a button should have been, and her fingers convulsed under his.

  “Ja—Jane—” she stammered casting desperately for something to distract him, to buy herself more time.

  Owen smiled and sat beside the bed, her hand still captive in his. “She’s going to be all right. The baby was born a few hours ago. It’s a girl.”

  “Alive?” Angela eyed the bell on the other side of the bed. If only he would let go of her she could reach it and summon help.

  “Yes, tiny but perfect and healthy. We have named her Regina, Gina for short. She is just like Jane

  How could he go on and on so enthusiastically about the baby when all the time he meant to do her harm—and why? That was what she couldn’t begin to fathom. They were friends and had been since before she could remember. The only thing she could think of was that he had been overwrought and angry about her treatment of Jane, the premature birth and the idea that his wife and child were in dire danger of dying because of her. Had Owen done it in an unthinking rage, in the depths of despair when everything seemed at its worst?

  He was acting so natural now as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred and they were back on their old footing. Was he regretting last night’s actions or had he already forgotten about them, as something unpleasant to be pushed from his thoughts? If it wasn’t for the button she couldn’t have believed it herself.

  “Yesterday was a horrible day for all of us,” Owen said with a jaunty smile. “Why don’t we forget it ever happened? Soon you and Jane will be better and we will all be friends again. We need one another and must not ever let anything come between the three of us. Scott would want us to look after you.”

  Angela closed her eyes with relief. Whatever had happened was over as quickly as it had begun. But she would never forget it. Even the most loyal of friends and the most steadfast lover could turn on you if the situation warranted it. And both had happened to her on the same day. It was a lesson she would remember and the nagging familiarity of it all having happened before in another life cemented the feeling that there were very few she could allow herself to trust.

  “You don’t look well, Angela. Shall I send Maggie to you?”

  “Oh, yes, please! And, Owen—I’m glad everything is back to normal again and that you don’t hate me for what I did.”

  “Silly girl,” Owen teased kissing the tips of her cold fingers. “I could never hate you!”

  Somehow those bright, cheerful words chilled her through and through, and she couldn’t cast off the events that had changed her safe world. Every long day that she spent at Bentwood until the doctor allowed her to go home was tinged with an evil quality that nothing could dispel.

  With his tutor’s hand heavy on his shoulder Robert watched the open carriage sweep up the drive and come to a smooth halt before the door. It was two weeks since the disastrous day his father had left, and just as long since he had seen his mother, and no man could have restrained Robert Harrington. With the easy grace that belonged to Scott he shrugged from Louis Garamond’s tightening grip and escaped down the steps.

  He stopped short as Angela gingerly withdrew her hand from Owen’s grasp, remembering Kate’s specific orders not to embrace his mother for she was recovering from an accident. Robert hung there for a moment, unsure of himself and aware of the fast approaching Mr. Garamond behind him, when Angela turned her full attention on him and smiled.

  “Oh, Robert, my baby! How I have missed you!”

  And she embraced him, ruffling his light brown hair, pressing his head to her breast, and for once he didn’t want to squirm from her maternal arms. He clung to her choking back unmanly tears and not even caring that she had called him a baby, because with his mother back the world was right again. The scent of her, the feel of her and her soft voice whispering words only to him helped dissolve the tension and fright of the past weeks, the fear that she wouldn’t return.

  He was used to his father’s absences but not Angela’s and both of them leaving on the same day had upset him more than he had let anyone know. Yes, that, and the strange man-to-man talk Scott had had with him before leaving; Ezra’s extended holiday in Paris, and a new and demanding tutor, had made a shambles of his life.

  But even Angela’s presence could not obliterate a small, nagging voice inside him, something that Robert could barely sense but would not be gotten rid of this easily. The innate knowledge that something was terribly wrong and threatening the very fabric of his life. He remembered, dimly, feeling like that once before; imprisoned on an island by a pirate who in some way had made Angela withdraw unexplainably from him, though physically sh
e had been there.

  She kissed him on both cheeks but though she was smiling and as beautiful as ever there was a secret pain in her eyes, so sharp and unconcealable, that Robert felt it too. “Mama—” he began but Uncle Owen took his hand, pulling him from Angela’s side, and escorted her into the house.

  “Well, young man,” said Mr. Garamond grasping his errant change by the scruff of the neck. “You have disobeyed orders—as usual. We will just have to see what punishment Kate will mete out. Probably too light as always. In the meantime you can spend the rest of the day at your lessons instead of with your mother.”

  With narrowed brown eyes and a scowl on his face Robert looked up at the blond head towering over him. Discipline never sat well on his shoulders and with a quick twist he kicked Mr. Garamond soundly in the shin and was free.

  “Damn you to hell, you bloody Frenchy!” Robert taunted just beyond the reach of his doubled over tutor who was clutching his shin with murder in his darkened eyes. “My mother needs me and no one will keep me from her!”

  “She will spank you when I tell her of your despicable behavior and foul mouth!”

  The threat and the consequences of his actions were soon left far behind as Robert charged up the stairs and into the round drawing room. Clare was on Angela’s lap, as she sat on a sofa opposite Owen, with an elegantly spread tea table between them. But his sister was no threat because his mother looked up at his entrance and stretched out her hand for him with that special, loving look on her face that was for him alone.

  So he sat beside her, squirming impatiently, as Uncle Owen drank gallons of tea and Angela distractedly glanced out the tall windows at the garden, caressed Clare’s hair, pretended to drink her tea and answered Owen in monosyllables. And he wished they were alone so he could talk to his mother about his troubles and have her explain them away. Also he must confess his transgressions before his tutor appeared and disclosed them himself.

  There was something wrong between his mother and Uncle Owen. He saw, with the unworldly, uncluttered perception of a child, what the adults couldn’t and what even Owen missed. On the surface everything was as still as a becalmed sea but beneath, in the depths where it mattered, was an abstract undercurrent that replaced all the worries so recently dissipated with Angela’s homecoming.

  Kate came for Clare and soon after that Owen took his leave. “Now, my son,” said Angela, holding both his hands in hers and gazing deeply into golden-brown eyes that were so exactly like Scott’s it pained her. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  But how could he explain what he hardly understood himself? Instead Robert said, “I missed you, Mama, and I don’t like Mr. Garamond!”

  “He seems a very nice young man. What is it that you dislike?”

  “He’s a Frenchy!”

  Angela hid a smile. “Is that all?”

  “All Frenchies are pirates and I hate pirates!”

  “Oh, Robert, you’re wrong. Not all Frenchmen are pirates any more than all Englishmen are scoundrels. You can’t dislike someone just because of where they were born or the way they talk. Mr. Garamond can’t help it—”

  “Mama! Don’t you remember the pirates?” asked Robert desperately. But from the frown between her brows and the puzzled concentration in her eyes he knew she didn’t.

  His father had explained it all very carefully to him, about her lapses of memory and the past she couldn’t remember, but sometimes it was beyond his comprehension. But this flaw in his mother made her dearer still and brought out a protective feeling that he must shield her from the unpleasantness of the past. He was now the man in the family since Scott was gone; his father had told him that straightaway during that disconcerting talk. So to spare Angela, Robert, who would not be seven till the end of December, changed the subject.

  “When will Papa be back?” He had no way of knowing that this new subject was one even more distressing than Angela’s lost memory. But he found out quickly enough.

  “I don’t know,” Angela choked out looking as if she was trying not to cry. Than she composed herself instantly for she had known the question would be asked eventually and she could not lie. “Your father is not coming back to live here again.”

  “Never?”

  How could she explain to this incredulous little boy, who in some ways was too old for his age, what had occurred between her and Scott? “Never. You will understand better when you are older; that sometimes adults find it impossible to live together no matter how hard they try.”

  “But you are married, and husbands and wives live together!”

  “Not in this case, Robert. Most definitely not in my case!”

  “Don’t you love him anymore?”

  “Yes. Yes I love him but that’s not enough—”

  “Then he doesn’t love you; he left you, he hurt you! I hate him!

  “No!” Angela reached for her son, with the worry, pain, and misunderstanding marring his face, and held his head against her shoulder. Only she could set things right and reconcile him with Scott, even at the cost of losing his love.

  “He still loves me but I was the one that drove him away. You are too young to understand it all but you must believe me,” Angela explained very slowly and precisely. “Scott could not live with me any longer because I was the one hurting him. I would have destroyed him if he stayed. And if he hurt me by leaving it was something he couldn’t help. Your father would never harm me on purpose. Believe me, Robert, for I’m telling you the truth.”

  She held his face between her hands, very close to hers, and watched the angry fire die in his eyes, confusion taking its place. “You must not hate your father because he was wise enough to know what was best for everyone. And in the long run this will be best. He loves you, Robert, and you will visit him often and he will come to see you. But our lives will never be the same as before, and we must help each other get used to it. You will help me won’t you, son?”

  “Yes, Mama, but I still don’t understand—”

  “No, and you may never understand. When you are a man you will come to know that the only consistent thing about a woman is her unpredictability. I am a woman and sometimes I can’t even fathom my own actions, so how could you or Scott comprehend them?”

  Robert looked at her with puzzled concentration. She had soothed his anger and left him bewildered with an unknown anxiety.

  She had driven his father away yet he couldn’t hate her the way he was prepared to hate Scott at the drop of a hat. Angela seemed somehow helpless in the chaotic strands of a net that was tightening inexorably around her.

  “I think you should send for Ezra right away!” he burst out sharply. “I don’t know how to help you but he could.”

  “Nonsense. You help by loving me and trying to understand and just by being here. Besides, we don’t want to spoil Ezra’s holiday. He hasn’t had one in such a long time. There is nothing for you to worry about, baby; everything will settle down now that we know the way it has to be.

  “Now, give me a smile and a kiss so that I can go to my room and rest. And how would you like to stay up late and have dinner with me?”

  Robert complied with her wishes and then left hastily. In the privacy of his own room he penned an incoherent misspelled letter to Ezra pleading with him to return immediately.

  He had forgotten completely about Mr. Garamond’s bruised shin.

  After dinner with Robert and a hot bath, when the household had settled down and she remained sleepless, Angela went to the connecting door she had avoided looking at for hours. She opened it and the room was cold and dark and irresistible.

  She had been in the room twice and once Scott had made love to her and once he had raped her. Candle flame leaped yellow from Angela’s shaking fingers and she forced herself to stay calm and coax the golden glow into stability. Very slowly, holding the candle high, she walked around the room that was devoid of Scott’s presence.

  Strange that they had lived in this house together since their return f
rom Australia and she had only come to this room willingly two times, and left both times in a panic. How cruel and how gentle he had been to her in this room, her enigmatic husband that she couldn’t understand anymore than he could understand her. She touched the exquisite linenfold paneling; a brown leather armchair; the smooth, polished walnut desk; a painting of a storm at sea all angry and violent with motion; and another quite different and serene, a landscape of autumnal colors. The room was elegant but masculine, done in forest-green, with touches of burnt orange, brown, and yellow scattered about. She had never noticed any of those things before.

  Beside the bed was a book upon a chest of drawers; the only sign of recent occupancy. She touched the grained leather and picked it up. Who would have expected a man like Scott to read poetry? With fingers trembling again Angela put down the candle and flipped quickly through the well-worn pages. Love poems. Her discovery was becoming even more disconcerting.

  For the past weeks she had kept a tight rein on every emotion and even after the scene today with Robert she had refused to break down. And now she felt her control crumbling. She could not give way. So Angela threw the book on the bed intending to flee but it opened automatically to a place near the beginning; obviously a poem he had read and reread, pondering over it in the agonizing nights when she had been all too aware of a light burning in his room into the early hours of morning.

  How could she resist picking it up and reading it, and discovering what words had filled his mind and disturbed his sleep? Turning the book away from the deep shadows and into the flickering light she smoothed the page that had been ripped halfway down, fitting the letters evenly together.

  Put your head, darling, darling, darling,

  Your darling black head my heart above;

  Oh, mouth of honey, with the thyme for fragrance,