“Mrs. Brighton is not here, I’m afraid.” The woman began closing the door.
Lizbeth, not meaning to startle her, placed a hand against the wood to keep it from shutting. “Wait! Please. This is a matter of some urgency. When will she return? Where might I find her?”
“You’ll find her in the Allshire cemetery, ma’am. Mrs. Brighton passed nearly fifteen years ago.” The woman stared with alarm at Lizbeth’s hand against the door.
“Oh, no. Please don’t tell me that.”
She had come for nothing. She should have inquired first. She should have written. She should have…
“Is Mrs. Brighton’s replacement here? May I speak to the matron of the orphanage?”
The woman narrowed her eyes and was about to turn her away when she saw the ducal coach waiting in the street. Her eyes widened with a fresh head-to-foot perusal of Lizbeth, assuming her to be a duchess here to inspect the premise, pay homage, or some other business of crown and country.
With a new willingness to please, she curtsied deeply to Lizbeth and stammered, “I do apologize, Your Grace. Please forgive me. I shall see you to the matron now, Your Grace.”
Lizbeth didn’t correct the error in identity, but instead followed her through a narrow hall into a back room that served as a small office.
“Please sit, Your Grace. I will bring Mrs. Copeland to you.” The woman curtsied backwards out of the room, dipping and stepping all the way through the door as though the guest were royalty.
She didn’t wait long before a tall, slender, and rose-cheeked young woman not much older than Lizbeth rushed into the room, curtsied, and seated herself behind the desk. With a moment’s amusement, Lizbeth imagined herself sitting behind that desk, a fate she might once have desired before marrying Sebastian.
“Welcome, Your Grace. I am Mrs. Copeland, the headmistress. You wish to see the children and facilities, then? The children are in the dining room taking supper. I could show you first the classrooms, then the sleeping quarters to give Miss Tolkey time to prepare the children for presentation.”
“Oh, no, you misunderstand my purpose. Allow me to introduce myself. I am the Countess of Roddam. My sister, waiting in the carriage, is the Duchess of Annick. We are here not to inspect, but rather to find an orphan who may have once stayed here. We hope to learn if she arrived safely, and if so, her current whereabouts, assuming they may be known. Mrs. Brighton handled her admission.” Lizbeth watched as Mrs. Copeland deflated, her expression turning from eagerness to confusion.
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you, Your Ladyship. Few records are kept once children leave. What would have been the timeframe of the child’s stay?”
“I would hazard to guess during the span of the late 1760s to early 1780s.” Liz tried to calculate dates quickly in her head based on Sebastian’s age, his age when his mother died, and thus the relative age his sister would have been sent to the orphanage. She failed miserably at the hasty subtraction but felt confident the dates were within a relatively safe range.
“No, we wouldn’t have any records for the children from so long ago. I’m sorry I can’t be of more help. Would you still like to see the facilities?” The woman, eager to please, had already stood in preparation for the tour.
“I’ve come nearly one hundred miles. Please, don’t turn me away. Maybe you would remember the child if I told you her name,” Liz begged.
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know any of the children from that time. That was when Mrs. Brighton served as matron. I would have been about the same age as the person you seek, I’m sorry to say.”
“Her name was Lilith. Lilith Lancaster or maybe Lilith Chambers,” Liz blurted out, not wanting to be dismissed before having her say. “Please, tell me you know a child named Lilith. I don’t know where else to turn.” Glad her sister wasn’t present to witness her groveling to an orphanage matron, Liz stood and implored the woman, her hands clasped in front as if in prayer.
“Lilith? You want to see Lilith? Why didn’t you say so from the outset?” Mrs. Copeland looked even more confused now, but with obvious recognition.
“You know her?”
“Yes, of course. She’s our schoolmistress. Once an orphan here herself, she has stayed on as a teacher.”
A hand over her mouth, Lizbeth released a quiet sob. This all seemed heaven sent. Without first warning the startled Mrs. Copeland, Lizbeth reached out and hugged the matron.
“You have no idea how happy this makes me. Where may I find her? I will go to her now,” Lizbeth said, releasing the poor woman who had been crushed to Liz’s bosom.
“She’s at Arbor House this evening, just beyond the west edge of town. I’ll draw you a map, if you’d like.”
The matron sketched it on the back of discarded parchment. Lizbeth bade the woman farewell and raced to Charlotte so they could proceed to Arbor House before the darkness of night hampered their task.
Sunrays illuminated Sebastian’s world, flooding the gazebo with morning light. He had lain awake most of the night, listening to the waves make love to the rocks and feeling the emptiness of the bed. Hours before dawn, he tired of staring at her empty pillow and walked out to the gazebo on the headland to think.
Sitting in the place where they had exchanged vows didn’t make him feel much better, but if he closed his eyes and centered himself in the sounds around him, he could swear she sat next to him and whispered to him on the wind. He saw her in the waves and felt her touch in the sea mist.
Nothing could dissuade him from his next course of action, for he knew what he must do. He must find peace within himself so he could bring his wife home.
The empty halls of Dunstanburgh begged to be filled with the laughter of their children. The beach called to be covered with their footprints. The guest wing waited to accommodate Hazel, Walter, and Cuthbert. The lord of the manor yearned for his soul’s mate.
Finding peace was the only way to bring her home, the only way he could convince her he wasn’t a monster. If he could just convince himself first. After a lifetime spent blocking the memories and wallowing in blame, he struggled to focus. Never before had he tried to focus on it, tried to pinpoint exactly what haunted him, what the nightmares meant. Before he could wash the blood from his hands, he needed to know from whence it came.
The nightmares were always the same with variations on the theme. They always started with a clear vision of Lilith playing in the water, calling for him to stay and play. That in itself was a happy memory, one he wanted to hold onto if it weren’t associated with guilt. Only the rest of the nightmare twisted the memory, filling in the blankness of when he turned his back. He had turned from her and never saw what happened next, so the dreams filled the void with monsters, epically sized squid, pirates, sky-high waves, and various other absurd ways she could have been taken by the sea.
Was it that he didn’t have the rest of the story that bothered him? That he couldn’t see what happened to her? Or maybe it was that he had been unable to save her? If he could dig deep enough inside himself, face the pain, he could pinpoint the anguish and free himself. Theoretically.
He had never been able to do this before, never had the courage to face his self-made enemy, but for Lizbeth, he could do this. He had to do this. For Lizbeth, he had to look at himself and understand the truth.
His scars were no exception to this self-exploration. He spent a good portion of the previous evening staring at his own scars, something he had never done before. He had no idea what his back looked like until now.
Gerald and his valet had gathered several mirrors and arranged them to face each other so he could see his back in full view from all sides. The scars had always been a reminder of his decision and the consequence, but the only way he could heal was to see himself how Lizbeth saw him, to accept himself for what he was and what he had done.
The scars had been diffi
cult to look at. At first, they made him physically ill to see. Only through remembering Lizbeth’s reaction on their wedding night did he find the courage to return to the mirrors. It took hours for him to work up to an unwavering stare, to study the lines and crisscrosses without casting up his accounts.
Remembering her lips on his back helped him accept what he saw. He touched those he could reach, accepted them as being part of him rather than a reminder of death. Lizbeth saw them as a mark of courage and survival. She had traced every scar with her fingers, kissed every mark and complimented his bravery. These were the marks of a survivor, not a beast.
Sitting by the sea until dawn helped him remember every conversation he had with Lizbeth, even their first one, when they discussed Locke’s theories of the tabula rasa, the blank slate. Lizbeth, his clever and witty wife, had believed it to be hogwash, that people were not defined by what happened to them, were not molded by nurture alone.
Her belief, so different from what his had always been, held that people were born with predispositions, characteristics and personalities, and while nurture would certainly influence their value systems and their decisions, the inborn traits as well as free will had more to do with anything nurture affected. If a man were beaten, he could blame nurture for turning him into an abuser, or he could look inside himself and realize violence is wrong and thus choose not to beat.
A lifetime he had spent being what his father made him, a worthless, unlovable wretch. Seeing himself through Lizbeth’s eyes changed everything. Thinking of what all he had done for his people changed everything. He was not who his father made him. He was a man of worth, both loving and courageous.
Searching his soul, remembering Lilith and his childhood, diving into the memories and facing his fears finally resulted in two conclusions. While he could certainly be mistaken and need to explore his feelings further, he thus far concluded that two aspects afflicted him.
The first pain was that he hadn’t been there to help her. The second misery was that he had never been able to say goodbye. Unpacking these two traumas, he discovered a few more things about himself.
As young as he had been and as small as he had been, even smaller in stature than his sister at the time, he wouldn’t have been able to rescue her if she had been caught in the undertow, which is most likely what happened.
She excelled at swimming and swore she had hidden gills and a mermaid fin. It made no sense that she would have drowned unless the undertow had pulled her in. Even then, she should have known not to struggle and allow the tide to release her back to shore. Often, they had ridden the undertow together, letting it suck them under the water and release them. She should have known what to do.
If the undertow had taken her, there would have been nothing he could have done, and in all likelihood, he may have been pulled under with her. Part of his agony, he discovered, was guilt that his absence had allowed her to drown. As a rational man fully aware of the motions of the sea, he now realized his presence wouldn’t have helped any more than his absence.
What hurt about this now, looking back, was that even if he couldn’t have helped her, he wasn’t there to try. She had died alone. He hadn’t been there for her. He didn’t know if she cried out for him or if it had happened all at once. Had she been scared or unaware?
This. This was demon number one that he faced down for the first time in his life, understanding what about the memory tortured his dreams.
The second aspect that tormented him was not being able to say goodbye. He felt his father had taken away that right. No funeral had been held. No acknowledgment whatsoever of her death had taken place other than his father’s words telling Sebastian she had died and her name would never again be spoken, as though she never existed. His mother had been buried at Roddam Hall, only a small cross marking her grave, but no such burial had been made for Lilith, not even a cross to mark her existence and passing.
Without an opportunity to mourn the loss of the two people he had loved most in the world, his guilt had been branded onto his body with a fire poker. He realized now he had spent so many years feeling guilty, he had never truly mourned. The more his mind wrapped around this line of thinking, the more he devised ways he could lay them both to rest, especially Lilith, and thus lay this bane of his past to rest.
He could never absolve himself of the blame for not being there, but he saw no reason he couldn’t lay everything else to rest. It had been Lizbeth who helped him discover this, in her own way, helping him verbalize it even when he wasn’t ready and reminding him throughout their acquaintance that there were no victims, that no one could control or define another person.
Lilith never would have blamed him, and despite what his father had said at the time, his mother certainly wouldn’t have blamed him. As Lizbeth pointed out, he had only been a child. He wanted to beg for forgiveness all the same, but they never would have blamed him.
He decided at once to hold a funeral for her, to place a marker for her to memorialize her short time on earth. He could carve her name on the largest rock on the cliff as the marker or sculpt one of the large boulders into the shape of a mermaid in honor of her. Rock sculpture wasn’t exactly something he had tried before, but neither had woodcarving, and the flower he carved for Lizbeth had turned out fairly well.
Lizbeth needed to be by his side, even if he had to fight to win her back. He had never fought for anything in his life, not really, only ever emulating the passive victim, letting things happen to him rather than taking control.
This time, he would fight, for he had something worth fighting for. This time, he would fight for what mattered, fight against his father’s oppressive ghost and fight to prove to Liz he was not a monster after all, only a remorseful boy trapped inside a man’s body.
If he could convince her that nothing else mattered except his love for her, maybe he had a chance to win her back. All her suggestions of talking to begin the healing process now made sense, and he embraced this, wanted to talk about his plan for a funeral, wanted to share memories of his sister, wanted to talk about it all, to heal after all these years.
Even if she wanted to read the travel journals, they could read them together, or better yet, they could travel to each place and compare the entries to their experiences, putting his father to rest in the process. He would do anything she wanted, anything she asked, if only she would give him the chance to be the man she fell in love with.
Funny how she knew him better than he knew himself. She had seen the real him, the man behind the mask. He always assumed the mask was him, but no, it was the face of the remorseful boy, not him. He thought about the things in life he loved, his hobbies and interests, sardonic jokes, bawdy poetry, all of which comprised the real him, not the blame he placed on himself.
He felt awakened. He felt alive after a century of slumber. A future with the woman he loved beckoned.
Much to the surprise of the seagulls, Sebastian laughed out loud, the sound reverberating in the coved ceiling of the gazebo. He laughed from happiness, from release, and he also laughed at himself for not realizing all of this sooner, coming to grips with it all sooner. He spent so much time locking it away, afraid to face his demons, that he never even knew what haunted him. He wanted to take Lizbeth in his arms and kiss her, twirl her in the air, and laugh about how alive he felt.
Only one snag in that plan. She had left. That fact be damned, he was going after her. She could slap him across the face and call him a devil if she liked, but he didn’t care because he knew now he wasn’t to blame.
As fast as his feet could carry him across the dew-covered grass, he returned to the castle, mounting the stairs two at a time to the bedchamber. He didn’t bother calling his valet for he dressed for no one but his love. Stubble grew on his cheeks, and he didn’t care. He would use it to tickle her face when he finally kissed her again. He held no illusions he could bring her back to him, but cou
rage welled inside of him, passion fueled him, and a confident self-perception led him.
Dressed to ride, hair sloppily pulled back, and boots on his feet, he jogged to the stables and was riding to Lyonn Manor within minutes.
Chapter 35
When Lizbeth and Charlotte arrived at Arbor House, they questioned if Mrs. Copeland sent them to the right address. A sizable home stood on acreage just outside of town. This was hardly the home of an orphan.
Charlotte suggested, more than a tad impressed, “It would seem she married well.”
Lizbeth exited the carriage with Charlotte still declining to join her. Charlotte agreed to accompany her as moral support but didn’t want to get involved if she could avoid it. To Charlotte, the whole situation sounded too dreadfully depressing, as if from one of those barbarous novels, The Old English Baron or The Castle of Otranto. Liz ventured to the white columned estate alone, armed with purpose and courage.
Naught but twenty feet from the door, she stopped in her tracks at an ear-splitting scream from inside the home. Panicked, she burst through the door, following the sounds of the screams down unfamiliar hallways. Not a soul was in sight to stop her as she barreled down the corridors and up a flight of stairs, holding her skirts high and her wits higher.
As she turned down a hallway on the second floor, the screaming stopped. Which door had it come from? She surveyed the doors for signs of life, a flicker of light from beneath the frames, sounds of movement from within the rooms, anything.
A door at the end of the hallway opened. A woman stepped out wearing an apron covered in blood.
Horrified, Liz stared at the blood stains, unable to run in any direction, not even to retreat to the stairwell. The reddened apron moved closer.
“Pardon me, but are you here to see Sir Graham? He’s in his study.”
Liz shook her head, her eyes working up the bloody apron until they met the face behind the voice. Shock rippled through her body.
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