It Takes Two to Tumble

by Cat Sebastian

  “How churlish of me not to have thought of that,” she said, her eyes sparkling. “Next time, send word and we’ll come up with some suitable display of affection for you.”

  “Please do.” He smiled back. She really was beautiful, both in the sense that anyone in their right mind would agree that she was lovely to look at, and in the sense that she was dear to him and therefore he found her countenance pleasing. He loved her, and he believed she loved him. It was right and good for them to marry; their union would be comfortable and easy. This was what marriage was for. But comfort and ease suddenly seemed like pale and flimsy things.

  “That face again,” Alice said, regarding him with concern.

  Ben made an effort to be decent company. “It’s lovely weather we’re having.” And then he wanted to slap himself, because since when did he have to resort to weather-related conversation with Alice?

  “Is this where I mention that we’re due for rain?” Alice shot back, an eyebrow gently raised. She knew him too well. “But I’ll play along. Yes, Benedict, the weather is fine. I do wish I could experience it without a pane of glass between me and it, but it certainly looks well enough through the window.” Even with the support of Ben’s arm, she was only able to walk a few steps; that wouldn’t bring her even to the garden door.

  “I’ll carry you outside,” he said impetuously.

  “No you will not,” she protested. “We have a Bath chair due to arrive next week, and I’ll be wheeled outside in tremendous dignity.”

  He was already on his feet. “Let me take you outside now, though.”

  She looked up at him steadily. “Suit yourself,” she said, lifting her arms. “Haul me about wherever you like. Oh, up I go.” She laughed as Ben lifted her, and her mother cast them both a look of indulgence shot through with weariness, and Ben was reminded of how much of a trial the past months had been for the older woman: her only child sick, crippled. It was surely a relief for Mr. and Mrs. Crawford to know that after they died, Alice would at least have a husband to care for her, if it came to that. She didn’t have money or any family that could be relied on; Ben was all she had. He held tightly to her.

  Alice felt insubstantial in his arms, as if she were entirely composed of muslin ruffles. Too light. He tried to keep the worry off his face, knowing she could read him perfectly.

  He managed to open the French door that led out of the drawing room, then kicked it shut behind him after they stepped out onto the terrace.

  “You can put me down on the bench,” Alice said, so close her breath ruffled his hair.

  “Must I?” he asked, squeezing her a bit tighter, then loosening his grip because he could feel the contours of her bones. He was seized by the idea that if he put her down she’d blow away.

  “I’m afraid so.” Her voice seemed graver than this conversation required. “How did you find Captain Dacre?” she asked after he had arranged her on the bench.

  “He’s cold and angry and seems dead set against kindness,” Ben said, not mincing words, and then immediately feeling guilty for being so uncharitable. “He returns from two years at sea and instead of—I don’t know—embracing his children or even greeting them or whatever it is fond papas do, he makes himself as disagreeable as possible.”

  “When my father came home from a trip he’d always bring me back something special. A new set of paints, or something else he could slip into his bag.”

  “Well, he was fond of you. Who can blame him?” Ben asked. He didn’t want to talk about the captain. Not here.

  “A doctor from London came last week while you were up at Barton Hall.”

  “Did he have anything helpful to say?”

  “He thinks I’m malingering.”

  Ben sucked in a breath and held it until he could trust himself to speak calmly. “Did your parents believe him?”

  “No, thank goodness. Or, even if they did, they’d never say as much, which is more or less the same thing.” Ben disagreed there, but didn’t want to point it out. “But I feel like I’m starting to believe him. What if I’m mad? He told Father that this is a form of hysteria he usually sees in older women who have already had children and now wish to get attention in other ways.”

  Ben would have liked to give this medical man some attention, preferably with his fists and quite possibly with his boots. “You haven’t walked on your own in months. If you were shamming it, you’d have to be as mad as a March hare, and I think we’d all have noticed by now.”

  She was silent, the only sounds the hooting of an owl and the rustling of leaves. “He was so sure of himself.”

  “It’s his job to be sure of himself. He can’t charge five guineas to shrug his shoulders and walk away.”

  “I don’t want to get married until I know for sure whether I’m going to recover.”

  “I don’t care whether you can walk, Alice.”

  “But I do,” she said vehemently. “I want to know what’s in store for me before I make any promises. I want to know what my life will be like. I think I deserve that. My opinion on this matters, Benedict.” She sounded almost angry on those last words.

  Ben couldn’t argue. He wasn’t going to try to persuade her to marry him against her will. He took her hands. “Anything you want. However long you want. I’m not going anywhere. But in case you were in any doubt, I want to marry you, no matter what. There’s nobody else I can imagine spending my life with.”

  He thought this was a good thing to say. It was the truth, and it was what he told himself whenever he thought about his marriage: there was nobody other than Alice he could imagine being with. But Alice tilted her head to the side and regarded him quizzically. “You know there are people who marry for other reasons.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at her. “You mean dynastic marriages? I never seem to have any money at all and you have three hundred pounds. I don’t think we qualify.”

  She laughed, but her smile didn’t last long. “No, I mean when the butcher’s boy steps out with the baker’s daughter. They have their own reasons.”

  His own smile faltered but he shored it up. “I daresay they do, and that it has something to do with sandwiches.” His own parents had gotten married while drunk on lust; he was rather pleased with himself that he wasn’t repeating their mistake. He preferred not to dwell on the fact that his own sobriety of thought owed more to his lack of interest in women than it did with any moral uprightness. That wasn’t the point.

  “Very droll,” she said.

  He kissed her hand, just a light brush of his lips over her cool skin, and tried not to notice Alice’s slight frown.

  Since it was already a terrible day and not much could make it worse, Phillip climbed the stairs to the schoolroom. He knew it would be empty but he wanted to see it, maybe to confirm that it was still precisely as bad as he remembered, no better and no worse. The schoolroom was tucked away in a dismal, north-facing corner of an upper story, grim even at noon but beyond dreary at night. When he pushed the door open, the hinges creaked angrily as if the door hadn’t been opened recently. Indeed, it had the damp and dusty odor of a room long unused. The moonlight shifted, illuminating an unintelligible scrawl on the chalkboard and dredging up every stray particle of shame and confusion he had experienced as a child in this room.

  For a brief moment he was glad the children were off making mischief in cherry trees or really anywhere else rather than this godforsaken tomb. But no, Phillip had his own particular reasons for which this room had been the setting of such misery. His children didn’t share any of that. They belonged in the damned schoolroom and he was beyond annoyed that they weren’t.

  He went back down to the library and took out his frustration on the brandy bottle, so he was mildly drunk and execrably lonely when his gaze strayed to the pair of portraits on the wall by the hearth. Even in oil paints, Caroline was almost tangibly competent. Her competence was all over the house, from the neat arrangement of chairs against the wall to the way the servants tapped p
recisely twice on the door before entering.

  Suddenly he resented Caroline for having died, which he realized was a ridiculous thing to do, but he did so anyway. He missed his boys in their matching short pants and his daughter with her neat plaits. And it was all Caroline’s fault. Bloody scarlet fever.

  Phillip wanted to beat his hands on the paneling of the wall. This was all wrong. This was not what he wanted. He was angry with Caroline for having died, he was angry with himself for not having returned sooner and not knowing what to do now that he was here, and he was angry with the bloody vicar for simply existing even though he knew none of this was the man’s fault. God, he had never missed Caroline so much in his life. Or, which was worse, in her own life. He could add taking her for granted to his list of sins.

  She had written to him, like any dutiful wife, and he had McCarthy read her letters aloud to him when they were alone in his cabin. He would dictate a reply for McCarthy to copy out. Christ, just thinking of it made him feel like he had somehow betrayed both of them at once.

  He wanted to go back to his ship so he didn’t have to think about any of this. He wanted to return to a time and a place far away when he could imagine his family safe and small on a tiny green island across the globe. Things were so much more manageable at a distance. But here, so close, he had to confront the fact that he didn’t belong; his presence at Barton Hall would do none of them any good, he feared. He would never do anyone any good; these were the thoughts that assailed him in his blackest moods.

  “Goddamn it, Caroline,” he said, looking at her portrait. It had been commissioned on their betrothal, a lavish present from her wealthy father. She had been one and twenty when they married, which seemed frightfully young to look so palpably self-assured. “What the hell would you have me do now?”

  Perhaps if he had been slightly less drunk he might have noticed that the door leading from the terrace had opened. As it was, he was bleary-eyed and didn’t notice anything until he heard the sound of a throat being cleared.

  Slowly, he turned his head and saw Sedgwick standing in the open doorway, one hand in his pocket and the other holding a lit cigarillo. Phillip could make out the burning tip, glowing red in the darkness.

  Vicars definitely weren’t supposed to smoke cigarillos. A pipe by the fireside, perhaps. But not a cigarillo and not out of doors. But vicars also weren’t supposed to look at other gentlemen the way he had caught Sedgwick looking at him over the breakfast table, so perhaps Sedgwick was simply a terrible vicar. Phillip found that thought comforting. He thought he could coexist with a terrible vicar better than with a godly one who would judge his failings and see all the ways he fell short as a father, a husband, a man.

  “Coming back from a midnight rendezvous?” How unvicarly. Phillip pulled out his watch to check it. It wasn’t even half past ten yet, so perhaps Sedgwick had only been sweeping out the church or whatever vicars did in their spare time. Disappointing. Also, how could it be so early? He had been in Kirkby Barton for less than thirty-six hours and it felt like approximately three weeks. Time was passing in a hellishly slow manner here. On board a ship, time was crucial. It was tied up with location, and distance, and speed, and all the other things that were paramount at sea and irrelevant standing still on land. He wasn’t moving, so perhaps the hands on the clock had just given up.

  “I saw the light on in the library and thought I’d see if you needed anything,” Sedgwick said.

  Phillip was about to tell him how presumptuous this sentiment was, but got distracted by the sight of the vicar taking a last puff on his cigarillo before dropping it to the ground and extinguishing it with his boot, the sound of leather on stone somehow as loud as a whip crack.

  Before Phillip could quite grasp what was happening, Sedgwick entered the room and came to stand before him. They were about the same height, and stood close enough for Phillip to discern the solemn expression on the vicar’s face. Sedgwick put a hand solidly on Phillip’s shoulder, and for a mad moment Phillip thought he was about to be kissed. The room, the whole world, was reeling crazily around except for that one point of contact where Sedgwick touched him, and there it burned.

  Chapter Five

  Ben knew straightaway that it had been a mistake to stand so close to the captain, and an even worse mistake to touch him.

  He was trying to do right by the man, trying to do his duty. Dacre was drunk, alone, and staring at his dead wife’s portrait. It was quite clearly the right thing to go to him, to be with him, to offer whatever small solace he could. Any clergyman and indeed any decent human being would recognize this; Ben had to listen to his conscience rather than the voice that warned him not to get closer to temptation.

  Because this man was temptation incarnate. If Ben had ever let himself imagine a man beside him during the furtive nighttime releases that he never thought of in the light of day, that man might have looked very much like the captain. Lean frame, wide mouth, eyes that seemed to know things Ben couldn’t even dream of.

  Feeling his face heat, Ben did his best to clear his mind of these unwelcome thoughts, to focus on duty and not on the heat emanating from Captain Dacre’s body, the solidity of the muscles under Ben’s hand.

  “I apologize for having assumed the worst of you when you arrived,” Ben managed. “Being here must dredge up all your grief.”

  The captain stepped backward, dislodging Ben’s hand. “Grief!” he sputtered. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. And you can sod right off with your priestly rubbish, so spare it for someone who cares.”

  Ben automatically glanced at the portrait of the late Mrs. Dacre. He had only seen her a few times before her death. He had buried her, just as he would soon bury Mr. Farleigh and just as he had escaped burying Alice. “It’s true that I’ve never had that kind of loss, but if you like I can—”

  “I’m not grieving my wife, you fool.” Captain Dacre sank into a chair. His words were slurred and Ben knew any confidence he was about to receive would be regretted when the captain sobered up. “I resent the hell out of her for dying, and it’s utter . . .” He gestured futilely with his hands before dropping them to the arms of the chair. “It’s utter shit that she won’t get to see the children grow up. But I’ve finished grieving her.”

  There was something about the way he put the stress on the last word that gave Ben pause. “But you are grieving,” he said.

  For a moment Ben thought the captain wouldn’t answer. “I lost my lieutenant fourteen months ago.”

  Ben didn’t know whether it was the precise measure of time or the magnitude of sorrow in the word lost that clued him in to exactly what Dacre was getting at. “I see,” he said.

  There was scorn in the captain’s eyes. “I don’t think you do, vicar.”

  Ben could have managed a platitude, something about friendship and loss. He could have extricated himself from this situation without giving up any of his own secrets. But that would be a betrayal of his own conscience; the right thing was to let the captain know that he wasn’t alone, that his secrets were shared. This, he told himself, was why he searched out the brandy decanter and poured himself a glass. Nobody liked to drink alone, he reasoned. This was why he settled into the chair opposite the captain’s. It was all to give the captain comfort and companionship, not because Ben desperately longed to talk to another man who shared his own . . . proclivities.

  “I do know,” Ben said after taking a sip of brandy. “I’m not unfamiliar with the way men can become close when living in proximity.” Oh, that was so primly euphemistic, so desperately inadequate, as the captain’s bleak laugh made clear. He tried again, measuring his words carefully. “When I was at school—”

  The captain cut him off with an impatient wave of his hand. “Every schoolboy knows about having the convenient sort of friendship where you toss one another off and never speak of it in the light of day.”

  That was indeed so close to Ben’s only experiences that he was momentarily speechless t
o hear it dismissed out of hand. He silently sipped his brandy and tried to look like a man who wasn’t perilously out of his depth in this conversation.

  “The worst of it is that maybe that’s all it was to McCarthy. Perhaps for him, during a long sea voyage, beggars couldn’t be choosers. But now he’s dead and I’ll never know.” Dacre looked up at him with barely focused eyes, as if only now recalling that he was not alone. “I’m very drunk and I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

  Ben couldn’t argue with that. “If you’ll pardon me for saying so, you already have.”

  Something like a smile whispered across Dacre’s face. “Point taken.”

  “You’re grieving your . . .” Friend was wrong. Lover seemed an invasion of privacy. But what else was there? “Your Lieutenant McCarthy,” he finally said. “He was important to you.” Ben knew how to have this conversation, this repetitive reassurance that grief can take its own time and shape. But that had been grief for parents, children, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives. Neat categories of valid relationships that everyone understood, phrases of belonging that could be etched concisely onto tombstones: beloved son, devoted wife. There were even rules for how to grieve people in each category, how many months to wear a black armband and whether one could dance. Captain Dacre didn’t have any of that, and Ben felt his heart twist in his chest at what that must cost him.

  “He was everything to me.” The captain spoke with such seriousness, such earnestness, that Ben was taken aback. He tried not to imagine what it would be like to hear someone speak of himself in those terms.

  “But you don’t know if he returned the sentiment.”

  Dacre examined the contents of his glass. “It’s worse than that. I let him believe that it was the sort of schoolboy arrangement you mentioned earlier. And then he died.” He took a slow sip of his brandy. “He died without ever hearing me give it a name.”