by Lily Maxton
Love was a force to be reckoned with. It wasn’t a thing to be taken lightly, or toyed with, or revoked at a whim. Its presence was felt, and its dearth. Always, always, the lack of it was missed.
Love made all the difference in the world.
Robert’s share of it had been secure, and Ian’s had not.
So Robert couldn’t even blame him. Not really. None of the things that had happened to Ian were Ian’s fault. If Ian had needed that wall around his heart to survive, who was Robert to try and tear it down?
And Robert was probably an idiot, too. Because it wasn’t as though this particular obstacle was a fallen log—it was more like a jagged boulder, and it was because of Robert that it was there in the first place.
And maybe Ian’s form of brutal honesty was more realistic. It was quite possible that Hale would never find his bollocks and Robert was doomed to fail.
And right now, with the image of Ian walking away from him still fresh in his mind, he could barely bring himself to care. His heart hurt, and his head ached, and he was tired, and what was the point of any of it, if he couldn’t have Ian when it was done?
All the wishing in all the wells of all the world wouldn’t bring Ian back to him. All the falling stars in all the sky wouldn’t be enough.
“’S no good…” he muttered. It’s no good without you.
“I have no idea what you’re mumbling about,” Georgina said.
“Sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too, but this is for your own good. Someday, you’ll thank me.”
That was when he felt the shock of cold water, all over his head. He spluttered, standing up so abruptly that he knocked the chair over. His hair was plastered to his skull and trickles of cool water dripped down his neck and into his shirt.
“Fuck! Georgina! What in the bleeding—”
“Don’t swear at me,” she said calmly. “Are you sober?”
“No!” he exclaimed. “Now I’m just drunk and half drowned.”
“Half drowned? Really?” She rolled her eyes. “I’ve prepared some tea. Drink it.” She pushed a blue-and-white teacup toward him across the surface of the table.
She’d made it strong and sweet, the way he preferred it. Robert sipped at the tea until his head cleared a bit, but it didn’t make him feel better.
His thoughts turned to John and Alice. He wondered if she was disappointed in her cousin. In her former best friend. He wondered if she missed him. He wondered if she would be happy with Hale, or if it would just be one disappointment after another. A lifetime of small hurts.
“I give up, George,” Robert muttered. He’d thought saying the words would be a relief, but he only felt like he might cry. He swallowed down the lump in his throat, and with it, the stinging pressure at the back of his eyes. “I have no business playing with other people’s hearts.”
Georgina sat down across from him. She didn’t pretend she didn’t know what he was talking about. “But…you’re in love with someone else, aren’t you?”
His head jerked up. She met his gaze calmly, eyes glittering in the candlelight, and he couldn’t read her expression. Did she know? Did she care? Did she, like Ian’s parents, think he was unnatural? He couldn’t imagine Georgina ever saying such a thing to him, but he supposed there was always a chance—one never truly knew the darkest, most hateful parts of someone’s heart until they were revealed.
But he could glean no clue into her thoughts, so he left it. “It doesn’t matter. I can’t push Hale into something like this, anyway. What kind of marriage would that be? I doubt it would make Alice very happy.”
“You’re always worrying about everyone else,” she said, and she didn’t make it sound like a good thing. “What about you? What about your happiness?”
“My happiness is…out of reach.”
He closed his eyes briefly, saw Ian’s back. A shut door in front of him. He had a feeling that image was going to haunt him for the rest of his life.
“I am sure you are right.”
Robert blinked. “What?”
“Your happiness is out of reach because you’ve given up. What would Constable Whitley say? He never gives up, even when he’s fumbling around with no idea of what to do.”
Robert blinked harder, if that was possible. “What?”
“Constable Whitley…you wrote him, did you not? Maybe you should take your own advice.”
“How did you know?”
“I know everything,” she said serenely. “I’m omnipotent.” At his stunned look, she sighed. “I’m observant, Robert. You should try it sometime.”
And then, without further ado, she went to the bookshelves, grabbed a volume, and left. Robert was staring at the doorway, still a little stunned, when Hale entered the library. He was gripping a candelabra so tightly his knuckles were white, and he didn’t even seem to notice Robert. For a moment, he stood by the bookshelves, staring off into space, looking rather despondent.
Well, look at that, they did have something in common. They were both utterly miserable. If that wasn’t a solid basis for a friendship, Robert didn’t know what was.
“Hale,” he called out.
The younger man startled.
“Would you like some whisky?”
Hale hesitated, and then nodded. There was another bottle in the sideboard. Robert poured him some. Then he poured himself a glass of crisp, clear water from a Highland spring—Georgina was right; he could only wallow in alcohol for so long before he started to feel bad about himself—and then took everything to the low table in front of the settee.
He lifted his water glass. “Slàinte mhath,” he muttered, a Gaelic toast to good health.
Hale sat at the other end of the settee and sipped at his glass, coughing a little. Robert didn’t comment.
“Whisky reminds me of the Highlands,” Robert said. By which he meant it reminded him of Ian. The stars and the cool night air and the taste of fire and peat smoke on his tongue.
Hale just looked at him, eyes watering. “I feel like I’ve just consumed living flame.”
Robert had nearly forgotten about Hale’s dramatic turns of phrase. “That’s how it’s supposed to feel.”
“I think I prefer wine.”
Robert had to resist the urge to snatch the glass away from him. Why should he waste good whisky on someone who didn’t like it? Ian wouldn’t have preferred wine.
He took a deep breath.
Ian was not here.
Ian was not here.
For a while they sat in complete silence, except for the crackle of embers from the fire. But at some point the whisky must have given Hale some courage, because he leaned forward intently.
“Have you ever been in love?”
“Yes,” Robert said, not elaborating.
“How do you know?”
Robert blinked. “How do I know what?”
“That you’re in love?”
“I’m not sure, exactly. I think one just knows,” he said.
Hale looked supremely distressed by this answer. “But in the poems it’s all sweeping gestures and bold declarations, and fire and despair and elation—”
“It’s not like the poems.”
“Then what’s it like?”
“It’s quieter. Calmer. More enduring. There can be despair and elation, but it’s so much more than that. It’s all the little moments, together. It’s…laughing with each other, about the stupidest of things. It’s being able to talk to them, about anything, late into the night. It’s sitting side by side and not minding the silence. It’s the way you feel when they look at you. Simple things. Little things. That together, somehow, mean everything.”
Hale was silent for a while, contemplating this. He poured some more whisky. “But how do you know that you will not lose it?”
“You don’t.”
Hale jolted and nearly spilled his whisky. “Then what is the point?” he cried.
“Love is a risk. It is always a risk. No one knows what’s goin
g to happen. But you take your chances, you make your bets, you roll the dice, because that person and all those little moments with them are worth the risk. Because having them, even for a short while, is better than never having them at all.”
“I don’t know if I’m strong enough for that,” Hale whispered.
“Then it becomes a certainty—you’ll lose them,” Robert said. He tilted his head against the back of the settee and looked up at the ceiling contemplatively. “But the thing about the heart, Hale, is that it’s resilient. It can be bruised and battered and broken, and it survives. It can carry you through, if you let it.”
“You are very wise.”
Robert started to laugh, and it was a bitter, harsh-edged thing. “I’m only a few years older than you. And I’m just as lost as anyone.”
“Maybe you should roll the dice again,” Hale suggested.
Robert lifted his head. He was thinking about what Georgina had said about giving up, and he was thinking about how Ian must have felt when he’d realized Robert had agreed to marry Miss Worthington. He hadn’t even heard it from Robert, because Robert had been too much of a coward to tell him—he’d simply been working on his cottage, looked up, and there they were, strolling along like the almost-married couple they were.
Ian, who’d already been abandoned once.
Ian, who probably expected to be abandoned again.
Ian, Ian, Ian.
God, what an idiot Robert had been.
“Hale,” he said suddenly.
“Yes?”
“It’s not too late. To say the things you should have said. To do what you should have done. It’s not too late. Not yet.”
The settee creaked, and Hale set his glass down with a clank. “Thank you, Mr. Townsend.”
After Hale retired, Robert returned the whisky and glasses to the sideboard. He was walking down the corridor toward his bedchamber when he caught sight of a small shadow, slinking along the wall. A black cat slowly took shape, approaching Robert warily.
“Oh, thank God,” Robert said. “I thought I was going to have to tell Annabel that I lost you.”
Willoughby, in a display of affection that Robert had never seen him give anyone except Annabel, and, on occasion, Ian, bumped his head against Robert’s leg.
“I’m sorry I scared you,” he muttered. Robert leaned down to pet the cat and received a half-hearted warning hiss in response, so he stopped. He thought of Ian’s fondness for cats and laughed. The sound didn’t contain much joy, but it wasn’t hollow, either.
He didn’t know if Hale would finally work up the courage to tell Alice how he felt. He didn’t know if Ian, who was so good at pushing people away, would pull Robert back, even if that happened.
He didn’t know.
But he did know that he had to try.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ian went to the outbuilding. The night was cloudy, but eventually the shadows broke and stars began to emerge. He found the constellations, those guideposts in the sky, those friends from when he’d had nothing, and he shaped their names with his mouth.
But peace didn’t come. The quiet didn’t come.
No matter how long he sat, no matter how many stars he named, his heart was still restless.
It had never happened to him before. The stars had never rejected him. They’d never failed to give him the constancy he longed for.
Until this moment.
Which was when Ian wondered if he’d made the worst mistake of his life when he’d walked away from Robert Townsend.
When he saw the man in question from a distance the next day, at the stables, his chest hurt so badly that he thought he might be dying, and he wondered again.
And then he had a dream—he was in the Highlands, farther north, with Robert beside him as they approached his family’s cottage. He passed the bend in the road, looked up. The cottage was gone. Nothing was left. No one. It was as if his family had never existed.
“You waited too long,” Robert said in a far-off voice. “These things don’t get any easier, you know. They only grow worse.”
“I didna mean to. I didna—” But he broke off suddenly. The silence was so loud that it hurt his ears. It was like a great white nothingness, a yawning chasm, and he knew. He knew before he turned that Robert was gone.
He turned anyway.
He was alone. No one else, nothing, for miles.
The sky was gray, and the grass, and the wind howled.
And in that moment, the land that he loved, that was a part of his bones, his heart, his soul, seemed so incredibly bleak that a part of him hated it.
He woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.
And all his fears were laid out before him, one by one. That he wasn’t enough. That his family had rejected him not because of a fault that lay with them, but because Ian simply wasn’t worth it. That he would end up so alone and so jaded that even the things that brought him joy would turn bitter.
The moors. The sea. The stars.
His memories of Robert.
They were all entwined now. He couldn’t think of one without the other. Pointing out constellations to Robert. Smelling the brine on the air. The dips and rises of the land as they walked back to Llynmore, side by side.
He’d been happy, then. They’d both been happy.
Robert had seeped into his bones and heart and soul as surely as the Highlands had. And just like the Highlands, the other man was an inextricable part of him. He was not something that could be carved out or forgotten.
And even if he could, he wouldn’t want to. No matter what happened, even if Robert married Miss Worthington, Ian didn’t want to carve him out or forget him. He didn’t want to succumb to bitterness, like he had with his parents, because that sort of bitterness, that sort of anger—it might have protected him, it might have been his only hope of survival at the time, but it tainted everything. There’d been good moments with his family, there’d been laughter, but he could no longer remember those moments clearly, like a dream that fled on waking, because the worst moments had overshadowed them, had grown, over the years, stronger than them.
That wasn’t how he wanted it to be, with Robert.
He’d rather have one small part of him than nothing. He’d rather have this past handful of days with him than no time at all.
If love inevitably came with some amount of pain, then he would take both. He would take the full measure.
Coming to a decision, he sank back into his straw mattress.
The peace that had eluded him finally settled over him once more, and this time, it didn’t feel like something he had to find in bits and pieces, in things outside himself; it felt enduring, secure, something that could not be shaken.
It felt like it came from within.
…
Robert woke with a start. The light filtering in was still the soft, pink light of dawn, and Robert, lying on his stomach, was about to bury his head in the pillow and go back to sleep when he heard the shouting that had awoken him.
Good God. He wasn’t even surprised at this point. He made a vow to never have guests again.
His door burst open and crashed against the wall.
“This is all your doing!”
It was Worthington. Somehow, this didn’t surprise him, either.
“Good morning to you, too,” Robert muttered, pushing himself up. He stayed in bed, though, with the linen sheets pulled up. He slept naked in the summer, and he didn’t feel like showing off nature’s gifts to the entire household.
When he turned over and finally glimpsed Worthington’s face, he saw that it was bright red.
“Are you quite well?” he asked, worried the other man was going to have an apoplexy in his bedchamber.
“No. No, I am not well.” He held a scrap of parchment in his hand, which he proceeded to hurl at Robert. But hurling paper was a bit of a feat, and it tumbled down as gently as a leaf into Robert’s outstretched hand.
He skimmed it.
Then his eyes widened.
Then he reread it, just to be sure he wasn’t in the midst of some sort of fever dream.
Mr. Townsend,
After we spoke, I could not sleep. For hours, I thought about what you said, your words torturing my mind and my soul, and finally, I came to a conclusion. I think that you are right. About finding someone worth the risk. About the heart being resilient. About all the small moments that make up a grand love. I feel strong enough now.
I thank you for your parting words, for they did help, but what struck me the most was seeing how sad you looked when you said you were just as lost as anyone. I feared that I, too, might end up as sad and lost as you, and I realized that I couldn’t let that happen.
Robert stopped to snort at this. He’d looked so pathetic he’d even shocked the timid Hale into taking a risk. He supposed he should be grateful he was good for something, at least.
But I thank you from the depths of my soul. Please don’t be angry with me.
John Hale
There was another message, just below it, in a different hand.
Mr. Townsend,
What John has failed to mention is that as you read this, we will be headed to town to be married by the local blacksmith. I hope you won’t take this personally. I think you would have made a wonderful husband—I still do—but matters of the heart do not always work out as cleanly as one would wish.
In case you are uncertain about the prudence of our match, I would also like to note an occurrence that you missed when you were out at the stables. My father was ignoring me, as he has been since the incident, but this time, John stepped in. He told him that he didn’t deserve to be my father, and that he had never appreciated me as he should, and that he thought my father was a fool.
I have never seen my father so quiet before.
(It was glorious.)
Yours,
Alice Worthington
As Robert smiled a bit over the last part, another small commotion took place, and suddenly the letter was yanked from his grasp by Miss Hale. He realized that, just like the night he’d been caught with Miss Worthington, her father’s bellowing had drawn everyone else to the room. He pulled the linen sheet up higher, but no one seemed to be paying him much attention.
