by Ruth Owen
Chapter Nineteen
Dr. Williams determined that none of the earl’s bones were broken, but his numerous injuries, the great loss of blood, and the threat of infection made him fearful that Trevelyan might not recover. Rina spent hours ministering to the earl’s cuts and bruises. She spent long nights sitting by his bedside, applying cool towels to his burning brow until the fever that accompanied his wounds had broken. She spent every waking moment praying for his recovery. And in the end, those prayers were answered.
On the evening of the third day Charles officially pronounced Edward out of danger—and promptly ordered Rina to her room to get a good night’s sleep. She fell into her bed fully clothed, too exhausted to undress, too happy to dream. She slept like the dead, and woke to the new day refreshed and filled with hope—until she caught sight of the stuffed bear Ginger sitting on her mantelpiece, a reminder of her deception. Too late, she realized that helping Edward battle for his life had only strengthened her love for him. She’d helped to save Edward’s life, but the deed might very well have cost her her heart.
Edward recovered rapidly, and the rest of the household began to recover as well. Lady Penelope stopped hovering around the earl’s rooms and began to preside over afternoon tea like the grande dame she was. The children’s laughter could be heard once again in the halls. Even stiff-backed Merriman lost his anxious pallor and went back to his usual grumbling. All the inhabitants at Ravenshold began to return to normal—with the singular exception of Lady Amy.
The girl remained oddly cool to both Rina and Dr. Williams, avoiding them both at every turn. Rina put it down to Amy’s continued concern for her brother, but there was no denying that she was stung by her cool indifference. Rina had gotten used to having a friend.
Edward’s recovery continued with astonishing speed. By the end of the week he was going stir-crazy in his room, and Charles—more out of self-preservation than medical judgment—gave leave for the earl to be taken out in the garden to enjoy some late spring sunshine. Toby had wheeled Lord Trevelyan out in the dowager’s chair, but the boy hadn’t been gone fifteen minutes before he came rushing back into the main hall, where Sabrina was arranging sprigs of lilacs in a Venetian glass vase. “Earl’s gone, miss.”
Rina stared at the agitated boy. “What do you mean, gone? Lord Trevelyan promised he wouldn’t leave the chair.”
“Can’t say what he did or didn’t promise. Alls I know is that he told me check out a sound he heard behind the hedge. ‘Maybe a poacher,’ his lordship said. I rounded the hedge but couldn’t find nothin’. When I got back he was vanished, right like that bird in the magician’s act.”
“He will wish he was a bird by the time I get through with him,” Rina muttered as she grabbed her shawl and headed for the door. “Toby, tell Merriman what has happened, and to send out the footmen and stablehands as quickly as he can. We must find the earl before he endangers his recovery.” Or meets with one of the “accidents” that have plagued the estate.
Sabrina had no trouble finding the empty wheelchair—the trouble came when she looked around, and saw that Edward could have chosen half a dozen paths to make his escape. Breathing an oath no lady would have uttered, she put her hands on her hips and swiveled around, searching for some clue to the earl’s whereabouts.
The she heard it. The far-off hush of the sea.
Sabrina found Lord Trevelyan leaning against a cairn of stones, staring out at the sea. The afternoon wind was brisk and strong, and had blown his dark hair into a wild tangle. Nevertheless he watched the churning water below with the intensity that marked his nature, standing so still that it seemed as if he were made of the same melancholy stone as the cliffs. He looked like a dark angel, magnificent and terrible, isolated from the men he walked among and the heaven he’d once called his home.
Unconsciously, Rina puller her shawl closer to her throat to fight the chilling emptiness she felt in him. Her heart constricted as she realized how desperately she wanted to end his loneliness…then she caught sight of the sling on his left arm. Her fanciful thoughts came thudding back to earth. Angels did not suffer from sprained wrists, or have their bruised ribs trussed up in bandages, or have a vicious gash on their forehead that had nearly cost them their lives. Magnificent or not, he was still recovering from a dangerously close brush with death. Rina hoisted her skirt and scrambled up the rocks, determined to shepherd the very mortal earl back to bed where he belonged.
He did not turn around as she approached, but he must have heard her. Still staring at the ocean, he spoke. “I knew you would find me. I just did not expect you to find me so quickly.”
After a week of tending to him as a bedridden patient, she’d forgotten how the sound of his voice could make her heart beat faster. “I should not have had to find you at all. You promised Dr. Williams that you would not leave the wheelchair.”
His mouth edged up. “Charles is an old woman. Besides, if I had stayed in that chair, I would have lost an opportunity to make you angry. And you are quite beautiful when you are angry.”
His slow, devilish glance slid across her skin like a caress. Her heart thundered against her ribs with such force that she was amazed he could not hear it. “Do not try to flummox me, my lord. You are not well enough for so much activity. And even if you were, you should not be out here alone, so close to the cliff’s edge. The villain who sabotaged your mine is still very much at large. And we already know from Sarah’s accident that he has moved at least some of the red markers—”
“I need no markers to tell my way.” He waved his hand as if to claim the vast landscape of emerald sea, melancholy cliffs, and endless sky for his own. ”These are Trevelyan cliffs. My cliffs. I learned them before I learned my ABCs, and I can assure you that the rocks beneath our feet will be standing sure and strong long after I am gone to dust. And as for climbing up here…I have done a deal of thinking this last week, and I promised myself that the moment I rose from my sickbed, I would come to this spot.”
“Coming to this spot will surely put you right back into your sickbed,” she replied tartly. “Why do such a thing?”
“To visit ghosts.”
Even in the afternoon sun his chill words sent a midnight shiver down her spine. “There are no such things as ghosts. The climb has overtaxed you. We should return to the house.”
She stepped away, but he made no move to either answer or follow her. Instead, he turned his gaze once more to the sea. The only sounds were the low howl of the wind, and the eerie cries of the wheeling gulls. In that moment Rina could almost believe in ghosts. But no ghost could be more alone than the man who stood with his back to the cliffs, staring out at the empty sea.
He was shutting her out—she could see it in the hard line of his jaw and the coldness of his gaze. Whatever he was going through, he seemed determined to go through it alone. He hid so much behind his rugged face, so much loneliness, so much pain. She remembered what he’d told her in the nursery—that he did not deserve the love of his family. He’d warned her once that if she dug too deeply into his past, she might not like what she found. But there was a way to ease his pain, she needed to find it. She had so little time left with him.
“Edward. Please, do not shut me out.”
For the space of several heartbeats he said nothing. Then, as suddenly as a tern diving into the waves, he asked, “Did your parents love each other?”
The question surprised her so much that she answered with the truth. “Deeply. Papa said my mother meant everything to him, and I know she felt the same. They were each other’s lives.”
Once again his mouth edged up in a smile, but this time there was no warmth in it. “Then you were fortunate. My father loved wealth and power above all things, and my mother reserved her affection for fashionable gowns and equally fashionable friends. If they held any regard for each other, or for me or my sister, I never witnessed it. I grew up believing that love was something which existed only in fairy tales and flowery poetry. Unt
il I met Isabel.”
Oddly she felt no jealousy at his statement, just sadness for a love gone tragically wrong. She stood facing him with her hands clasped tightly in front of her, and prayed that she would be wise enough not to betray his trust. “I have heard she was very beautiful.”
His harsh smile softened at the memory. “That she was. But there was more to her than mere beauty. She had a light about her, a brilliance and generosity that drew people to her. I met her at Almack’s in London. I’d gone to the city for business and was browbeaten by an old friend of Grandmother’s to attend the assembly. I had no time for parties—my father had died only a few months before and I was still learning how to manage all his holdings. I was not planning to fall in love, but when I saw her standing at the edge of the crowd, as delicate and golden as a storybook princess…well, I was but one-and-twenty, and had spent most of my life among the gray moors of Cornwall. Isabel, and London seemed as distant from the world I knew as part the dust of the earth are from the stars.
Rina glanced at the landscape around them. She had learned to love the bleak, wild magnificence of the land, but she could easily imagine a serious young Edward being seduced by the glitter and pageanty of London. “You cannot blame yourself for falling in love with a beautiful young girl. Whatever happened is in the past. The wrong she did to you is over.”
“And what of the wrong I did to her?” he asked softly. “What about the fact that, more than anyone else, I am responsible for her death.”
His words were as quiet as a prayer, but they shook Sabrina with the force of an earthquake. “I…I do not believe it. Even if you were to swear to me it was true, I would not believe it.”
He lifted his hand and brushed his fingers against her cheek. “No, you would not. If you believed in someone, I suspect you’d argue with Saint Peter himself over their salvation. You are stubborn like that—infuriatingly, maddeningly, wonderfully stubborn. But Isabel wasn’t. She was delicate and kind, but she was not strong. And this land requires strength to survive.”
He lifted his gaze, staring past her shoulder to the sea. “We were happy for many years. Then, shortly after David’s birth, she began to accuse me of losing interest in her. At first her fears were small and I was easily able to convince her that they were groundless. But as the months passed, and my business concerns required me to spend more time away from Ravenshold, she became more and more obsessed with my absences. She became convinced that I was having an affair.”
“Could you not have taken her with you?” Rina asked.
A flicker of warmth sparked in the earl’s eyes, but it was gone in an instant. “A sensible solution, Miss Winthrope. I suggested it to Isabel, to show her that her fears were groundless. But David was too young to travel and she would not leave him. She was a wonderful mother to both David and Sarah, and I loved her all the more for it. Yet with each passing day her belief in my infidelity grew stronger. Nothing I said made any difference. Her constant accusations made our life together intolerable. In the end I began to seek out business affairs that would take me away from her for weeks at a time. I put gold in the place of my lost love, and sought wealth with the passion my wife no longer wanted. I was one of the most successful men in England—and I felt every bit as alone as I had when I was a boy growing up on the moors. Then, when I was in York—”
All at once Edward winced, and pressed his hand to his ribs. Damn, Rina thought, inwardly cursing herself for getting so wrapped up in his story that she’d forgotten that he was just out of the sickbed. “My lord, you should not be standing, much less climbing down these rocks. The men should be nearby. I’ll get help—”
“No!” The earl’s arm lashed out, capturing her wrist with a strength that belied his pale countenance. “Let me finish. Let there finally be an end to it.”
Sighing, he leaned back against the rock wall, as if some part of him could draw on the strength of the stones. “I was in Yorkshire when I received a letter from Isabel. She said that she had discovered that she’d been wrong about my infidelities, and said that she had a secret to share with me. She said…she said that she loved me—that she had never stopped loving me, even when she believed I had been unfaithful. I felt as if I’d sprouted wings. I finished up my business in record time and started for home before the week was out. But when I arrived home I found…well, you know what I found. Isabel’s letter had been a sham. My wife had left me. My preoccupation with business had driven her into the arms of another man, and ultimately to her death.”
Rina shook her head. “It was not your fault.”
“It was no one else’s.” he fired back. “Her final letter to me might have been a lie, but my neglect of her wasn’t. I should have stayed at Ravenshold, should have tried harder to convince her of my faithfulness. I should have moved heaven and earth to prove my love, instead of running off like some callow lad to nurse my wounded pride. She deserted me, but I deserted her first. God, it must have killed her to leave the children, but she did it to escape me. I did not think she could hate me that much, not when she’d once loved me so dearly.
“After she left, everything fell apart. I didn’t give a damn about my business. I could not stay at Ravenshold, which had been our home. I avoided my children because I saw her in them, accusing me through their eyes. God, some of the locals even claimed they saw her ghost walking these cliffs. I had to get away—as far away from the life I’d known as possible. I sank myself in senseless pleasures and debaucheries. I sought out women who asked nothing of me but my coin. I’m not proud of what I did, but I thought I had nothing left inside me, nothing left to give to anyone. Sometimes I felt as if I were the one who had died, not Isabel. Sometimes, God help me, I wished that I had.”
Rina knew that emptiness. She’d seen it in her father’s eyes after her mother died, a hollow, directionless emotion. Grief over her mother’s untimely death had eaten Daniel Murphy alive. Both men had felt they’d betrayed women who’d loved them. Edward was younger than her father, and had a strength of character the gambler had never possessed. But if guilt over Isabel continued to eat at Edward’s soul, he would end up just as lost and wasted as her father.
She reached out and curled her fingers around his. “I cannot know what was in Isabel’s mind and heart. No one can. But I do know that, whether she walks on these cliffs or in the hills in heaven, she knows the truth. She knows you were not unfaithful to her. She knows that you loved her. And the woman you loved would not want you to waste your life, or your children’s lives, grieving for a mistake she’d made.”
At first she didn’t know if her words had reached him. Then she saw a spark flare in his gaze, the beginning of the healing she had never seen in her father’s eyes. With his loving family to support him, Rina knew that eventually his heart would heal.
A lump rose in her throat. By the time it did, she’d be nothing more than a distasteful memory to him of a clever, conniving thief. If he thought of her at all, it would be with disgust and revulsion. His heart will heal, but what about mine?
“Prudence, are you crying?”
“‘Tis the wind. It blew something in my eye,” she temporized as she brushed away a hopeless tear. Foolish, Rina-lass. Wanting cards that haven’t been dealt to you. She pasted a bright smile on her face. “You’ve been out and about long enough, my lord. You should return to bed.”
“Not just yet.”
She heard the rough edge in his voice, but by then it was too late. With a single move he shrugged off his sling and tugged her into his arms, wrapping her in an embrace so intimate it made her gasp. “Edward, your wounds!”
“Hang my wounds. I’m strong enough for this. God knows I’ve been dreaming about it long enough.” And without another word he lowered his mouth to hers.
The cliffs and sea faded into nothing as she tumbled into the fiery magic that he spun inside her. She reached up and buried her hands in his hair, pulling him closer, losing herself in sweet passions that bubbled through he
r like fine champagne.
“Christ, what you do to me,” he groaned against her mouth. “Ever since that first day, when I found a red-haired vixen sprawled on Grandmother’s drawing room floor.”
“I was not sprawled,” she murmured.
He laughed, and started to feather swift, searing kisses along her throat. “Sprawled or not, you were a picture. I wanted you from the first, but I did not know then that I’d want even more. So much more.”
He took her face between his hands and stared down at her with a tenderness that shattered and remade her with every heartbeat. “I knew you were brave when you rescued Sarah. Yet when you risked your life to come down in the mine for my sake, I knew I’d found a treasure beyond price. I loved Isabel—I want you to understand that. But it was a boy’s love. Not once, not even in those first heady days of our courtship, did I experience even a portion of what I feel for you.”
He lifted his glance to the cliffs and the sea. “I know this isn’t the way a woman imagines it. There should be moonlight, and roses. You should be wearing a white dress, and I should be gallantly going down on one knee. But moonlight is hours away, and my ribs ache like the devil. I could not bend over, much less kneel. I can offer you none of the appropriate trappings, but I can offer you this.”
