The Darkest of Shadows

by Lisse Smith

  “Something like that.” Lawrence smiled. “Don’t try and tell me that you haven’t been following the activities of Monterey Enterprises.”

  “I would never attempt to lie to you in that manner, my boy. And besides, you know perfectly well that I monitor the movements of all the big players in the business world. It’s just an added bonus that you happen to be one of them.”

  Lawrence laughed. “At least it makes it easier to catch up. There’s not much to tell, in that case.”

  “There is always much to tell, my friend—but that usually doesn’t come out until we have both indulged in a bit too much of my favorite old whiskey.”

  “That is true.” Lawrence was totally relaxed in this man’s company, something that was so rare for him that I instantly warmed toward William. I would give him a chance, if only because he gave so much to Lawrence just by being his friend.

  Lawrence and William caught up over dinner, a meal that was served in a surprisingly small dining room, which I was sure wasn’t the only dining room in the old house. But it was sufficient for a more intimate dinner, which this was.

  I tried to stay out of the general conversation, not only because it allowed William and Lawrence the time to catch up, but because I found it was fascinating to listen to them converse with each other. They were so similar, so familiar, and so easy in each other’s company that I couldn’t help smiling as I listened. Here was someone who knew Lawrence, someone else who wasn’t scared of him.

  When dinner was over, I excused myself from their company. Not only was I genuinely tired, but I could see that they wanted to continue their talk, probably into the early hours of the morning, and they deserved privacy for that. Besides, I was sure that I would be spending a great deal of time in company with William over the next week. I would allow them this time without my presence.

  “Are you sure?” Lawrence led me into our room, one that he found with a familiarity that assured me this was the room that he used every time that he stayed with William.

  “Go,” I encouraged him. “I can see how much he means to you. Go and have tonight with him.”

  Lawrence smiled, a beautiful and intimate gesture just for me. “Thank you, Lilly,” he said, his arms wrapping around me.

  I smiled back and kissed him, a long, satisfying kiss. “Wake me when you come up,” I reminded him, and moments later I was alone in one of the most beautiful rooms I had ever seen, in possibly one of the most expensive and grand houses in the world.

  Hadn’t I come a long way in life!

  Seventeen

  Lawrence slept late the following morning, and considering he hadn’t crawled into bed until close to dawn, I wasn’t holding it against him. He rarely got to sleep in; our usual lifestyle was far too busy for this type of activity. But I still wasn’t venturing out of this room without him. Even though I thought he might be right, that it was possible that I would actually like William, I wasn’t about to chance running into him on the first day without Lawrence as a buffer.

  So I dozed beside him for most of the morning, his gentle snoring a comforting, familiar sound in the strangeness of the huge room. It was every inch a regency bedroom; the bed itself was massive and had a canopy that stretched over the bed with dark blue drapes falling softly around the head board. The furniture was old and had a slightly fragile quality to it that I knew to be false. For it to have survived as long as it had assured me that it would survive for a while yet.

  I was thankful it had been renovated to fit with the twenty-first century, and the bathroom had every convenience imaginable—something I had discovered to my delight the night before. This morning, I was waiting for Lawrence before I made use of its facilities. The shower was made for two, and I had plans for such a large accommodating space.

  By the time Lawrence finally woke, with a bit of encouragement from me, and after we made spectacular use of the twin showers, it was lunchtime before we found ourselves making our way back through the house.

  “So what exactly are the plans for this weeklong stay?” I asked. Neither of us was in a hurry; in fact, it was strange, but from the moment that we got in the car to drive here, it seemed that Lawrence was a different person. If I wasn’t mistaken, I would have sworn that he was in holiday mode. Calm, relaxed, and at peace.

  “I have no plans,” he admitted with a grin. “Absolutely nothing, and I find the novelty of it amusing.”

  “I just bet you do,” I joked. Then a thought occurred to me. “When was the last time that you had a real holiday?” I asked. “One where you turned the phone off and did absolutely nothing.”

  “I don’t understand the question.” He gave me a sly grin, and I understood that he was telling me that he had never done that before, had never turned off his world to that extent. This was indeed a novelty for him. On the drive up to William’s estate, Lawrence had made arrangements with Allan to have all calls go through him; it was only for something of the utmost urgency, such as someone dying, that Allan would call Lawrence. Both of our phones were off; the only contact anyone had with us was a landline in William’s office, and only Allan had that number. I wondered how much the world would change in the week that we weren’t part of it.

  “Good morning, Will,” Lawrence greeted him, when we walked quietly into the same room where we had met him the night before. I was pretty certain that this would be where we spent most of our time.

  “You’re alive?” William responded from where he sat at his desk. “I was about to send out a search party to see if you got lost somewhere.”

  “Hardly.” Lawrence laughed. “I knew exactly where I was, thank you.”

  “Well, now that you’ve finally decided to grace me with your presence, you must be starving.” He rose from behind the desk and crossed to where we stood. “Come. Let’s have lunch, and then I’d like to take this lovely young lady on a tour of my house.”

  Lunch was easy, easier than I expected. William and Lawrence seemed to have had enough time alone last night to catch up personally, which mean that today, they were all interested in me.

  What did I think of the house, the estate, the weather, the economy? What was working for Lawrence like? Where did we meet? How long had we been together? Where was I from?

  The list of questions was endless, and most of them I answered honestly, all except the personal questions; those I avoided, and I was thankful that Lawrence didn’t push me in that regard. He actually helped to steer the conversation around the areas he knew I wouldn’t want to talk about.

  After lunch, William took me on a tour, with Lawrence following casually in our wake. William loved the house. He knew everything about it, every nook and cranny, and he told me stories that had me reassessing any desire to go wandering the halls at night by myself. It was stunning, intriguing, and intimidating all at the same time.

  “My turn,” Lawrence announced, when we were walking down a back hall of the house. He grabbed my hand in his and, with a nod to William, we slipped out a door near us. I found myself outside in the sunlight.

  “Where are we going?” I asked in surprise.

  “I want to show you the parts of the estate that I love the most.”

  We walked hand in hand around the side of the house and headed out into the grounds. They were as spectacular as the house and maintained in a very formal fashion. We slowly meandered our way through the grounds; every now and then, Lawrence would stop and point something out to me, or we would pause and look at the sight spread before us: the hills in the distance or a pond with ducks floating happily over its surface.

  He showed me a small creek that wound through the estate; apparently people came here just to fish in that river. Good on them, was my thought. I wasn’t into fishing.

  “This,” he announced, as we stopped before a single old white timber gate. It was about head height and was the only opening in a low wall covered totally in beautiful climbing roses that stretched over and around the arch that framed the gate. “This
is my garden. This is where I come when I need time, when I’m not sure what to do, when I don’t have answers. I come here.”

  He pushed open the gate and stepped back so that I could take in the view through the small opening. It was nothing like the rest of the property. It was a small, walled country cottage garden and had that randomness to it, the overgrown cluttered planting that was characteristic of that style of garden. It was beautiful.

  I stepped through the opening and silently walked slowly down the path toward the center of the garden, where an old oak tree dominated the space. Swaying gently from one of the large strong limbs was an old rope swing. A single seat of worn timber waited for someone, anyone, to share its secrets.

  It waited for me. I ran my fingers gently down the rope and found it to be as smooth as silk. So many hands, years of fingers grasping the rope had smoothed the surface into a cable of soft rope. My gaze turned to Lawrence and found him waiting a few meters behind me, watching, calm and unworried.

  I took the seat that was offered, lowering myself to rest against the old timber, knowing that it would support me, knowing that I was safe.

  I closed my eyes and pushed off with my feet. Holding the rope in both hands, I leaned all the way back and allowed myself to give in to the freedom of the movement. The air rushing past, then the return movement when my hair rushed forward to tangle over my face, the continuous, repetitive motion of the swing, the sounds of the garden, the quiet, the contentment…I could see how easy it would be to think in this place, how wonderful to have such a haven.

  Close the gate, and you could be alone in the world. No interruptions, no disturbances, and no other living humans. I could stay here forever.

  I squealed with joy, a soft merry sound that seemed to belong in this place. I took a huge leap from the swing and catapulted myself into the air. I wanted to feel something, and something caught me. Moments after my feet made a precarious landing in the soft ground, Lawrence’s arms wrapped around me and steadied me back to reality.

  I smiled up into his beautiful, calm face. My hands stretched up and wrapped around his face, a face that I had come to recognize was special to me. “I love it,” I assured him, and then pulled his face down for a kiss. “It’s beautiful. You’re beautiful.” I think it was the first time that I had ever told him exactly how I saw him; it must have been, because his face clouded, first in surprise and then in hunger, and then the kiss turned into something so much more.

  “This was Elizabeth’s garden,” he told me later. We both sat on a timber seat against the back wall of the garden.

  “Elizabeth was William’s wife?” I remembered him saying something about her before.

  He nodded. “They were genuinely in love,” he said. “She adored him and he her. But she didn’t cope well with the world we live in. She wasn’t strong enough. William was away a lot; he traveled, and his headquarters were in London, but this was where Lizzie was truly happy; so she spent most of her time here without him. She didn’t like London or the people William dealt with; the life was too intense for her. She was a shy person at heart. They were childhood sweethearts, but she didn’t want the life he led.”

  “That sounds like a lonely existence.”

  “It was. For both of them.” Lawrence sighed, his fingers playing with mine in his lap. “William loved her, totally, but he also loved his company, and he fought to find a balance between the two.”

  “Did he ever succeed?”

  “He has the balance now, but it’s too late for Elizabeth.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She had cancer. Bone cancer. It was all relatively quick. She was diagnosed in June, and by December she was gone. William was devastated, totally lost, and he blamed himself for a long time. He closed up Parkgrove and refused to come back here. He immersed himself in work to the exclusion of everything else, and he came very close to losing his own life as a result.”

  A chill settled in my chest. I understood that reality. “What happened?”

  “I wouldn’t let him go,” Lawrence had tears in his eyes, something I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen with him. “I went to his office and yelled at him. Quite forcefully, too. I told him he was being stupid and irresponsible and dishonoring Lizzie’s memory if he continued to try to kill himself. I dragged his sorry ass out of that building and drove him here. I sat him down on that swing, and we stayed here the entire night. He didn’t talk; he just sat there while I told him stories about Lizzie, about their time together, and how much she had loved him and how much she had loved this garden. This was her place, and it was the closest I could get him to her.” He wiped a tear from his face. “We scattered Elizabeth’s ashes under the oak tree. This is her, this is Lizzie; and William wouldn’t listen to me or anyone else, but I knew that he would listen to her.”

  It took me a moment to breathe past the lump in my chest, the cold, hard, painful feeling next to my heart. “How…” I had to repeat myself, because the word didn’t come out properly. “How…?”

  “How did he get better?” Lawrence knew what I was asking. Even though he had never admitted the connection, with the similarity between William and me, I knew that Lawrence was telling me this story so that I would understand that people could come back from horrible events in their past. “I’m honestly not sure,” he admitted, his fingers tightening on mine. “I don’t know that it was anything that I said; I’m not sure it was anything physical. William is the only one who knows the answer to that question, and I hope one day you might get up enough courage to ask him, because for you, I believe that he might actually tell you the truth.”

  I watched William with new eyes that night over dinner. If I didn’t know the story of his loss, his emotional and physical near-ending, I’m not sure I would have even picked up that he was more than a gentle old man with not a care in the world.

  But the more I watched him, the more I understood of him, and the more I realized was reflected in the depths of my own soul. He hurt, he still grieved over the loss of his wife, but he was coping much better with it than I was. I just wasn’t sure if I wanted to find out how he managed it.

  The next few days passed in a strange haze. Lawrence and I basically did nothing. We slept late in the morning, usually as a result of the fact that Lawrence would keep me up late into the night. Something about this place had us both yearning for the touch of each other’s bodies. Insatiable, tender, sweet, and then at other times, quick, almost violent. But in whatever form our lovemaking took, it was complete and fulfilling.

  The day light hours were spent talking to William, sharing ideas and thoughts, and sometimes Lawrence and I would spend hours just being together, walking in the gardens or driving around the estate. He took me fishing—well, he actually fished, while I threw rocks into the river nearby, something that he assured me wasn’t helping his chances of catching anything.

  We went horseback riding, which was an experience I was in no hurry to repeat. Horses are big and scary, and I told him so numerous times on our little adventure. I refused to get above a trot, and that was a bone-jarring experience in itself. I determined that I needed a much more padded posterior before I ever contemplated getting on another horse in this lifetime.

  Dinner was always an interesting experience. William was a lively, engaging companion, who made sure that whatever was being discussed was relevant to all of us, so at no time was I bored or left out.

  What was becoming more apparent as the days passed was that while my eyes were being opened more and more to who William really was, he was having the same revelation about me. Small comments, shared looks with Lawrence, and times when I would find him staring at me were indication enough that he was seeing far more of me than I was happy with.

  I knew it was coming; it was as inevitable as Lawrence had predicted. Eventually, William and I were going to have to speak. And it turned out that the day before we were due to leave, Thursday afternoon, William decided the time had come for that li
ttle chat.

  “Lawrence, go find something else to do,” William instructed, as he sat down opposite me on the lounger in his office.

  “What?” Lawrence sounded surprised.

  “Lilly and I are going to get to know each other better, and we can’t do that with you hovering. So go.”

  Lawrence’s gaze met mine. He was clearly giving me the choice. Did I want this? Could I manage without his buffer?

  I smiled reassuringly at him. “I’m fine.” He nodded and placed a quick kiss on my lips.

  “I’ll be back later.” Then he was gone, and I was alone with William.

  “Thank you for coming to visit with him,” William started. “I don’t get to see him nearly as much as I would like, and I know he wouldn’t have come without you. So thank you.”

  “It’s been a pleasure,” I said honestly. “I can see how much you mean to him. I like to see him this relaxed, this comfortable. He doesn’t have enough people he can trust in his life.”

  “He trusts you.”

  I nodded. “I think he does.”

  “I know he does,” William replied. “Lawrence has had to learn some valuable lessons in his life. We live in a dangerous world, one that doesn’t accept weak people. It has so many layers of falseness that it is sometimes hard to remember that there are good, honest people out there.”

  I agreed. “Lawrence tells me that you and he have a long history together. That you were his original mentor, and that he still comes to talk to you when he needs guidance.”

  “Lawrence hasn’t needed my guidance for a long while now,” he countered. “Now I just offer him someone to listen, someone who understands. He usually already knows the answer; sometimes it’s just nice to have someone to talk through your problems with.”

  I smiled slightly, remembering how Lawrence said William was a good listener. “How much did he tell you about me?” I asked in query.

  “Next to nothing,” William answered, and I thought I heard a trace of surprise.

  “Oh,” I responded, a little bit confused. I had assumed that Lawrence would have already prepared him, even just to warn him that I was not quite right. “Lawrence told me that I should talk to someone. He wanted that someone to be you,” I informed him. “I wasn’t sure if he had told you why, or how much you know.”