Chapter 23
“Oh, my dear Thomas, I had thought the two of you looked so very comfortable the other afternoon. I kept my eye on you as I played bridge, and you looked for all the world as you did all those years ago.” Lady Morton seemed almost as disappointed in the turn of events as Thomas.
“I thought the same, and if I am honest, I did not detect any malice in her words. She simply told me that we must be careful with our hearts and that she is not in any mood to have hers broken again. She was kind, but she was most decidedly firm,” Thomas said sadly and reached for his tea.
His conversation with Catherine at Lady Morton’s bridge afternoon had taken a decided turn very early on. After he had met with her in the woods on the edge of the Barford estate, Thomas had convinced himself that a certain coherence had been achieved between them, that they were not so greatly distant from the two young people they had once been.
When she had comforted him, held his hand, and walked arm in arm with him through the trees, it was as if nothing else in the world had existed for Thomas, not his life or his responsibilities, and certainly not his upcoming nuptials with Lady Eleanor Barchester.
But when she had told him that they had something they must discuss in that very drawing room where he now sat, Thomas had known that it would be something he did not want to hear.
“Thomas, I cannot tell you how wonderful it has been for me to see you again,” she began, and he knew that it was the calm before the storm. “But I can already sense a little closeness developing between us which I know I must avoid. I cannot tell you how it hurt to be separated from you all those years ago, but I suppose you already know it very well yourself.”
“It broke my heart, Catherine,” he said and felt a deep sense of disappointment welling in the pit of his stomach.
“And it broke mine also. And as much as I would not want to feel that again, I would also not want you to feel it either. There is no path which leads to each other anymore, Thomas. There is no way for us to be together. I am a different woman now, and I have been through too much, so much that I would not under any circumstances put myself in harm’s way again. I do not have the same spirit of adventure that I had as a young woman. Life has taught me much and taught me the hard way.”
“But we can be friends, can we not?” he said and saw a brief flash of annoyance on her face.
It was so brief, so transient, that he could hardly believe now that he had seen it at all.
“We are nothing more than friends now, Thomas, and already I can see it leading to disaster for us both.”
“But …”
“No, Thomas.” She cut him off. “You are under the impression that it is as simple as picking up where we left off, and it quite clearly is not. Things are not the same, are they? For one thing, you are soon to be a married man, and I am sure that Lady Eleanor Barchester would not be at all pleased by the attention that you are paying me.”
“But Catherine, please …”
“Thomas, I really do not know what it is you expect from me.”
“I just want to be near you, Catherine. I never want to lose you again.”
“When you walk down the aisle in a few weeks’ time, Thomas, you will lose me forever, and it will be your choice. I have no part to play in this anymore. I have no father to placate and no husband-to-be waiting in the wings for me.”
“You are angry with me,” he said sullenly.
“I am angry that I find myself in this position again. I am angry that I have so easily walked back along the path to pain. That does not mean that I do not care for you Thomas because I do. But this is an impossible situation, and there is not a single thing that I can do about it.”
When Thomas had finished recounting the entire conversation to Lady Morton, he looked at her with his eyebrows raised and his heart full of expectation. However, Lady Morton did not speak for several minutes but simply stared at him a little incredulously.
“Lady Morton, for heaven’s sake say something,” Thomas said with an uneasy grin.
“Thomas, I cannot believe that you were first party to the conversation, then you have undoubtedly thought it through several times, and now you are recounting it to me, and yet you do not seem to have drawn any conclusion at all.” Lady Morton seemed to be a curious mixture of amused and annoyed.
“And now you are angry with me,” Thomas said and then laughed when he realized he sounded a little self-pitying.
“Thomas, I am going to ask you a question which Catherine already asked you. What is it you expect of her?” Lady Morton put her empty teacup down on the table and leaned back heavily in her armchair.
“I love her; I love her the same as ever I did.”
“You did not answer my question, but never mind for a moment.” Lady Morton laced her fingers together across her lap and stared thoughtfully into the distance. “So, you love Catherine the same as ever you did?”
“I have never stopped loving her, and seeing her again has made me love her even more,” Thomas said miserably.
“And do you love Lady Eleanor Barchester?”
“No, I do not.”
“And do you love any other young lady?”
“No, of course I do not. There has never been anybody in my heart but Catherine,” Thomas said and realized he spoke as if Lady Morton ought to have known that by instinct. “Forgive me; this business rather has me upside down at the moment.”
“And I have no doubt it has Catherine upside down also,” Lady Morton said gently. “But please believe me that I do not mean to antagonize you or say anything to cause you hurt, Thomas, because you are as important to me as Catherine herself is.”
“You must speak freely, Lady Morton.”
“You surely do not expect that you can marry Lady Eleanor Barchester and that Catherine will move back from Derbyshire for the simple pleasure of meeting you once a week by Stromlyn Lake, do you?”
“No, no I do not. Well, I did not really think about it.”
“And have you told Lady Eleanor Barchester that you will not be marrying her?”
“No, I had not thought of that. I do not see how I can escape it.”
“You escape it by saying no, my dear boy. Not only to Lady Eleanor, but to your father.”
“I am afraid it is my father who is the problem. He will be angry enough if I upend this little union between myself and Lady Eleanor and angrier still if he thinks the reason I have done so is for the sake of Catherine Ambrose. He will never agree to my marrying her.”
“You do not know until you ask.”
“I do know, Lady Morton. He would disown me in a heartbeat, and then I would have nothing with which to keep Catherine. She would be marrying a pauper.”
“And when you went to find her all those years ago in Derbyshire … when you spent all those miserable hours in Glossop asking strangers if they had ever heard of her, what had you intended?”
“I wanted to elope with her, to have her marry me.”
“And you would have had nothing, and been disowned, and been a pauper. That is my entire point, Thomas, and it is trying my patience a little that you cannot see it.”
“I cannot expect Catherine to live like that.”
“And you cannot expect her to suffer the pain of seeing you married to another and still manage to maintain some sort of meaningful friendship with you. Imagine how you would feel if it were the other way around. Think back to your own fevered imaginings when you were peering out from the foliage at the graveyard hoping not to set eyes upon Catherine’s husband. You really must try to see it from her side. If you cannot make the right decision, Thomas, you can only expect to have to let her go. It is not fair on her, you see.”
“Then there is nothing to be done,” he said and felt utterly defeated.
“There is something to be done, Thomas. You have a decision to make, and it must be made one way or the other. Whatever happens next is in your hands, Thomas, nobody else’s.
Any move to be made is your move, not Catherine’s, not your father’s, not Lady Eleanor’s. It is your choice, Thomas. Now, one way or the other, you must make it.”
“You are right; I must make a choice.”