Chapter Thirty-One
When Theo reached the cottage the sky had turned a dusky pink and the front door stood open. A horse and rider were cantering away, and as he peered closer, the obstinate set of the man’s shoulders struck a chord of remembrance.
Everything in him stilled as he recognized Viscount Westburgh. He’d been trying to think of what to say to her, but at the first hint that she might be in danger, all considerations fled and he bolted toward the door.
Annabel stood facing him, her back to a small peat fire. And though she looked a little surprised by his abrupt entrance, she didn’t look frightened or hurt, she just looked like Annabel. His heart swelled, too much, too fast, and he feared it might explode on the spot.
“Are you well?” he asked hoarsely, stupidly.
She nodded. “He wanted to know the truth about what happened to his brother.” Theo opened his mouth, but she continued, “You need not worry. I don’t think he’ll come here again.”
They both lapsed into silence. There were questions he should ask, maybe, but he couldn’t think of what they were. He was too overwhelmed by being so close to her after what felt like years. She wasn’t watching him with hate, thank God, but a curious placidness. It wasn’t ideal, but it was more than he’d dared hope for.
He couldn’t help but notice the hole in the ceiling, the crack in the window. The cold drafts that came in through these unrepaired damages. And he felt like the world’s biggest ass. She deserved so much more than this. So much more than he’d been willing to give.
But he was willing now. He was ready.
He couldn’t keep his gaze from finding her like a magnet, from devouring her greedily. She must have been outside earlier; a sheen of moisture covered her hair and a sprig of yellow gorse was tucked haphazardly into her chignon. Her dress, which was the delicate blue of a bird’s egg, had mud all over the hem.
She was the goddess of spring, and if he lived a hundred years, he would forever think of her in blues and yellows and greens.
Did she even realize she looked too lovely to be real? Did she realize he wanted to fall at her feet and worship at her altar?
When she didn’t speak, he cleared his throat. “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner. There were things I needed to take care of.”
She didn’t address his comment; instead, she pushed back a tendril of hair from her face, in a gesture that was agonizingly self-conscious to Theo. He hated himself for that. She should never be less than the confident, free-spirited woman that she was.
She began to speak, her gaze fixed somewhere past him. “I used to come here sometimes and imagine the family that once lived here, and wonder where they’d gone. Sometimes I would lose track of time, especially if it was a clear night, because I liked to lie on my back in the grass and look up at the stars and imagine that somewhere they were looking up at the stars, too, and that they were happy in their new lives, and not sad because they’d lost their home, or had to give it up.” She sighed, a wistful smile curving her lips.
“Frances scolded me for frightening her the first time I disappeared, and it was the strangest feeling. I felt guilty for scaring her and so amazingly wonderful at the same time. No one had ever scolded me because they were worried about me before. For other things, certainly, but not for that. I was almost tempted to do it again just so I could feel that way again.”
A peculiar pressure stung his eyes. “But you didn’t?”
“No. I always told her where I was going after that, in case I didn’t return until the morning. It didn’t seem fair to make her worry about me just so I could feel loved.” She clasped her hands in front of her. “What matter did you need to take care of?”
He stepped forward, too eagerly, but he couldn’t stop his sudden surge of energy. “You cannot know how sorry I am. You cannot know how much it pains me to think that I caused you pain.”
“I think I have some idea.”
He pulled the stack of rumpled foolscap from where he’d slipped it inside his waistcoat. He knew there would never be a good moment for this. Never an easy moment. He just had to do it anyway.
“What is that?” she asked.
“My soul, for your collection,” he said, handing over the pages.
She stared at the first sheet, reading silently, and then her lips parted and she looked up. “Is this—”
“It’s everything. Every battle I was in. Everything I felt.” He paused. “I’ve been working on that, every day for the past few weeks. Robert helped. I was having trouble discussing it out loud—he came up with the idea of writing it down.”
And Robert had been there as his soul flowed from his fingertips into the quill, his heart bleeding on the pages in smears of black ink. More than once he’d wanted to stop; he’d trembled in his need to shove the foolscap away, but he told himself it was for Annabel, he was writing everything down for Annabel. And then at some point, it changed. It wasn’t just for her, but it was for himself, too.
Nothing was chronological, and he had no idea how coherent it was. He would jump back in time and then forward. Remember something new and go back again. He’d cut a vein of memory and the blood wouldn’t stop spilling.
As he’d written, he’d felt physically ill; he’d been ill once or twice. His mind shied away from the words like an untried horse. When it became too much, Robert took the parchment from him, and he stopped, rested, took time to calm down by going for a ride, or walking. Sometimes he reached into his waistcoat pocket for a shell he’d taken from one of Annabel’s vases and pressed his fingertips to it—feeling the hard grooves calmed him somehow, helped him gather himself. But he always came back to that parchment.
He forced himself to feel every single emotion he’d felt before, to examine them and acknowledge them. To accept them. And, finally, to start letting them go.
When he was done, when he couldn’t think of anything else to write, his limbs had gone weak and his eyes had grown damp. He couldn’t say that he felt better, exactly. He felt half dead, his heart torn, still beating, from his chest.
He felt, he’d realized on a whisper of hope, like he’d traveled to the depths of hell.
And returned.
Annabel’s gaze flickered between him and the stack of foolscap she now held in her hands. “Theo,” she breathed.
“You asked me specifically about the bayonet wound. It was…I suppose the details don’t matter, but suffice it to say we ambushed the French and everything turned to chaos quite quickly. There was a man in my regiment. Young, eager to prove himself, though barely more than a boy, even though he was married. His wife followed him in the camps. His name was Thomas Leander.” Theo faltered at the sound of his comrade’s name, and then started again.
“He looked up to me for some reason, and I did what I could to protect him. During this battle, Thomas was fighting beside me… a French soldier took aim at him… I saw it happen… I saw it…but I didn’t react quickly enough. The Frenchman didn’t miss. He hit Thomas, a mortal wound. I shot the French soldier, killed him, but before he collapsed he managed to stab me through the shoulder with his bayonet.
He stopped here, expecting a reaction—maybe a gasp of horror at the violent details—but Annabel was silent. Theo stared down at his hands as he continued. For a long time, he’d wondered why there were no remnants of the things he’d done. Not just failing Thomas but all the men he had killed. Why were they so clean?
One of the things he’d written about was finding a miniature portrait clasped in the hand of a dead French soldier—a woman and a small boy. As the man had died, he’d looked at a painting of his family. He’d written about the startling realization that the people he’d only thought of—only allowed himself to think of—as enemies—weren’t so very different from him, from any of the men he’d fought beside.
And he’d started to let himself grieve, for Thomas, yes, but for all of them.
He breathed deeply and let his fingers brush over the shell in his waistcoat pocket before he finished the story. “When I knelt by Thomas, he had already lost a lot of blood. He was nearly gone, but he begged me to take his body to his wife. So I did. I slung his body over my good shoulder and ran all the way back to camp. They called me a hero. I didn’t tell them otherwise… I didn’t tell them he was dead because I had failed him. I felt like I’d fallen into an icy pond and all the breath had been knocked out of me. It was a numb sort of horror. A pain I didn’t feel until later.”
“Did you tell his wife what you told me?”
Theo nodded. “She was the only one I told. And then, because I was a coward, I left before she could condemn me, and I haven’t spoken to her since.”
“You don’t know that she condemns you,” Annabel said softly.
“Why wouldn’t she?”
Annabel touched his arm. “Because you did your best. Because it could have just as easily happened to someone else.”
“But it happened because of me.”
“And if it had been the other way around, would you want Thomas to carry the same guilt?”
His hands clenched. No. No one deserved this kind of guilt. He’d started to realize it on his own, but Annabel’s confirmation, Annabel’s love, unshaken, was like the sweetest music. Maybe he hadn’t acted quickly enough to save Thomas, but he’d done what he could, and he could only be what he was—human. Only human, with all the frailties and strengths that entailed.
If another soldier came to Theo with the same story, he wouldn’t condemn the man…perhaps he shouldn’t be so quick to condemn himself.
“It’s odd,” he continued thoughtfully. “You would think that after that, I might have sold my commission. That when I was injured, I might have been relieved that I had no choice but to leave the army. But the battlefield was all I’d known for so long. I didn’t know how to face my family. I didn’t know how to live with my new memories in my old life. I was terrified.”
Annabel’s grip on his arm tightened, a calm, reassuring pressure. “May I read the rest of it?”
He nodded, and she sat down on the dirt floor, tilting the foolscap to catch the light from the fire. He sat down a few feet away from her, and waited, his whole body tense, like a harp string stretched too tightly.
“Theo,” she whispered.
He looked up. She had set aside the foolscap and was kneeling next to him. He didn’t know how much time had passed, but tear tracks stained her face.
“Well?” The word didn’t emerge from his lips steadily; too much hinged on it. His entire world.
“Reading this only confirmed everything I already knew. You are an honorable man, a kind man, a thoughtful man. Do you think you would be affected so deeply if you weren’t?”
“Annabel,” he said brokenly, folding her into his arms. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be the man I used to be.”
“I don’t care.” She rested her hands on his chest and stared into his face intently. Her touch flowed through him, buried inside him, anchored him to the earth. “I know you. I know who you are.” She breathed his own words back to him. “You cannot always carry this weight with you.”
“I’m trying,” he said. “I’m learning.”
“And I am not going anywhere.”
He buried his face in her hair and felt like weeping, but not from sorrow, from a fierce, painful joy. They stayed like that for a long time, basking in sensations, in words unspoken but understood. They stayed like that until a sudden draft reached them from the crack in the window, tearing them from their small, intimate world.
“You shouldn’t be living like this,” Theo said. “How long has it been abandoned? A decade?”
“I don’t need much,” she said.
“I don’t care about what you need,” he said, pressing a kiss to the soft slope of her jaw. “I care about what you deserve, and you deserve to live like a queen.”
“Do I?”
“Yes,” he said emphatically. “And a queen needs a castle.”
She stilled.
“So it’s quite lucky for me that I happened to inherit one.”
He pulled back, just so he could see the faint smile curving her lips.
“I’ve heard,” he continued, “that it’s rather easy to get married in this country.”
“Almost too easy,” Annabel confirmed, only a trace of breathlessness belying her light words. “A couple could be married almost as soon as they decide to wed, if they wish it.”
“I wish it,” Theo said. Then he paused. He didn’t want to push Annabel toward anything she wasn’t ready for. Healing was an uphill climb, and while he’d made progress, he didn’t know how long the climb would last, or if it would ever truly be finished. If she needed more time, he wouldn’t deny her that. “It’s not too soon, is it?”
She laughed, and the sound alone made him smile. The sound alone eased his worry. “For the fearless Annabel Lockhart? I don’t hesitate when I want something, and I’ve already decided you’re mine.”
And he was hers, body and soul. And for the first time in a while, he didn’t feel like those were such meager offerings, after all.
He promised himself with each beat of his heart, with his lips pressed to hers. A soft kiss. One of many. Hopefully, one of thousands. And then she pulled him down to the floor with her, and they made love, slowly, then passionately, then leisurely again, as though they had all night. As though they had their whole lives.
And he whispered things to her, so many things—You are desired. You are wanted. You are loved. Because Annabel was wounded, too. But then, everyone was, in some way or another.
No one was perfect. But, he thought, as their lips found each other once again, some people fit together perfectly. Some people’s corners and rough edges balanced in a way that was as close to perfection as one could get on this wild, beautiful, devastating earth.
Sated and tired and blissful, Theo fell asleep within the protective circle of Annabel’s arms, and though they were on a most uncomfortable dirt floor, he slept, a deep dreamless sleep, for hours.