Chapter Seventeen
“That man of loneliness and mystery.”
(Byron’s Corsair.)
Auburn hair snaked the woman’s shoulder and slid over her lover as if with a life of its own, brushing his cheek and twining with his sinful black locks.
Darkly handsome with a lethal gaze, his lips remained but a breath away, ready to strike. She stared back, without fear.
Hades and Persephone, the original mismatched couple to Tamsyn’s mind, took no heed of her intimate perusal, with eyes uniquely for each other upon the canvas.
At any moment, Jack would saunter through the library door as requested the previous day and the prospect raised a goose skin, a slight clogging in her throat and a certain apprehension.
He’d been absent for most of the day – in Helston again, she supposed – but tonight he’d been his usual jocular self over dinner, prodding Lowdy to wear lemon and enticing Father to enthuse over clay extraction methods, grin broad.
But she’d also felt his eyes upon her. Assessing and asking the question: are you sure?
And at this moment, she was far from sure.
Tamsyn recalled long-ago evenings in this room, listening to Papa read Gulliver’s Travels whilst she’d lounged with her mother on silk cushions upon the floor, their heads resting against his knee.
Her parents had lived in unbroken harmony, so alike, and whilst Papa had read, Tamsyn had stared at this painting, wondering how the nature-loving Persephone had coped with months in the dreary Underworld.
Would it not have been better if they’d each found spouses with similar inclinations?
“Were you happy?” she enquired of the captured Persephone.
“Always,” came the goddess’s answer in rather a deeper voice than she’d imagined.
She didn’t turn, merely felt his presence, an enticing blend of port and lemon ripening the air. The door closed and she heard the click of a lock, his light tread. Everyone else was occupied with their own affairs tonight – Aunt and Lowdy writing letters, Papa at the Treloor Inn and herself supposedly reading in the library…alone.
A finger pointed over Tamsyn’s shoulder to Hades clasping his wife’s waist, indentations in her white silk shift revealing his passion. “She leans into his touch, yearns for it, as does her wayward hair. Likewise, he is utterly beguiled, cannot look away, aches for her kiss.”
“Is that not purely desire?”
“No. It is love. They would do anything for one another.”
“I thought rogues disdained love,” she teased, but his voice was serious in reply.
“In four of my friends, I have witnessed love grow at its purest. A blinded passion; an enduring pursuit; an unwavering patience; a profound trust. All shaped by, and in the name of…love.”
Tamsyn blinked. How could she ever have thought him a fribble with no concern further than his appearance. He was so much more.
“Have you been in love?” She knew it was a personal question and yet how much easier to ask when she couldn’t glimpse his ceaseless eyes.
Did she wish to know the answer? Had a woman broken his heart, causing the rogue to be born? Her breath caught.
“No, never.”
The breath released at his emphatic denial, and she turned. “And yet you speak so eloquently of it.”
No laughing eyes or smirking lips greeted her but pensiveness and solemn gravity.
A striking sapphire silk adorned his person this night with navy velvet collar, black pantaloons, and the ubiquitous and immaculate white cravat.
Exceptional, the woman within purred.
For herself, she’d worn an oyster grey but added an emerald-green ribbon about her throat, another twined in her hair. She’d smiled at her reflection, something she’d not done for years.
“I do appreciate the emotion I observe in others, even if I will never experience it,” he said, turning away to fiddle with a porcelain shepherdess wandering winsomely amongst the books. “I don’t have a heart, you realise.”
No, she didn’t realise at all. What caused him to think that?
Never had she met a man with such immense heart. He purposely danced with all the wallflowers, complimented servants on their work and made everyone feel special – in fact, was there ever a man with a bigger heart than the Marquess of Winterbourne?
“Were your parents in love?” Tamsyn asked. He’d alluded to maltreatment…
A laugh, yet not a jovial one; this spoke of distaste and sarcasm.
“Lud, no.” He glanced over with relentless jet eyes such as she had never seen. “Well, maybe my mother did at first, but Father married for dowry and bloodlines, and she soon fell out of love when he spent the honeymoon with his mistress.”
Oh. Tamsyn twisted the grey buttons at her neck. “Did she… Did she die some time ago, your mother?” She watched as he turned his attention to a porcelain ballet dancer.
“When I had but thirteen years. She drowned at the estate.”
“I’m so very sorry, Jack,” she whispered. To lose both his mother and brother so young must have been deeply affecting, and his father hadn’t sounded the affectionate type. When news of Mama’s death at sea had arrived, herself, Father and brother Ruan had huddled close, cried in each other’s arms and grieved together, a bond never to be broken. “Was it… Did your mother fall?”
The ballet dancer ungainly wobbled in her retiré devant as he plonked it down and meandered to the half-open window that granted no breeze. “Have you changed your mind, Tamsyn? You need only say, and I will wait until you are ready to speak.”
No, her mind was set, but she also wanted to know more of this man, just as he wanted to know of her. After tonight, she would have no secrets from Jack.
“I am ready but… I like you, Jack. I want to know you.”
His sapphire-clad shoulders stooped, hands braced on the stone window frame, and she caught the side of his face, tired and grave. She wished to understand him because this evening, this friend to everyone appeared so…alone.
She came to stand close. Inches away.
“No fall, no accident,” he stated to his reflection in the dark glass. “My mother simply walked into the lake one morning.”
“Beg pardon?”
He swivelled, causing her to startle but substantial hands steadied her shoulders.
“My mother was unable to face life with a vile Winterbourne any longer and so, one beautiful summer’s day, she walked into the estate lake, a rock tied to either wrist with a rose-pink satin ribbon.”
Face blanching, Tamsyn’s trembling fingers rose to her mouth. Tears blurred her eyes and cold flushed her veins. The ribbons. The colour. Lord have mercy, it could only mean…
“You found her?” she whispered.
The horror of his young life pounded her with desolation and pain, made her thankful for all she had – a devoted family to love and protect.
“Yes,” he answered, quite matter of fact, although his grip tightened on her shoulders. “No one else cared that she’d been missing some four hours. I found her stockings and shoes by the lake and dived in, thinking she’d gone paddling and slipped but…”
Jack’s eyes briefly closed and when they reopened, no suave rogue or affable marquess stared back, just a devastated boy. “I dived deep and there she was, floating like one of your Cornish mermaids, sunlight breaking the water to glint in her blond hair.”
Tears slid down Tamsyn’s cheeks, dripped onto her dress. His face held a bleakness; how could it not? Yet he spoke with such…normalcy. “And your father?” she croaked.
A shake of the head. Curl of lip. “He wasn’t home. I cut the ribbons, and with her in my arms, I waded out. Mama’s sodden skirts were so heavy, I had to clamber from the shallows on my knees.”
Tamsyn closed her eyes to the horror, images forming nonetheless. Of Jack, a young boy crawling in the lake’s mud with his dead mother in his arms, fingers scrambling at the bank, cries of anger and pain and misery.
Alone on a beautiful summer’s day.
Gentle thumbs wiped the tears from her cheek. “Don’t cry, Tamsyn. She is at peace now and if we bury ourselves in the past, we become mired also.”
She shook her head. Yes, there were tears for his poor mother but most were for this man.
Her angel and devil, his dark and his light.
Jack wasn’t sure he’d ever made a woman cry before, but he’d sensed she needed something.
Something of him.
He’d reconciled himself long ago to his mother’s choice and no torment troubled his soul. There had been nothing that Jack, a mere boy, could have done. She’d chosen where her peace lay.
The best he’d been able to do as a son was gently untie the pink ribbons about her wrists, say he’d heard a cry, that she must have slipped, that he’d been too late. Far too late.
In that way, she would at least be granted burial within the churchyard and not banished to unconsecrated land for the manner of her death. He believed God would welcome all. Only man would be so cruel.
They’d laid her next to Vincent. Safe from harm.
And Jack had vowed that as a Winterbourne through and through, he would never hurt a woman in such a way, never crush nor quell, disregard nor pain – neither in body nor spirit.
Father had even missed her funeral due to a new mistress but evidently realised something was amiss as he’d mumbled his gratitude at their next encounter, muttering there would have been nothing worse than a scandal of female madness in the noble Winterbourne lineage.
Bloody fiend. Jack hadn’t done it for him or the Winterbourne name, marred as it already was in defilement and brutality.
He focused on the painting over Tamsyn’s shoulder, saw the love with which it had been imbued.
One had to seize joy in this fleeting life.
And his gaze fell to the woman he held.
“Allow me to share your burden, Tamsyn. Tell me of that night and carry it alone no longer.”
A nod and her clear blue eyes met his. “I want to tell you all, Jack.”