“You are depressed, Ben,” Vincent said. “Even I have noticed.”
The others all sat again, and Ben, with a sigh, resumed his own seat. He had so nearly got away with it.
“No one likes to be a whiner,” he told them. “Whiners are dead bores.”
“Agreed.” George smiled. “But you have never been a whiner, Benedict. None of us has. The rest of us would not have put up with it. Admitting problems, asking for help or even just for a friendly ear, is not whining. It is merely drawing upon the collective sympathies of people who know almost exactly what you are going through. Your legs are paining you, are they?”
“I never resent a bit of pain,” Ben said without denying it. “At least it reminds me that I still have my legs.”
“But—?”
George had not himself fought in the wars, though he had once been a military officer. His only son had fought, though, and had died in Portugal. His wife, the boy’s mother, perhaps overcome with grief, flung herself to her death from the cliffs at the edge of the estate not long after. When he had opened his home to the six of them, as well as to others, George had been as wounded as any of them. He probably still was.
“I will walk. I do walk after a fashion. And I will dance one day.” Ben smiled ruefully. That had always been his boast, and the others often teased him about it.
No one teased now.
“But—?” It was Hugo this time.
“But I will never do either as I once did,” Ben said. “I suppose I have known it for a long time. I would be a fool not to have done so. But it has taken me six years to face up to the fact that I will never walk more than a few steps without my canes—plural—and that I will never move more than haltingly with them. I will never get my life back as it was. I will always be a cripple.”
“A harsh word, that,” Ralph said with a frown. “And a bit defeatist?”
“It is the simple truth,” Ben said firmly. “It is time to accept reality.”
The duke rested his elbows on the arms of his chair and steepled his fingers. “And accepting reality involves giving up and calling yourself a cripple?” he said. “You would never have got up off your bed, Benedict, if you had done that from the start. Indeed, you would have agreed to allow the army sawbones to relieve you of your legs altogether.”
“Admitting the truth does not mean giving up,” Ben told him. “But it does mean assessing reality and adjusting my life accordingly. I was a career military officer and never envisaged any other life for myself. I did not want any other life. I was going to end up a general. I have lived and toiled for the day when I could have that old life back. It is not going to happen, though. It never was. It is time I admitted it openly and dealt with it.”
“You cannot be happy with a life outside the army?” Imogen asked.
“Oh, I can be,” Ben assured her. “Of course I can. And will. It is just that I have spent six years denying reality, with the result that at this late date I still have no idea what the future does hold for me. Or what I want of the future. I have wasted those years yearning for a past that is long gone and will never return. You see? I am whining, and you could all be sleeping peacefully in your beds by now.”
“I would r-rather be here,” Flavian said. “If one of us ever goes away from here unhappy because he c-couldn’t bring himself to confide in the rest of us, then we m-might as well stop coming. George lives at the back of beyond here in Cornwall, after all. Who would want to c-come just for the scenery?”
“He is right, Ben.” Vincent grinned. “I would not come for the scenery.”
“You are not going home when you leave here, Ben,” George said. It was a statement, not a question.
“Beatrice—my sister—needs company,” Ben explained with a shrug. “She had a lingering chill through the winter and is only now getting her strength back with the spring. She does not feel up to moving to London when Gramley goes up after Easter for the opening of the parliamentary session. And her boys will be away at school.”
“The Countess of Gramley is fortunate to have such an agreeable brother,” the duke said.
“We were always particularly fond of each other,” Ben told him.
But he had not answered George’s implied question. And since the answer was a large part of the depression his friends had noticed, he felt obliged to give it. Flavian was right. If they could not share themselves with one another here, their friendship and these gatherings would lose meaning.
“Whenever I go home to Kenelston,” he said, “Calvin is unwilling to let me to do anything. He does not want me to set foot in the study or talk to my estate agent or visit any of my farms. He insists upon doing everything that needs to be done himself. His manner is always cheerful and hearty. It is as if he believes my brain has been rendered as crooked as my legs. And Julia, my sister-in-law, fusses over me, even to the point of clearing a path before me whenever I emerge from my own apartments. The children are allowed the run of the house, you see, and run they do, strewing objects as they go. She has my meals served in my private apartments so that I will not have to exert myself to go down to the dining room. She—they both go a fair way, in fact, toward smothering me with kindness until I leave again.”
“Ah,” George said. “Now we get to the heart of the matter.”
“They really do fear me,” Ben said. “They fairly pulsate with anxiety every moment I am there.”