The letter had reached Flavian in London, just before he came to Gloucestershire. He would surely wish to return home to Candlebury for Easter this year, now that he would have an incentive, his mother had written. She had underlined the four key words.
Velma was coming home and bringing her young daughter with her. Len’s daughter. She had had no son. No heir.
“It does not m-matter that she is returning to Farthings,” he added, tossing back what remained in his glass. “I never go near C-Candlebury anyway.”
Imogen had patted his knee, and after a brief silence Vincent had started to tell them about the joy the birth of his son had brought into his life—and about the panic attacks he had to fight whenever he was overwhelmed by the realization that he would never see the child or any brothers and sisters he might have.
“But, oh, the joy!” There had been tears swimming in his eyes when Flavian had looked up at him.
No one wondered this morning, then, why Flavian chose to be alone. Some things had to be dealt with on one’s own, as they all knew from experience. Which fact led him to wonder about marriage—in particular, the marriages of three of the Survivors—as he stepped out of the house half an hour after breakfast and turned his steps in the direction of the lake. Was there space in marriage? There would have to be, wouldn’t there? Or one would feel suffocated. Even if one was wildly in love. Happily-ever-after did not mean being welded together for all eternity—ghastly thought.
What did it mean, then?
It meant nothing, of course, because there was no such thing. Even the marriages of his three friends would crumble if they and their wives did not work like the devil to keep them whole for the rest of their natural lives. Was it worth the trouble?
He had believed in romantic love and happily-ever-after once upon a time, silly idiot that he had been. At least—he stopped walking to frown in thought for a moment—he was almost sure he must have believed in it. Sometimes it seemed to him that his mind was a bit like a checkerboard—the dark squares representing conscious memory, the white ones just blank spaces to hold the memories apart. Whether the blanks meant anything more than that, he could not remember. And when he tried too hard to work it out, he either got one of his crashing headaches or else he looked around for something into which he might ram his fist without breaking every bone in his hand.
There was definitely something in those white squares. There was violence, if nothing else.
The ladies and Ben—with his canes rather than his wheeled chair—were before him at the lake. Ben had the door of the boathouse open, and the ladies were peering inside. Was he planning to play the gallant and row them across to the island so that they could take a closer look at the temple folly there? Flavian hailed them, and there was a cheerful exchange of pleasantries during which he did not suggest helping to row. He kept on walking about the lake and past the band of trees on the other side. It was a lengthy walk.
The uninitiated would assume the park ended with the lake and the trees on its far bank. But it did not. It stretched beyond into a spacious area that was a little less cultivated, more secluded, more designed for solitude or the enjoyment of a tête-à-tête with a chosen companion.
It was solitude he wanted and needed this morning. Where the devil had that outburst come from last night? He had read the notice of Len’s death with some surprise about this time last year. It was always a nasty reminder of one’s own mortality when a contemporary died, especially when one was only thirty. And more especially when, once upon a time, one had known that particular contemporary almost as well as one knew one’s fellow Survivors now. Though he would wager his life that no one of the Survivors would steal away and marry the betrothed of any other who was incapacitated.
He had read the notice with some surprise but with no greater emotion. All that unpleasantness had happened a long time ago, after all, not long after he had been brought home from the Peninsula and just before he had been taken to Penderris Hall for treatment and convalescence. A lifetime ago, it seemed. It had all meant nothing to him last spring. Len had meant nothing. Velma had meant nothing.
A whole alarming lot of nothing.
It still meant nothing now.
Except that she was coming back from the north of England, which had always felt comfortably like the other side of the world. And it did not require any genius to imagine what excitement her return was arousing in the romantic, matchmaking bosoms of his mother and hers. The fact that his mother expected him to go running to Candlebury for Easter just because Velma would be at Farthings told its own eloquent tale. It also told him that they expected he would feel the same about Velma—and she about him—as they had felt before his injuries and Len’s betrayal.
He thought back, aghast, to that unexpected outburst last night and that equally unexpected relapse into an almost uncontrollable inability to get his words out. For two pins, if someone had said the wrong thing, he would have lashed out with his fists and done the Lord knew what damage to Vincent’s home. He had been alarmingly close to having a complete relapse into the state of animal madness he’d been left in after the war. And he had fought a throbbing headache for most of a largely sleepless night.
He thought of Vince’s bubble and chuckled ruefully.
And then he realized that he was not alone back here after all.
* * *
It had been unwise to come here today, especially when there was unlimited countryside, all of it teeming with new growth and the wildflowers of early spring, in every direction about the village. It was wildflowers that Agnes loved to paint. But the only daffodils she had seen were in the flower beds of people’s gardens—and in the grass of the meadow on the far side of the park at Middlebury. And daffodils did not bloom forever. She could not simply wait for three weeks to pass until Lord Darleigh’s houseguests went away.