He and Blossom eyed each other in the sitting room. Blossom won the confrontation. He took the chair on the other side of the fireplace after Imogen had seated herself firmly in the middle of a love seat. Hector plopped down at his feet, ignored by the cat. Mrs. Primrose had seen them come in and would bring the tea tray without waiting for instructions. Visitors were always plied with her tea and whatever sweet delight she had baked that day.
He talked with great enthusiasm about the weather until the tray had arrived and Imogen had poured their tea and set his beside him with two oatmeal biscuits propped in the saucer. He made dire predictions for the future based upon the fact that they had been enjoying a string of fine days and must surely suffer as a consequence. He almost had her laughing with his monologue, and once again she was forced to admit to herself that she almost liked him. She might even withdraw the qualification of the almost if he did not fill her sitting room to such an extent that there seemed to be almost no air left to breathe.
She resented that charisma he seemed to carry about with him wherever he went. It seemed undeserved.
He picked up one of his biscuits and bit into it. He chewed and swallowed.
“If not that, then what?” he asked abruptly, and curiously she knew exactly what he was talking about. His whole manner had changed, and so had the atmosphere in the room. If not rape, he was asking her, then what?
She ought to refuse to answer. He had no right. No one else had ever asked her outright. At Penderris, everyone—even the physician, even George—had waited until she was ready to volunteer the information. It had taken two years for it all to come out. Two years. She had known him . . . how many days? Eight? Nine?
“Nothing,” she said. “You were mistaken in your assumption.”
“Oh,” he said, “I believe you. But something happened.”
“My husband died,” she said.
“But you not only mourn,” he said, looking at the biscuit in his hand as though he had only just realized it was there, and taking another bite. “You also refuse to continue to live.”
He was too perceptive.
“I breathe air into my lungs,” she told him, “and breathe it out again.”
“That,” he said, “is not living.”
“What do you call it, then?” she asked, annoyed. Could he not take a hint and talk about the weather again?
“Surviving,” he said. “Barely. Living is not merely a matter of staying alive, is it? It is what you do with your life and the fact of your survival that counts.”
“Spoken by an authority?” she asked him.
But she thought unwillingly of her fellow Survivors who had done a great deal with their lives and their survival in the years since Penderris. Ben, though he still struggled to walk, had acquired a great deal of mobility since taking to a wheeled chair and was the very busy manager of prosperous coal mines and ironworks in Wales. He was also happily married. Vincent, despite his blindness, walked and rode and exercised, even boxed, and composed children’s stories with his wife, stories that she then illustrated before they were published. They had a son. Flavian, Hugo, Ralph—they were all married too and living active, presumably happy lives. Yet she could remember them all when they were so broken that even drawing in another lungful of air had been a burden. Ralph in particular had been suicidal for a long time.
But none of them carried her particular burden. Just as she carried none of theirs. What if she could not see the first snowdrop, not this year or ever? What if she could never stride along the cliff path or the beach below?
He had not answered her question. He was chewing the last mouthful of his first biscuit.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Oh, confession is a two-way business, Lord Hardford,” she said sharply. “Unless one is a priest, perhaps. You also have stories you would rather not tell.”
The progress of his second biscuit was arrested two inches from his mouth. “But one would not wish to scandalize a lady,” he said, lowering it, “or scorch her ears with unsavory stories.”
She tutted. “You are terrified of the sea,” she said, “and of the cliffs. I daresay it was only your pride because I, a mere woman, was there that got you down the path onto the beach a few days ago.”
He set the biscuit back in his saucer.
“Are we bartering here, Cousin Imogen?” he asked. “Your story for mine?”
Oh.
Oh. No.
She ought to have thought before she spoke. She ought not to have started any of this.
“Shall I go first?” he asked.
10
He did not wait for her answer.
“I was ten or eleven,” he said. “I was at that obnoxious age, which all boys go through and perhaps girls too, when I knew nothing and thought I knew everything. We were spending a few weeks by the sea. I have no memory of quite where, though it was somewhere on the east coast. There were golden beaches, high, rugged cliffs, a jetty and boats, the sea to splash around in and foaming waves to hurl myself beneath. A boy’s paradise, in fact. But—the blight of a boy’s existence—there was an army of adults with me, united in its determination to see that I did not enjoy a single moment of my time there—my parents, one of my tutors, various servants, even my old nurse. The sea was dangerous and drowned little boys; the boats were dangerous and tipped little boys into the water before drowning them; the cliffs were dangerous and dashed little boys to their death on jagged rocks below—everything was dangerous. The only thing that could keep me safe was constant adult supervision, preferably of the hold-my-hand-don’t-do-that variety. I resented every little that was uttered and every hand that was held out for mine.”