* * *
He pretty much hated himself, Percy decided as he shut the garden gate behind him and, without conscious thought, took the cliff path until he came to the gap. He scrambled down the steep track to the beach, heedless of possible danger, and strode the short distance to the cave. He went inside without stopping, daring the tide to come galloping up over the sand to trap him in there and drown him. The cave was much larger than he had expected.
Yes, he did, he decided as he placed one hand on a protruding rock and gazed out into daylight. He hated himself.
“You came all the way down this time without help, did you?” he asked Hector, who was lying across the mouth of the cave, his head on his paws, his bulging eyes looking inside. “Well done.”
Why was the dog so attached to him when he was a worthless lump of humanity? Dogs were supposed to be discriminating.
He had just confessed to the big dark blot on the otherwise relatively serene progress of his life—the great terror from which he had never recovered. A boy’s disobedient folly gone wrong. The ghastly humiliation that had dogged him into adulthood, though he had always hidden it well by the simple expedient of staying far from the sea and confronting every other challenge that came his way, the more dangerous the better, with a reckless disregard for his own life. It was mildly ironic, he supposed, that when he had inherited the title totally unexpectedly two years ago, it had come with a house and park that not only were in Cornwall but also were perched spectacularly upon a high cliff top.
That boyhood episode had been virtually the only dark blot on his life. Well, there had been his father’s death three years ago, and that had been excruciatingly painful. But such losses occurred in the natural course of one’s life, and one did recover over time. It seemed to him that he had spent all the rest of his life studiously avoiding pain and really doing quite a good job of it. But who would not do likewise, given the choice? Who would deliberately court pain and suffering?
He was not in the mood for making excuses for himself, though. His adult life had been one escapade piled upon another. Since coming down from Oxford almost ten years ago, he had taken care to remain uninvolved in all except shallow, meaningless, often downright stupid frivolity. He was thirty years old and had done nothing in his life of which he could feel proud. Well, except his double first degree with which he had done nothing since getting it.
Was it normal?
It certainly was not admirable.
He had said something—this very morning. He frowned in thought for a moment.
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.
And he had said it in criticism of her, pompous ass that he was.
He was a survivor too, was he not? He had survived his own birth, no mean feat when so many newborns did not. He had survived all the perils and illnesses of early childhood. He had survived that ordeal on the cliff face. He had survived reckless horse and curricle races and a duel with pistols and the jumping of broad gaps between houses from four stories up, once during a heavy rainstorm. He had done a lot of surviving. He had got to the age of thirty more or less intact physically and mentally and emotionally.
It is what you do with your life and the fact of your survival that counts.
What the devil had he ever done with his? What real use had he made of the precious gift of breath?
He left the cave and walked down the beach until he was at the water’s edge. The salt of the air was more pronounced here. He felt exposed, surrounded by vastness, half deafened by the elemental roar of the sea and the breaking of the waves. The sun was sparkling across the water, half blinding him. Hector was gamboling along in the shallows, knee-deep in water, sending up cascades of it behind him. He was going to be caked with sand to take back to the house.
What was it exactly he feared about the sea? Percy asked himself. Was it that all that water could trap him and drown him? Or was it something more fundamental than that? Was it the fear of vanishing into nothing in such vastness? Or the fear of coming face-to-face with the vast unknown? Was it just that it was easier to cling to his own trivial little inland world?
But he was not used to introspection and turned his attention back to his dog, which was obviously enjoying itself.
His dog?
“Damn your eyes, Hector,” he murmured. “Could you not have been a proud, handsome mastiff? Or taken a fancy to Mrs. Ferby instead of me?”
She had not played fair—Lady Barclay, that was, not Mrs. Ferby. He had told her the whole of his story, even to the pulling down of his breeches for his spanking. She had told him only part of hers. A chunk of it, the key part of it, had been omitted. And it was the very part that he suspected would explain everything.
He had no right to know. He had had no right to ask in the first place. He had only more or less tricked her into telling her story by offering his own in exchange. And he did not want to know what she had withheld. He had cringed even from what she had told him. He had the feeling—no, he knew—that the missing details would be unbearable.
He always avoided what was unbearable.
She had spent three years at Penderris Hall. And she was not mended even now. Far from it. It was not simple grieving that kept her broken.
He did not want to know.
He did not usually pry into other people’s lives. He was not usually curious about what was of no personal concern to him, especially if it promised something painful.
Lady Barclay was not of any personal concern to him. She was not in any way at all the type of woman to attract him. Indeed, she was all that would normally repel him.