Blackmoore by Julianne Donaldson
Chapter 27
Present Day
The evening had never stretched so long as it did on this evening while I waited for midnight to come again, bringing with it another trip to the tower with Henry.
“Where have you been today?” Henry asked, once we had climbed up into the tower.
I loved this place even more than I loved the bird room. I loved being high above everything. I loved seeing the tops of trees and the expanse of the ocean in the moonlight, and I loved hearing the haunting cries of the rooks in the next tower.
“I went into Robin Hood’s Bay with Sylvia and Miss St.Claire.” Saying her name brought a bitterness to my tone I had not planned.
“But you did not come home with them.” He made it sound like a question.
“No. I ... had something I had to do. But I made it here safe enough, as you see.”
He just looked at me, without comment, but I could sense there were things he wanted to say to me.
“Are you going to lecture me about propriety?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at him.
He shook his head. “No. I was just going to say that I would have liked to go with you. I’ve wanted to show you Robin Hood’s Bay for a long time.”
I hadn’t thought of that at all. “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “It’s not important.” Henry seemed aloof tonight. Angry, somehow, deep inside. But I did not know how to fix whatever was wrong.
So I said, “Let us proceed, shall we? You can ask your secret first tonight, if you like.”
He folded his arms across his chest, faced me as if confronting an opponent, and said, “I want to know why you are so opposed to marriage.”
I took a deep breath. He had asked me this many times before, and I had always refused to answer. But now I was bound to answer him, and the thought of being honest about this frightened me. My chin trembled. I looked away, searching for something within myself to anchor my courage to. India. This was for India, and open cages, and freedom. This was for a land far away, where I would never have to witness the marriage of Henry and Miss St.Claire. I gripped my courage and turned my nervousness to anger and hardness. I thought of my mother and father; I thought of Eleanor and her husband, James. And I said, “Marriage is bondage and misery.”
“Bondage and misery?” Surprise turned his voice. He shook his head. “I think of marriage differently. A companionship of like minds. A tie that binds, yes, but in the binding comes strength. A lifetime with your dearest friend as your truest and best companion. That is what it can be. I believe that.”
His naïveté infuriated me for a reason I could not explain. “Is that the sort of marriage you expect to have with Miss St.Claire?”
Henry’s head jerked back, as if I had slapped him.
He took two breaths before answering. “We are not speaking of my future. We are contemplating yours.”
“That is a thoroughly unsatisfactory answer, Henry Delafield.”
A smirk lifted one side of his mouth. “You always fall back on addressing me by my full name when you are upset. As if you were my mother.”
I scowled at him. “And you always fall back on trying to change the subject when you don’t wish to be forthright.” I reached out without thinking and grabbed him by the shirt front, pulling him down so that we were on eye level with one another. All I could see in his eyes was surprise and amusement. “Why should I be the only one making myself vulnerable? You have asked me for my secrets; now you should share something with me. It’s only fair.”
Henry reached both arms around me, resting his hands on the low wall at my back, trapping me. And even though I quickly released my grip on his shirt (what had I been thinking?), he continued to lean down, close enough to me that I could see the instant his expression changed from amused to intense. “What would you have me share with you?”
“Something honest. Something you have told nobody else. A secret of your own.” I paused, then added, “Something about Miss St.Claire.”
He shook his head. “She is not a part of this. This is between you and me.”
I felt thwarted and angry because of it. He never spoke of Miss St.Claire. Any information I had about her before this week had come from Sylvia. Through the years, Henry had been consistently reticent about his intended, and I burned with envy. I hated that he had a secret I could not get from him. I hated that he had a month out of every year that he spent here, with her, and I had never been allowed to be a part of it. And I knew from experience that the secrets you never spoke of, to anyone, were the most treasured secrets of all.
I resisted the urge to shove him away, crossing my arms across my chest to rein in the impulse. “You never speak of her. I think it is abominable of you to keep something from me, after everything I have told you.”
“I will tell you a secret. I only said it wouldn’t be about Juliet.”
Juliet. He had called her by her given name, as if there was already an agreement between them. As if he had already proposed to her. As if they were already connected to each other.
“I hate that name, by the way,” I muttered.
Henry smiled, as if my hatred of her name gave him great amusement. Joy, even. “Do you? Why is that?”
“It sounds presumptuous.”
“Hmm.” Henry nodded. “Presumptuous.”
“Yes! As if she has something classical about her. As if she could be the star in a Shakespearean tragedy. It is entirely too presumptuous. Did her parents not think how they were setting her up for disappointment? For that is what I felt as soon as I met her—disappointment that she was so very bland.”
I stopped, realizing I had gone too far. Henry’s eyes narrowed. I was speaking of his intended. Perhaps his affianced. I should not have said what I had.
“Bland? Oh, I see. You object to her because she is not stubborn and willful and outspoken like you. Is that it?”
I pressed my lips together, cursing my loose tongue. But I did not retreat. “Yes. I suppose that is it.”
He spoke lightly. “Some men prefer quiet women.”
“You do not prefer quiet women, though,” I said, lifting my chin. “Do you?” It was pride that made me ask that. Pride asking if he disapproved of me. I had never considered it before—I had never considered that Henry might not approve of me. But now I had to know.
He considered me for a moment in silence, a faint smile lingering on his lips, then he spoke softly. “I think you have misjudged Miss St.Claire. She is intelligent and refined.”
I disliked her even more after hearing his praise of her. “Well, if that is all you are looking for in a wife, then I suppose you will be very happy with your intelligent and refined Miss St.Claire.” I could not help muttering, “Even though she didn’t know the difference between Phaeton and Icarus.”
His lip quivered.
“What? What are you smiling about?”
“You are jealous,” he said with a laugh.
“I am not,” I scoffed.
He smiled, as if everything I had said gave him real pleasure. “Do you want to know my secret or not?” he asked in a low voice.
I took a deep breath. He was standing too close. “Yes.”
He shifted his weight, moving even closer to me, so that I felt off balance, as if the world had tilted and if I did not hold onto something, I would fall. My heart quickened its pace, and so did my breathing. I felt his arms on either side of me, anchoring me or trapping me—I could not decide which.
A long moment stretched between us, the silence so taut that I thought something would surely snap. He was looking at me as if contemplating a whole host of secrets he could share, and my curiosity mixed with dread.
“Your eyebrows,” he finally said.
My eyes opened wide with surprise. “My eyebrows? What about them?”
“I love them,” he stated as if it were a fact. A truth.
I laughed again, breathlessly now, and shook my head. “They are too dark. Too thick.”
“No. They give your face character. And there is something so very ... graceful about them.” His voice dropped to almost a whisper. “Perhaps it is their curve. They look like the wing of a bird in flight.”
I felt extraordinarily self-conscious, and I was grateful for the darkness hiding my blush. Henry shifted again and lifted his hand to my face. I held perfectly still, trapped with surprise, my heart in my throat. He touched my face as gently and carefully as he had touched the caged bird. His fingertips brushed lightly along the curve of my left eyebrow, tracing the line, his eyes following the path of his fingers. A tremor shook through me and my heart raced. He stroked my cheek with the back of his fingers, lightly, a graze, a burning left in its path before his hand fell off the edge of my jaw.
“I can never look at a bird without thinking of you,” he said. “I wonder what you will do with your wings once you have found them. I wonder how far away they will take you. And I fear them, for my sake, at the same time that I hope for them, for yours.”
I drew in a breath, feeling the air shudder into my lungs, but could not find any words to speak. He had never touched me like this. He had never looked at me like this. He had never spoken to me like this. My hand crept up my throat, and I felt my burning cheek, sure that some fundamental change had occurred where he had touched it.
“Now,” he said, his voice low and husky, and he was gazing into my eyes without flinching, “are we even? Have I made myself vulnerable enough to suit you?”
I could have leaned into him and kissed him. He was that close to me. My heart pounded, and I found myself staring at his mouth. I gripped the stone wall behind me, telling myself not to reach for him, not to lift my lips to touch his, not to hold him tightly and tell him that I did not want to fly away from him.
We were fragile, the two of us, breathing the same air, caught in this taut moment of secrets and half-truths. I could sense how everything could go wrong with one misstep, one misspoken word. So I nodded and did not say a word, terrified to speak and ruin this thing we were trying to balance between ourselves—this fragile and deep and flammable friendship.
“Good,” Henry whispered, standing upright and backing up a step. I shivered in the sudden cold without the warmth of his nearness.
“Do you want to go inside?” he asked, noticing my chill.
“No. Let’s—let’s finish this here.” Awkwardness made me feel tongue-tied now. “You want to know why I object to marriage.”
“Actually, I’ve changed my mind. What I really want to know is why you’re afraid of love.”
My breath came sharply. I tried to laugh but couldn’t. He was not supposed to ask me that. He was not supposed to even know to ask me that. He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall, as if telling me that he would wait all night if he had to.
I crossed my arms too, wanting to protect myself, and took a deep breath. “My love is as a fever ...”
“You want to quote Shakespeare?” He shook his head. “You can do better than that.”
I glared at him, clenching my hands into fists. Anger was much less complicated than fear; defensiveness was much safer than vulnerability. “It is true, though. Love is like a disease. It ravages. It maims. It destroys everything in its wake. I am wise to shun the idea of it, just as wise as if I were to avoid a plague. It is a weakness of the human heart to imagine that something that starts with passion can last. Passion is a fire that burns and leaves nothing standing in its wake. It is illogical and unreasonable. Love is the downfall of men and the entrapment of women. It is a cage that once one enters, one can never escape.
“I have seen it time and time again. With my mother. With my father. With Eleanor. Now with Maria. It is a scourge to all that is tender and good. It is disloyal. It is no respecter of persons. It creates bondage, heartache, betrayal, resentment—” My breath caught unexpectedly, and I had to wait and swallow. I pressed a hand to my chest, where my heart ached so badly I could not breathe. “That is what I have seen of love. That is why I will avoid it. I will be wiser than my parents and my sisters and everyone else who was entrapped by a fleeting feeling and then made to suffer for it for the rest of their lives.”
Henry moved toward me, until I could see his face in the moonlight. It was full of aching and compassion and denial. “That is not love you speak of. You have seen the decay of the imitation of love. Your parents never loved. Your sisters never truly loved. I wonder if they’re even capable of it. But you, dear Kate ...” He shook his head. “You are not like them.”
But what if I am? I turned the question over in my mind, letting it tear me up with doubt, and then I looked up at the dark sky and sighed.
“I have given you my answer, Henry. Now it is your turn.”
I was looking away from him. I was looking at the stars, wishing I could turn back time and not eavesdrop at that ball. I was wishing I could remake our fortunes and change the families we had been born into.
I wasn’t prepared for the touch of Henry’s hand on mine. A jolt of surprise rushed through me, and my gaze flew to his face. He was watching me with a quiet intensity that made my heart race. He did not merely take my hand in his. He slipped his fingers around the back of my hand, his touch a caress as his fingers encircled my wrist, slid up my palm, then slipped between my fingers. My heart pounded as he lifted our joined hands and bowed his head and pressed a kiss to the back of my hand.
Panic pulsed through me with the racing rhythm of my heart. And something else, too. Some deep, slow melting that made me feel weak all over.
“Kate,” he whispered, stepping closer to me, “you are not like your mother. You are a different creature from your sisters. The depths of your soul are fathomless. You are brave and loyal and true. You have such a good heart.” He held my hand close to his chest and covered it with his other hand. “It is only afraid. But I would take such good care of it, love, if you would give it to me.” He bent his head and pressed his lips to my fingers.
I was all fire and fear and more fear inside. My heart threatened to bound out of my chest. My knees were weak from the melting that was happening within me. I trembled everywhere, and as my thoughts raced, I caught onto the first reasonable one I noticed.
In a shaking voice I said, “Thank you, but no.”
I felt him flinch. But when I opened my eyes, his face was turned from me, and he stepped away, letting my hand fall from his grip. I folded my arms into myself, feeling wounded and weak. His back was to me, and with his head tipped back I could see he was looking at the stars. Or perhaps it was the birds, nesting in the tower next to ours, that he watched.
After a long moment of silence between us, he reached for the lantern on the wall and said, “That’s two. Only one more to go.”
I nodded and pushed back the weakness that threatened my calm. This was what was supposed to happen. This would give me my dream—my trip to India. This was the right thing to do. We walked back through the secret passageway in silence, and the only words Henry spoke to me when he left me in the west wing were “Good night.”