Chapter Sixteen
She’d forgotten the intensity and extent of the devastation. She’d not thought she would. But somehow, over the course of the year, it had become muted. Not erased, just mitigated perhaps against the grief of her personal loss. Fleur stood in front of Quarmby’s Butcher Shop on Victoria Street, staring at the stone that marked the depth of the floodwaters. The water must have been six feet deep at least here.
‘Extraordinary,’ Jasper murmured beside her. Perhaps it was the very extraordinary quality of it that had indeed caused it to become muted. One could not live with such horror in full force day in and day out. But today, she felt she must. The reminder kept the need for justice fresh. Distance and time dulled the exigence and the pain.
Jasper was her rock as they walked the town. He listened to her recount the night and the days that followed. ‘In the dark, we could only hear it and in the morning we could see the wreckage it had left,’ she said as they turned towards the river where the damage had been greatest.
The weather was fair, an early summer day with blue sky overhead, but the weather could not disguise the lack of progress that had been made. After a year, the damaged bridge had not been rebuilt and several mills lining the river were still not operational. She understood the recovery effort would take time, that it was no easy task to dredge a river or to haul away machinery that weighed tons, or to bring in new building materials, draw up new plans and all that went with rebuilding. But that didn’t change the practical reality that every day a mill didn’t operate, people didn’t work, didn’t eat, didn’t provide for their family. Delays cost people money and jobs. Quietly, her heart went out to the families that continued to suffer residual effects of the disaster.
‘Whole mills collapsed that night,’ she explained as they walked. ‘Cottages gave way under the weight of the water flooding them. Mill equipment littered the streets along with livestock and furniture. All the pieces of people’s lives gone in a matter of minutes. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would have thought such destruction impossible.’
She told him about the dish cabinet with the blue set. ‘It was indiscriminatory, what was saved, what was lost, who lived, who died. The waters were no respecters of status or money. We learned later that there was a wealthy man, Jonathan Sandford. He had stock in the London Northwestern Railway. He was in the process of buying an estate and there was a rumour he had nearly four thousand pounds in his house the night of the flood, a small fortune. But he lost all of it and his life. His money was never recovered.’
She shook her head. ‘There are sadder stories than his, but his stays with me. He was successful, a good steward of his funds, he’d built a comfortable life for himself and his family. He was on the brink of attaining all he’d aspired for and there was no reason he should not have it. It took only thirty minutes for it all to be wiped away. A lifetime destroyed.’
She shot Jasper a strong look. ‘Logically, he should have had more. Science might offer sureties, but real life does not.’ Perhaps the story of Jonathan Sandford stayed with her because it was so much like Adam’s. Adam should have had more, too.
She traced the route of the river that night for him as their walk continued. She stopped every so often to write in a little book, making notes for an anniversary story. To keep interest in Holmfirth alive, it would be good to do a ‘where are they now a year later’ style story about how the villagers and townspeople had recovered and how they had not. Mills weren’t the only things that had been lost. Farmland had been lost, too. When they met people along the river road, she took a moment to interview them about their lives in the past year, their stories affirming the broader conclusions she’d drawn about the effects of the flood.
‘This is where Holmfirth gives way to Hinchliffe Mill.’ She paused at an unseen border. Water Street lay ahead. The one place she was most loath to go. She’d not even gone there in the days following the disaster. It hadn’t been possible. But now there was nothing holding her back except her own choice.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ Jasper said quietly at her side. All day he’d been her strength. He’d walked beside her, reliving the disaster with her and through her. He’d waited patiently as she’d interviewed people, showing empathy and making enquiries of his own. He’d been impressive. People had responded to him.
She had responded, too. Seeing his sincerity in action, directed at people he didn’t know, affirmed that Jasper Bexley was a good man. He would go with her to Water Street if she asked it. He’d probably go even if she didn’t ask because that’s who he was. And he was right. She didn’t need to go there. She could choose to turn around and go back to the Rose and Crown Inn, have her meetings, and return to Rosefields. Seeing Water Street would not impact her ability to investigate Lord Orion Bexley’s involvement.
‘I have to go,’ she said solemnly. It would bring a different type of closure than the closure she sought with her legislation and her call for justice. This would be a personal closure, maybe a chance to shut the book on her life with Adam, here at the place where they’d last been together.
‘Then we’ll go together.’ Jasper gripped her hand and they made the rest of the walk, slowly and with the dignity of a funeral dirge as if to endow the importance of the event with the respect it deserved.
Fleur did not know what she expected to see on Water Street. Something. Remnants of the place they’d rented, perhaps. It was an unexpected shock to see that there was nothing. Just a gap where the row of houses had been. A woman hurried past with a child. Fleur stopped her. ‘Madam, do you know if there’s any plan to rebuild these houses?’
Leery of a stranger, the woman shook her head and scurried on. But the impact of that headshake sent Fleur reeling. She’d come to Water Street, treating it as a pilgrimage, a chance to memorialise Adam and the others. But there was nothing she could make into a personal, mental shrine. Adam’s part in the tragedy had been entirely washed away, as if he’d never been, as if their stay on Water Street had never happened. There was no stone like the one at Mr Quarmby’s Butcher Shop to mark what had happened. A man had died here, a marriage had died here. The life she’d known had died here and there was no marker for it. Rage began to boil. That wasn’t right, that couldn’t be right. There had to be more.
‘Fleur, are you well?’ Jasper had a steadying hand at her back. ‘You’ve gone pale, perhaps you should sit down.’ Only there was no place to sit. ‘Or lean. Lean against me,’ he instructed. ‘I am worried you might faint.’
She took a shuddering breath. ‘I’m f-f-fine’, and felt his arm go about her. It took all her willpower not to sag into that embrace, to not simply give up.
‘I have seen fine, Fleur, and you most definitely are not,’ he scolded. ‘You’re also a poor liar.’
‘I am fine,’ she insisted, the need to argue bringing her some resilience. ‘It’s just the shock of seeing it. Or rather, not seeing it.’ Then, with his arm about her, concern for her clearly expressed in his eyes, the words began to come, how she’d stayed to play whist at Mrs Parnaby’s and the men had gone back early. Then came the words she’d not shared with anyone, not even Antonia and Emma. They’d had their own grief to bear. They hadn’t needed her grief and her guilt as well. There’d been no one else to tell. Besides, these were not things anyone wanted to hear.
‘I didn’t kiss him goodbye. I was angry with him. We’d argued earlier that evening. We argued a lot.’ Guilt jabbed hard. She should not have pushed Adam that night on the issue. Her anger rose. Guilt and anger pushed at her, the pressure of those emotions building. Why hadn’t she done better? Chosen better? If she’d only known. The strength of Jasper’s chest bore the brunt of her guilt, of her anger, her fists pummelling at an unseen enemy as the dam of her grief broke. ‘I should have been a better wife. If I had only known. I squandered our last hours. I should have apologised. I was too stubborn, too selfish.’ She sobbed.
‘What did you fight over?’ Jasper’s voice was soft at her ear, calming as his hands ran over her back in a smoothing motion.
‘A baby.’ She drew a harsh, ragged breath. ‘I thought I was pregnant. Adam didn’t want the child and I said horrible things to him.’ She rocked against him, the horror of those memories sweeping her. ‘He told me I was asking the impossible, that it was selfish for me to want a child, to put that burden on him when he didn’t want it. I told him he loved himself more than me, that he was cruel and self-centred. That I was sorry I’d ever married him.’
A wail escaped her. What an awful thing to say to someone. She’d never said anything of that magnitude to him before. ‘I didn’t mean it.’ She gulped for air. ‘I swear I didn’t mean it, but I didn’t get to apologise.’ Now he was gone, the house where they’d fought was gone. She would never get to make reparations to him directly. The best she could do was to seek justice.
‘Breathe, Fleur. Just breathe. It will be all right.’ Jasper repeated the mantra over and over, until he felt her body quiet and still against him. He would be calm for her sake. For his, though, he was boiling with rage. He wanted to do harm to Dead Adam. Too bad the man was already beyond his efforts. How dare a man make his wife doubt her place with him?
She lifted a tear-stained face. ‘I wonder if he hated me in the end? I can’t bear the idea that he died hating me, resenting our life together. It wasn’t all bad. We were in love. Most of the time.’
He could give her obliteration, but he could not give her what she really wanted: absolution. He had not known Adam Griffiths, had no guess as to what Adam had thought or felt. He had no insight to offer that wouldn’t sound like naive platitudes, that of course Adam loved her. Hell, he had no idea. But his heart broke just a little further. Damn Adam Griffiths and his work-obsessed heart. If he had such a woman as Fleur Griffiths, Jasper would be damned sure he made time for her, that he gave her children, as many as she wanted. ‘You’ve done enough for today. Let me take you home, Fleur.’ Home to Rosefields where they could walk in the peace of the garden, talk on the terrace in the still of the evening and make love in the bedroom until the hurt was eased.
‘I am sorry I went to pieces,’ Fleur said quietly as they took in the garden by starlight, sitting on the stone bench where they’d sat the night before. ‘I had not expected to see it all gone. The finality of that was overwhelming. I thought I had come to grips with it, with all of it. I was wrong. Sometimes the grief just comes out of nowhere.’ Even now her voice trembled a bit.
‘You needn’t apologise. When my father died I felt much the same way. Everyone was looking to me as the new Marquess. They expected me to be strong, to make decisions, to immediately step into my father’s shoes. It was, as you say, overwhelming. There was no time for me to grieve privately. I imagine it was much the same for you with the newspapers to run.’
And she would not have given herself a break to adjust. It wasn’t her way. In the time he’d known her she was always at work. She’d been ‘at work’ at the Harefield’s ball, garnering Parliamentary support. The only time she’d not been at work had been the night he’d met her at the theatre. She worked because it was what she knew, because it was what she and Adam had done together. Maybe it was part of her grieving, a tribute to him. Jasper wasn’t sure Adam deserved such a tribute.
‘How did your father die?’ She leaned her head against him and he took a quiet pleasure from their closeness and the ease of it.
‘He got pneumonia one winter and never recovered. One would not think a cough would bring down such a man as he was, always out riding, exercising. He seemed invincible to me.’ Jasper smiled at the remembrance.
‘Adam seemed invincible to me, as well.’ She sighed. ‘I thought there was nothing he couldn’t do. But I learned otherwise. He was not so perfect. His newspapers were in debt before I took them over and he didn’t tell me. He left me with a struggling newspaper empire, he left me alone and without a family, and there are days when I am furious with him for it. You see, I am truly terrible. I am angry at a dead man who left me behind to sort out his mess. Then I get mad at myself for being mad at Adam.’
He pressed a kiss to the top of her head. ‘You are not terrible. You are human, you are honest and something bad happened to you, something unpredictable and unanticipated.’ And it had changed the trajectory of her life. He would not have met her if it hadn’t happened. But other things wouldn’t have happened either. His brother would not be in jeopardy. It was a reminder that while today had been tense with its remembrances, tomorrow would be more so.
‘What would you like to do tomorrow?’ he asked quietly. They had yet to meet with the regional bank where Orion kept his accounts. The accounts would tell a critical truth about Orion’s culpability. In his heart he hoped that they might delay that visit because of what the revelations might do to them. He wanted more time with her before that happened, more time to think about how to survive this because every day he was with her, the more he wanted that: to survive this latest crisis with this relationship intact.
She thought for a moment, perhaps weighing the choices and consequences as he had done, perhaps, he dared hope, she wanted the same thing. After a while she said, ‘I want to stay here and write, if that’s acceptable? I thought we might also draft that bill for better dam oversight.’
He allowed himself the luxury of relief. He would have her, them, for a while longer. Of course, she would seek refuge in work. After seeing the wreckage, still so visible after a year, it was clear that the region needed help and that something had to be done to prevent other disasters. But there was something else in her eyes that he understood and it warmed him even as he recognised it as a delaying tactic. She, too, wanted more time. With him. Not the Marquess. Just him.
Fair enough. He wanted more time with her, enough time to sort through what happened next, after the accounts revealed a truth that would support one of them and dash the hopes of the other. How could he navigate the outcome without losing her—her sharp wit, her intelligence, her forthright nature, temper and all, without losing her presence in his life. There were so many ways to lose her...and, he suspected, his heart. He’d not meant for that to happen.
Jasper lost no time in planning the days they did have together. After all, she wouldn’t write the whole day every day. He took her riding in the mornings, something she hadn’t done since she’d left her aunt and uncle’s, and watched her delight at being on horseback, cantering across Rosefields’s meadows. Morning rides turned into afternoon picnics beneath a June sky. There were strawberries to pick and stories to tell, of his childhood and hers. In the evenings there were al fresco dinners for two on the terrace and strolls in the garden, punctuated by stolen kisses and the final stroll upstairs to their bed accompanied by two realisations: the longer he was here with her the more obvious it was to him that he was falling in love and that each day moved them closer to the end. This could not last for ever.
‘I wish we could stay here for ever.’ Fleur stretched beside him on the picnic blanket one lazy afternoon when the blue sky was greyer than it had been lately. There were more clouds and they’d been playing the child’s game of seeking shapes.
‘Well, why not? We have food,’ he teased, reaching for the strawberries in a bowl. He popped one into her mouth. ‘We have a large blanket between us. We have each other.’ He grinned wickedly. There was no chance of being bored with Fleur. ‘What more could we want?’ He fed her another strawberry from their freshly picked horde. ‘I am glad you like it here. I’ll say it again, Rosefields suits you.’ And it suited him to have her here, to share this important place with her.
She turned on her side to face him, her auburn braid falling over one shoulder, her expression content. ‘It reminds me of my aunt and uncle’s home, only Rosefields is a much grander scale. My uncle had an endless amount of bridle trails. He was the master of the hunt for our bucolic corner of the world and I had a pony from the first day I came to live with them.’
Fleur gave a soft laugh. ‘My uncle took me to show me the stables before my aunt had a chance to even show me my room. He had a beautiful white pony waiting for me. I named her Sweetie and I thought she looked like a unicorn minus the horn.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘Sweetie became my best friend. She was exactly what a lonely little girl needed to start life in a new place.’
Jasper threaded his fingers through hers, taking advantage of the moment. Fleur had never talked before so specifically of her childhood, of life before Adam. ‘How old were you?’ It was the first of many questions he wanted to ask.
‘Eight. Old enough to know that something bad had happened, old enough to remember my life before and old enough to know everything was going to change.’ She shook her head. ‘I didn’t want it to change. I wanted my parents to come home. I wanted to stay at my house. Uncle’s house was larger, but I liked our manse with its ivy-covered brick walls, and Papa’s messy study and Mama’s tiny parlour.’
Jasper could imagine how uncertain the world must have felt for an eight-year-old. His own world had felt unstable when his father died and he’d had the benefit of being twenty-two. Perhaps we’re never old enough to lose our parents, he thought. ‘How did they die?’ he ventured softly.
‘It’s quite dashing, really. They were in the Mediterranean on one of Papa’s explorations—he was a cartographer—and their ship was boarded by pirates. Papa was also quite good with a sword and he stood to fight. It didn’t go his way. So, I became a permanent resident at my uncle’s.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Jasper meant it. He gave her a considering look, a new understanding of Fleur Griffiths emerging: a woman who’d first been a girl betrayed by love. She’d lost her parents, then she’d lost her aunt and uncle, then she’d lost her husband.
‘I was, too, but I also know I was lucky. It was an entrée into a whole new lifestyle. I went from being raised as a country gentleman’s daughter to being raised as a baron’s daughter. Life changed, opportunities changed and so did expectations.’ She’d mentioned those expectations before. Perhaps it was no wonder she’d been protective of herself in this relationship, less willing to give of herself emotional than physically. Until the day in Holmfirth, she’d kept her emotions—all except anger—on a tight leash.
In that regard, she was not any different than himself. He, too, felt betrayed by love. He, too, tiptoed around embracing sentimental emotions. And yet, here they were on a picnic blanket beneath a summer sky, falling for one another, their worlds turned upside down by the one thing they’d sought to avoid. It made no sense. It lacked all logic. Until one looked beyond social trappings of position and circumstance. In their hearts, they were alike: their hopes, their fears, the things they valued at their core like integrity, honesty and truth. The realisation shook him. It made him reckless.
‘I want to be your Sweetie. I want to be like that pony at your uncle’s. I want to be the person that makes it possible for you to step into your new life, the safe place you can run to when the world is too much.’ In this moment, he wanted that with all his being—to be hers, to make up for the disappointments with Adam, for the loss of her aunt and uncle who had stood by her until she chose a different path.
There was a flare of alarm in her eyes; she was rearing back even as he was reaching forward. ‘You should not want that,’ she warned. ‘I lose everyone I love.’
Did she love him?
He knew she meant it as a caution, but his heart sang at the implication. He would not press her on it. She would only retreat, only throw up her guard. He would instead quietly treasure the near-admission and the knowing that he was not in this struggle alone. But her next words tore at his heart. ‘I sometimes wonder if I deserve the right to love again. I bungled it so badly with Adam, with my aunt and uncle.’
Anger sparked in him on her behalf. ‘Why ever would you think that?’
She sat up and he sat up, too, ready to reach for her, to comfort her. ‘My aunt and uncle gave me everything, every advantage, treated me as their own, and I disappointed them by marrying down, by not advancing the family.’
He took her hand. ‘Love doesn’t work that way. If there is any fault it is theirs. Love is not conditional. If it were, I would have stopped loving Orion a long time ago. He was a difficult brother and I failed him, too. I wasn’t ready to be a father and brother to a teenage boy. But we’ve forgiven each other for our shortcomings.’ He paused. Adam was a different matter. ‘It is all right your marriage wasn’t perfect. How could it have been when people aren’t perfect?’
‘I was selfish. I wanted more than he could give,and I was not content with that.’
He would not let her get up from this blanket believing that. Jasper pushed a strand of loose hair behind her ear and tipped her face towards his. He wanted her to look at him when he told her the truth he saw. ‘He could give less and so you gave more.’ Jasper called on everything she’d told him about her years with Adam Griffiths. ‘He wanted to work and so you worked alongside him. He went to the paper daily and so did you. You wanted to be a collector of stories, but you made yourself into a reporter to fit his world. You gave up your lifestyle, your ambitions, your family, your dreams for him. That is not selfish.’
If anyone had been selfish it had been Adam Griffiths. The man had either been selfish and arrogant or he’d been entirely oblivious to his wife’s sacrifices. ‘Worst of all, Fleur, you’re still doing it. You’re running a newspaper syndicate, wearing yourself to a nub trying to overcome his debt. Where is your life in that? What, my darling, do you want? When do you reach out your hands and take it?’
For the second time since they’d arrived at Rosefields, Fleur Griffiths was crying. He had her in his arms, consoling her, but he did not regret sharing the hard truths in an attempt to reshape the narrative she carried in her head. When she told her story he wanted her to tell it right—with herself as the strong, resilient, selfless woman at its core. And he wanted to be there in that story beside her.
‘You mustn’t say such things, Jasper. I hurt the people I love and I will hurt you, too—you know it’s true.’ There it was again, that implication that she loved him.
‘No, I don’t know that,’ he argued fiercely. ‘You haven’t hurt me yet, nothing unrecoverable at least. I have a new set of tumblers on order,’ he tried to joke. But he knew what they faced. The trials to date were nothing compared to the last trial that loomed before them. Still, they had a good record of overcoming differences. Just maybe, they’d overcome this one, too. And they were stronger now—surely that worked in their favour as well.
‘I don’t want this to be over,’ she whispered against his shirt.
‘Then it won’t be.’ He hugged her close. He would find a way to prove to her that she deserved a second chance at love, that they deserved each other even as their personal Armageddon loomed.
She drew a shaky breath. ‘We can’t get over it if we don’t go through it.’ By ‘it’ she meant the bank, Orion’s records. So the time had come. Their Rubicon called.
He nodded, his grip about her tightening. ‘We’ll go tomorrow.’ Then they’d be on the other side of it. They’d know what their future looked like. He’d not come out on this picnic imagining it to be their last before...the bank. Perhaps it was better this way, to have the decision made without planning and posturing, without argument and formal consideration but instead here in the quiet of the afternoon, after picking strawberries and talking of childhood. The biggest moments of one’s life didn’t always come with a blare of trumpets but on the whisper of suggestion.
‘It will be all right, Fleur. We will find a way to survive it.’ He breathed the words into her hair as thunder rumbled in the distance, presaging a summer storm as if the weather understood just how momentous tomorrow would be.