Chapter 2 #2
Jules had said Chester could go hang and she was right.
He could. He had to. Because every time he used Chester to get himself through a difficult conversation, every time he took whatever dark thought he was feeling and stuffed it down inside himself instead of examining it, he lost a little more of the man he wanted to become.
The one his wife deserved. The one—and here the realization struck him—he deserved to be.
He stared out the window, fighting the urge to douse himself in self-recrimination after self-recrimination. Self-loathing would do him no good now. Nor would self-pity or self-disgust. He needed to act, not stand here dumbly and list all the things he would not do.
But he still didn’t know what he should—
—And then he did know it, the action he ought to take crystallizing in his mind.
He could do what Julianna had asked of him.
The one thing she’d requested that he rejected out of hand because he hadn’t been ready to have that conversation.
The squeezing in his chest told him he still might not be ready. But he had to try.
He’d go to Torquay and speak with Thomas, tell him the truth about the accident and the Baroness and the morass of guilt that had been eating at him ever since. It was the last secret he had and he never wanted to keep another one.
And then he would go to Farrow Cottage after and beg her forgiveness.
If she didn’t want to see him, he would wait until she did.
He would stand outside her cottage gate like a moon-eyed pup until she asked him to leave.
He would—by Christ—he would get down on his knees in the dirt while dressed in his very best suit to help her plant seeds all day if that’s what she wanted.
He left the kitchens and found the Inspector for a few short words. And then he called for the coachman. He was going to Torquay.
The medical villa faced south, all the better for its patients to soak up the sea air and take in the view of the water.
It was, Fred had to admit as he walked into the building, quite beautiful.
The sun was warm over his head, glinting off the villa’s pale facade and winking off the gentle waves.
The sky was blue and dotted with clouds.
Picturesque and abundantly lovely—had the knot in his stomach not made him want to cast up his accounts.
He made his way inside the villa, where the proprietress showed him to the second floor balcony. Thomas was already seated there, where Fred had been told he spent most of his days.
Fred had to stop himself from taking a few stuttering steps back when he saw his old friend. Thomas was thin and frail, wrapped in a bundle of blankets despite the warmth in the air.
Fred had known tuberculosis was a wasting disease—everybody knew that—but it was quite a different thing to witness that wasting upon the skin of one he’d known as long and well as he’d known Thomas.
He cleared his throat and then announced as jovially as he could muster, “Farrow.”
Thomas turned to look at him. “What are you doing here?”
He struggled to raise himself to a seated position and Fred went to help him, ignoring Thomas’s cold, hostile gaze as he did.
“Did something happen to my sister? Or did you come here just to toss me about?”
“Give it a rest, Tom. I’m here to do what I should have done a long time ago.”
“Which is?”
Once he’d gotten Thomas upright, Fred let himself turn to look over the balcony at the lapping sea for just a moment. Then he turned back. “To tell you the truth.”
Thomas set his mouth into a sneer but whatever words he was about to say were suffocated by the cough that tore through him. He flailed out, reaching for one of the handkerchiefs stacked on the nearest table, but knocked them to the floor instead.
Fred leaned over to retrieve one and pressed it into Thomas’s hand. It came away from his mouth splattered with blood.
“Shall I get you tea, Tom?”
“No.” Thomas took a moment to recover himself but then said, “Why are you standing there, staring at me, Fred? Say what you have to say.”
Fred settled into the only other chair on the balcony while Thomas watched him with suspicious eyes. Fred opened his mouth but no words came out. He closed it and swallowed, feeling Chester trying to push his way forward. He shoved him back down. Then said, “It’s about Jules.”
“If this is about your newfound state of wedded bliss, I’d really rather not know the particulars.”
“It’s not. Or not how you might imagine.”
Thomas turned his head away as another cough rattled through him. “I don’t wish to imagine it at all.”
He took a deep breath and plunged in. “Tom, be quiet. Please. I have a story to tell you and you must hear me out in full before you interrupt. Can you do that?”
Thomas lifted his hand and waved it weakly, as if to say “speak, man.”
“Good. What I’m trying to say is that, the night of the accident, it wasn’t me driving the carriage.
” Thomas’s mouth twisted into a grimace but Fred just plowed on.
“I know you do not wish to hear me, Tom. I do know it. And I am aware that is my doing—it’s all my doing—because I haven’t been honest with you these last years. ”
“It’s been a goddamned decade,” Thomas spat out. “Why should anyone believe your change of heart now?”
“Because now”—and here Fred thought of Julianna and felt his heart lurch—“I am married to your sister and she has requested I tell you the truth. I was not driving that night. I was at the Hawthornes, yes. I was with the Baroness, yes. But I did not cause the accident that killed your parents.
“I came home, alone, and I found your carriage overturned. Yours and Eva’s.
I helped you out from beneath it and sent you on your way and then I carried Eva back.
We weren’t so very far from Sedgewick Manor then, and she weighed nearly nothing by that point.
She’d been out when she shouldn’t be and had been handling the reins when she was in no state to.
And I couldn’t—I couldn’t let her suffer anymore, Thomas, so I took the blame. I’m sorry I lied to you.”
“You hated your stepmother,” Thomas said. “Why in Christ’s name should I believe this asinine story of martyrdom now?”
“I hated her when I was ten years old, which you well know. I was a child. One who was grieving and angry because my father had died. I think—” Fred paused and looked at Thomas before shaking his head.
“Grief does such things to us. We are more alike than you might realize in that. Always so angry, always looking to blame. And while I do not wish to adjudicate my entire lifetime of bad choices with you now, I will ask you to consider this: how was it, Tom, that you got Jules home from the accident that awful night?”
“We took your mare,” Thomas said. “But it’s too late to ask for her back. We sold her ages ago.”
Fred ignored that bit of petulance. “Did you ever pause to consider why the mare was unharmed? Why she was saddled and bridled for a single rider? Why she wasn’t cut free like the carriage horses?”
He didn’t raise his voice when he urged, “Think it through, Tom. I was not holding the reins. I came upon that accident. The mare you took was tied to a tree several paces away.”
Thomas gave a short, bitter laugh that dissolved into a cough. “It’s very convenient that the worst thing ever to befall us is suddenly not your fault, isn’t it? Now that you’ve taken a liking to my sister.”
“Your sister is my wife. And a woman who can make her own choices without either of us involved. But I never said it wasn’t my fault. I said I wasn’t driving.”
“What is your point, Fred?”
Fred looked down at his oldest friend. He was still in there somewhere. He had to be.
“My point is that if I had been driving the barouche that struck your parents’ landau—if I had been at the reins, as I claimed—there would have been no mare for you to take back to Sedgewick Manor.”
“I understand that. It isn’t my brain that’s been wasted. What I want to know is why. Why you lied to us. Why you skulked away to the Continent, if not because you were guilty?”