Chapter 16
Sixteen
Every moon, the concubine bled, and her king consoled her by telling her she need not give him a child.
He meant to be kind.
He did not realize a child was something for him to give to her.
— The Concubine and Her King. Unpublished MS.
Henry had left a day after her and been a day behind her the whole way, no matter how often they’d changed horses, because when he’d first gone to her empty bedchamber and discovered her note to him, he had lost all sense of himself.
He’d forgotten he was once a damn good officer, and he should recognize a strategic retreat. He’d forgotten he was an earl, and he had the power to solve unsolvable problems. He’d even forgotten he was a man who should ensure the safety of the woman he loved.
Even if she didn’t want his love.
But in the middle of that long, dark, wretched night, beset by bullets that weren’t there and screams of silence, he had gone to watch Mina sleep.
And he had remembered a lonely, empty man who didn’t even know he had love to give when he had breached the front gate of a foundling hospital and demanded his granddaughter.
Henry Delamere came back to himself, left the nursery, woke his household, made the carriage ready, left at dawn.
Now he strode heedlessly under the ancient lychgate, waded through uncut grasses that reached above his boots.
The trunk of the stone elephant doused him as he went under it.
No matter. He was already soaked through from the summer rain.
He rounded the back corner of the church, stepped over stones, and—
Susannah.
She sat, huddled in a corner of the ruined church, as bedraggled and wet as he. She saw him and pulled her knees to chest and hugged them.
Susannah.
He made his way to her. The stones of the church floor had long ago been taken up in the transept, and it was all grass and dirt here. Still, he was careful of his knees as he lowered himself to the ground in front of her.
Susannah.
She kept her eyes down and said nothing, so he spoke first.
“I’ve been to Much Wemby. Wedding breakfast preparations going on there for your brother and the innkeeper’s daughter.”
“Yes. Tomorrow.” Still, she kept her eyes averted.
“And your brother did not thrash me as I expected. Instead, he told me where your cottage was, and I was on my way there, but as I passed this place,” he waved at the walls, “I wondered if you might be here. I became sure you must be.”
She looked at him for just a moment, her gray hair dark from the rain and clinging to her skull. Then she looked away again.
“And you were right,” she said.
“Susannah, why did you run away from me?”
Her fingers touched the stone next to her. He could just make out the letters PVDDLEWICK carved there.
“Puddlewick,” he said, to say something.
“The mason’s mark, I always thought,” she said.
“Why, Susannah?”
She shook her head.
“Look at me,” he said.
“I can’t, I can’t,” she cried out, writhing as if in pain.
He heaved himself up onto his knees and leaned forward and settled his hands on her shoulders. Firmly, but not tightly. Her body immediately stilled even as her head kept turning from side to side, her eyes avoiding his.
“Why can’t you look at me?” he asked.
“You’ll see me, you’ll see me!” Her voice was full of anguish.
“No, Susannah. You’ll see me.”
Slowly, her head turned towards him, and her eyes met his.
“Yes,” she whispered.
He attempted a smile. “Am I so horrible to look on, then?”
“No. You know you’re not. But, also, yes. Horrible, like a god of judgment.”
“You’ve looked on many gods?”
“No. But I have looked on many people who sat in judgment of me.”
“I won’t judge you.” Then, “I killed a man.”
He hadn’t known he was going to say it until the moment he did. He had thought he would die with that secret untold to anyone. He certainly didn’t think he would tell it to a woman whose love he sought.
Her forehead wrinkled. “You were a soldier.”
He shook his head, released her shoulders, and got off of his bloody fucking knees. He sat on his arse and rubbed at those useless knees.
“I wasn’t a soldier when I killed the man who had touched my son. And my only regrets are that I didn’t do it sooner, and I didn’t do it myself. I paid a very bad man to kill another very bad man.”
Her eyes had been wide and unblinking as he confessed. Now they narrowed, and he heard only the most heartfelt conviction when she said, “I’m glad you killed him. I’m glad you had someone kill him.”
He nodded.
“You did well,” she said.
Yes, the killing was a good. A month after Diana’s death and without the protection of her money or her person, her lover had found himself in jail, friendless. But Henry knew that a man might someday leave a cell, that men everywhere were corrupt.
It was most unfortunate that the poet took his own life in that cell. A great talent lost. His jailers never explained how he had obtained the knife to slit his own throat.
It had been the best money Henry had ever spent, but he should have spent it much sooner.
He had been narrow-minded and selfish, not thinking of other children, only his sons.
He had been a coward and not used the law, not wanted the scandal.
He could not have the Delamere name connected to this vileness.
But he should have taken the law into his own hands years ago, when he had first taken the boys from their mother.
So much innocence lost in those intervening years. He would live with that guilt forever.
And he had been a coward in more ways than one. He had not fought for his boys’ love. He had surrendered them to Diana so when evil had come sniffing around, he hadn’t been there to thwart it.
He’d been too late. Too late to protect Hal. Too late to repair things with him before he died. Too late.
“Was it Charles?” Susannah asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. But Hal . . .” He could only nod.
His nodding turned to weeping. He crumpled to his side, and she was over him, holding him. They lay like that in the rain, him sobbing, her holding him, pinning him to the earth. She put her cheek against his sleeve and kept her arms around him.
He shed the tears of decades. They fell from his face and into the grass where they mixed with the rain. He cried for himself, for Hal, for Charles. For Mina.
Then he cried for himself again and for his guilt. That wretched nightmare guilt that had shriveled him into almost nothing, a floating piece of ice in a dark sea.
But he felt Susannah against him. And he was grateful she was on this earth at the same time as he, that she existed.
Finally, his tears slowed. He wiped his nose with his sopping sleeve. He pushed himself up, and she came with him. When he was sitting again, she let go of him, but she was right next to him, facing him, her legs folded to the side. She was so close.
He would take anything she gave him.
“Thank you,” he said.
She shook her head. She put her fingers to his temple and stroked his hair there. “I’m the one who must thank you, love.”
If he had not just wept for half an hour, he would weep again.
“Love,” he said instead, stupidly.
“Yes. I love you,” she said.
He moved to kiss her, but she was moving towards him at the same time, and they knocked their foreheads together. But despite that, he got a hand on the side of her face, and they kissed.
“I love you,” he said, words he had only ever spoken to Mina before.
“Wait,” she said.
“Nothing you say can possibly change my mind.”
“Wait.” She took a deep breath. “The girl you’re planning to marry is my daughter.”
There was far too much in that sentence that was confusing, wrong, extraordinary. He wanted to close his eyes, to sort things in the darkness, but he couldn’t close his eyes because he wouldn’t be able to see Susannah and she might disappear, melt away in the rain.
“You have a daughter,” he said.
She held up two fingers. “I bore two. Twins.”
“My son had Mina outside of marriage. Did you think I would judge you for that?”
“It’s not the same for men.”
“It should be worse for men. They don’t bear the children. Not that it should be—”
He suddenly realized he had gone about this completely the wrong way round and had not yet contradicted the only thing that was all his to contradict.
“I’m not planning to marry any girl. Whom do you mean?”
“Emma D’Oyly.”
He quickly said, “I’m not marrying her.” Then, as gently as he could manage, “But she’s your daughter?”
The D’Oylys had never mentioned Emma was not of their blood. Perhaps they had thought it unimportant since Emma did not stand to inherit a title. Or perhaps it was a secret, even from Emma herself.
Susannah wrung her hands. “I left her at the kitchen door of the D’Oyly house twenty-nine years ago.
I knew I should leave my baby where people had money, but I never imagined— I thought maybe the cook or a groom’s wife would take her.
I didn’t know the D’Oylys had adopted her as their own until I saw her in your drawing room. I saw her and . . . knew.”
Henry conjured Emma in his mind. She did possess features that were not present in Sir John or his wife or Charlotte D’Oyly, but Henry would have never noticed on his own.
“She is like you. She’s very beautiful.”
“That’s her father, not me.” Susannah smiled a sad smile.
“Mr. Greenway?” he guessed.
She nodded. “He never—he never said we would marry, but I thought, of course, we would. Then I heard he had asked for Miriam’s hand when I was in the village one day, and I stormed into the inn, all rage and venom, and he said, he said, he said, why would he ever marry me?
I had a useless father, I had the boys, Dando was only six, and Ned wasn’t going to take that on, he needed someone to help him run the coaching inn. ”
He started to say something, but she put three fingers flat against his lips. “I must get through this.”
He kissed her fingers and nodded.