Chapter 7 #2
“Sssh!” Arabella warned, drifting further into shadow to ensure she could not be seen. Alexander followed, to obscure himself, whilst remaining respectably distanced.
He smiled a little, teasingly. “Then you do care if I get caught ...?”
His flippancy in the light of such seriousness provoked a torrent of anger through Arabella’s veins. “Only if the magistrate apprehends you before I get my chance to do so!”
Even as she spoke the words, she recoiled at her bitter delivery. Alexander’s smile dropped, and he kicked idly at a stone on the ground.
“I did intend to contact you. To explain the volatile predicament. To suggest you join me …”
Hope flickered in Arabella’s eyes, for that was the exact fantasy she had entertained whenever she dreamed their lives had played out differently. Despite her determination to remain stoic with him, her words betrayed her.
“That was my dream,” she swallowed as she softened.
“That you had to immediately escape but would send for me after. When I was called aside by Marcus days after your disappearance, I believed it was for him to communicate your location and that you were asking for me. I would have gone, Alexander. Certainly, I would have missed my sister and my friends terribly, but in truth, I would willingly have left everything behind to follow you.”
Alexander stepped towards her again, misjudging her affectionate words. Arabella’s face fixed back to a stern frown as she stepped away again.
“But that was then, Alexander. Can you imagine the pain—believing I was being summoned to plan our reunion, only to be told of your death? It was utterly devastating.”
“I am so sorry, Arabella, to have put you through such turmoil–” Alexander balanced his weight on the tips of his toes, poised to go to her, yet holding back, knowing that any physical attempt at consolation would be rebuffed.
“No matter with all that now.” Arabella whisked her hand brusquely through the air, dismissing that time that felt too painful to recall. “What changed, Alexander? Why did a plot for integration develop into a conspiracy to have everybody believe you were dead?”
Alexander shook his head with regret. “Marcus made that call. He decided it was better for the authorities to classify me as deceased so that they wouldn’t persist in hunting me down. He was protecting me.”
“He couldn’t have installed me with you before declaring you dead?”
Arabella’s eyebrows were raised in consternation, and her vocal pitch was high as she appealed to him.
“Truly, Marcus had already announced my death before his letter reached me, asserting that he intended to do so. I had no say in the design.”
Arabella focused on a point on the ground between them, processing this.
“Then it was not your decision to purposely leave me?” Her voice cracked a little as she asked.
“I never wanted to leave you, Arabella. I wanted to marry you.”
Arabella noted the past tense of this statement and steeled herself against it. There would be plenty of hours in her bedchamber to cry over that particular loss in solitude; now was not the appropriate setting. She needed to remain strong.
“Could Thomas not have revealed the truth to me? Perhaps I could have followed on after …?”
“Marcus decided it was too perilous. Suspicion would be raised if my fiancée disappeared quite suddenly after my own demise, being a wanted man.”
Arabella could see the sense in this, but it did nothing to quell her fury at the injustice of the situation.
“Well, thank you, Alexander, for sacrificing me!” Arabella wailed in a whisper-voice.
“Arabella, please!” Alexander reached out a hand in a gesture of petition.
“Tell me, pray do, of your thoughts upon the news I was to marry your cousin, Edmund?”
Alexander blinked at the question, struggling to articulate the complexities of that reaction.
“Were you relieved, Alexander? That you no longer had to shoulder the guilt and burden of my abandonment?” Arabella agitated his conscience.
“No,” Alexander breathed heavily through his nose, suggesting he had much to say on the matter.
“Oh.” Arabella raised her eyebrows, teasingly. “Were you happy for us?”
Alexander swallowed hard. “No.”
Arabella frowned.
“Eventually,” Alexander elaborated. “I tried to be. Edmund is a good man … he was a good man, God rest his soul.”
Alexander noticed how tears sprang into Arabella’s eyes, and it hit him afresh that she had lost one fiancé and one husband, within a short period of just three years.
“I understood how he must love you. I fell in love with you—how dare I be so presumptuous as to assume I was the only one to be so captivated by you? So, I made my peace with it. He was a good man who loved you and could make you happy when I could not.”
“He did not love me, Alexander!” Arabella told him firmly.
Alexander looked stunned.
“He was a generous, altruistic soul who wished me not to live out my life as a scandalous woman. He saved my reputation out of his familial fondness for you. He was a good man. But he did not love me.”
Alexander’s mouth had fallen open, hardly able to believe this revelation.
“I suspected it was a marriage of convenience, due to the speed at which it was carried out, following my disappearance. But I assumed he also loved you. Because—" Alexander pouted, considering his words carefully. “How could he not?”
Arabella felt a smile tease at her lips, but she reined it in. Alexander always knew how to say sweet words to her, and she determined not to be won over by his affectionate quips.
“Have you said all you wanted to?” Arabella straightened herself up.
Alexander seemed to falter, doubting his next lines, before drawing himself upward and taking a deep breath.
“Among all lovely things my Love had been; Had noted well the stars, all flowers that grew–”
A panicked rage welled up in Arabella’s chest. “No, Alexander! You have no right!”
He stopped talking immediately, and his slackened jaw suggested he recognized reciting their poem had been a mistake.
“Do not try to take me back there,” Arabella asserted. “I was there for so long without you. I was left behind, unable to move forward, and you were gone. You had a choice, Alexander, and you left. You relinquished any right to entice me with romantic association!”
Alexander dropped his head, accepting this castigation.
Silence fell between them, but it crackled with the tension of their repressed emotions.
Arabella looked back across the wide expanse of lawn. “If you have said all you needed to, I shall return to the house–”
“I have not,” Alexander halted her. “Please—could we sit?” He gestured towards the stone bench, and his sparkling eyes held the weight of the memory. Neither of them could look at that bench without recalling his proposal and how she’d cried as she accepted.
“I’m perfectly comfortable standing.”
Alexander nodded just once and steadied his breathing before launching into his new narrative.
“Thomas and I are working to clear my name.”
Arabella inhaled sharply, and her hand flew to her chest. Alexander looked up at her through his eyebrows.
“Please say you know that I did not kill my father.”
Arabella swallowed and nervously whispered, “I never doubted your innocence, Alexander.”
He closed his eyes momentarily, as though he had wished to hear those words from her for three whole years. Perhaps he had, Arabella considered.
“Thank you,” he muttered before continuing, “I expressed to Thomas how I am living a half-life in exile. I am merely surviving. There is no joy, no hope. Coming home here, seeing Mother, seeing you …”
His eyes twinkled, and Arabella had to look away because it hurt too much to see the pain and want in his eyes.
“… I have nothing to lose by staying here undercover and working to expose who murdered my father. If we can prove it, I will again be a free man.”
Arabella blinked, unable to articulate the whirlpool of tumultuous emotions his revelation provoked.
“I wanted to ask you, Arabella—whilst I am aware that you owe me nothing and likely feel that you want to hand me over to the authorities yourself, such is your anger, and rightfully so—but …”
Arabella tilted her chin defiantly, soliciting his request.
“Please do not tell anybody you have seen me–”
Arabella huffed as though she was insulted. “But of course I have not told anybody, nor will I!”
“I appreciate that, very much. But also—may I ask you to help me?”
This question struck Arabella in the heart. Alexander had always been such a capable young man, independent and resilient. She had never heard him ask for help, and she felt a surge of compassion towards him for saying it.
“Yes, I will help,” she answered before she had even allowed herself a moment to think through the implications.
Alexander straightened in surprise. “You will?”
“Of course.” It seemed to be the only option to Arabella, and she was surprised by the idea that he had thought she would decline.
Alexander stepped forward, smiling, and Arabella, once again, stepped back, widening the distance between them. She held up her hand as a boundary.
“My cooperation does not equate forgiveness, Alexander.”
“No. No, of course, I understand that, and I am not requesting your forgiveness …” he stammered as he reluctantly stepped away once more.
“And forgiveness—should it ever materialize—would not equate reconciliation.”
Alexander hung his head, fully admonished.
“I understand.”
Arabella blinked back a wetness that had impulsively sprung to her eyes. She felt grateful that Alexander was looking at the ground and did not see.
She stole that moment to look upon him, unobserved. The broad slope of his muscular shoulders, the thick shiny hair on his bowed head. She wanted so much to go to him but held herself firm.
“How shall I be of help?” Arabella asked, and Alexander returned his gaze to her face in earnest.
“Thomas and I have particular conversations to launch and research to carry out amongst ourselves, but I will meet you here again in three nights’ time, and hopefully then we will have a plan.
I am so grateful to you, Arabella–” Alexander extended his hand to demonstrate his thanks, but Arabella merely looked down upon it and then back up into his face.
“I will see you in three nights,” she responded coldly. “Good night, Alexander.”
Arabella forced herself to look away from him, turn, and stride in the opposite direction, back towards the grand house.
“Good night, Arabella,” she heard him softly say, and the wistfulness in his voice caused her to close her eyes and blink back the tears.