Chapter 13
Caroline searched until she found Jackson working in the barn.
He looked up from the stall he was repairing and narrowed his eyes at her.
She strode right up to him as he rose from a squat. “Why did you marry Amanda?”
Shame flashed through his eyes, and he looked away.
“All those years, you called on me, wrote to me—I want an answer, Jackson.”
His shoulders slumped, then he lifted his head and looked her in the eye. “Amanda lost her virtue. I married your sister to save her reputation.”
The answer gave her pause, but not for long. Her anger at Jackson was compounded for seducing her sister and renewed toward Amanda for giving in to him. “My father didn’t question your choice?”
“No. I convinced him that, though I adored both of you, I felt Amanda was the more suitable choice to be my wife. The three of us had spent so much time together over the years, he accepted my answer.”
“I can’t believe he didn’t challenge your reasons at all.”
“He suspected there was more to the story—your father’s no fool—but he trusted me enough to know that if Amanda had been compromised, I would do the honorable thing and protect her.”
She scoffed. “Very convenient, considering you were the one who compromised her.”
Jackson’s mouth fell open, his face frozen in a look of complete incredulity. “I didn’t lie with your sister. How could you even think such a thing?”
“I’ve seen Noah. The resemblance is undeniable.”
Jackson stuffed his hands in his pockets and stared at the toes of his boots.
Caroline crossed her arms and waited until he lifted his head.
“There’s a family resemblance,” he said, as if he had to lasso each word and drag it out, “because Noah’s father is Ross.”
Caroline felt her lips part in shock. How had she not noticed before? The shape of Noah’s face could just as easily be Amanda’s, but the color of his eyes—pale, like clouds viewed through green glass—they were Ross’s.
“When I visited you in the garden,” Jackson went on, “that was the first time I’d set foot in Greenvale since I enlisted. Noah was born in February, not May, when the announcement was sent. Count the months, Caroline. I couldn’t have sired him. I was still at war.”
Now her emotions were a jumble. Ross deserved the lion’s share of her rage—he’d acted abominably, the shameless libertine. But what about Jackson and Amanda? They’d made choices, too. And theirs had left deep wounds.
She held Jackson’s gaze without blinking. “Did Amanda pressure you?” No matter how he answered, the words would hurt. Either her sister had coerced the man she loved away from her, or Jackson’s feelings had been shallow and easily diverted.
“No,” he said in a soft voice. “She slipped a note into my correspondence while paying a call on my mother, asking me to meet her by the boathouse at the lake, but she disguised her hand, so no one would know. In truth, I had no clue whom I was meeting.
“I went armed and did reconnaissance, in case an enemy from the war had come to do me harm. But it was only her, looking fretful. She asked me where Ross was, and when I told her I didn't know, she broke down and told me she was pregnant with his child.”
“And you believed her?”
“Yes. Amanda wasn’t the type of woman to lie about a thing like that.”
No. She wasn’t. “But she knew I loved you, and she stole you from me.”
“She didn’t steal me. I proposed. And, even then, she refused.”
“Apparently not strenuously enough.”
The guilt in Jackson’s eyes was indisputable, but he looked at her head-on, as if inviting her to search his face for doubt. “Turning my back on you was the hardest thing I ever had to do, but Ross was nowhere to be found. I couldn’t let Amanda suffer because of my brother’s dishonorable behavior.”
“Why didn't you tell me?”
“I was so focused on protecting her reputation, I couldn't think past that to anything else. I was afraid if I told a single person, it would open a Pandora's Box and lead to her ruin.”
“That's no excuse. I would have kept her secret, and you know it.”
“I reached the same conclusion, but when I tried to... there was never a good time.”
“You should have told me. If you had, I wouldn't have spent the last six years hating myself.”
“Hating yourself? Why?”
“For thinking you loved me. For being a fool and not seeing that you loved my sister instead.”
“But that wasn't the truth.”
“In the absence of another reason, what else was I supposed to think?”
Jackson stood mute, his voice—his very breath—choked by crippling regret.
After Caroline’s father had announced the engagement, and she’d fled, he’d stood by the window overlooking the garden and heard the faint echo of stifled sobs.
The words were nearly to his lips to excuse himself from the room, when the hopelessness of the situation threw his mind into a violent waking dream of the ambush that had nearly cost him his leg.
He'd gripped the sill and prayed no one would see him sweat and shake. Caroline wasn’t a threat, but her garden had morphed into a Gettysburg field full of lurking enemies.
By the time he’d forced his mind back to reality, he was afraid to step foot outside, afraid the smell of dirt and brush would throw him into the nightmare all over again.
Jackson despised the hold the war had on him.
He hated that it had turned him into a coward.
He regretted most of all that this ill-named ‘Soldier’s Heart’ had incapacitated him at a critical moment and hurt his precious Caroline. He hadn’t forced himself to go to her, hadn’t looked her in the eye and explained. Now, he’d spend the rest of his life wishing he had.
She glared at him with eyes full of resentment and pain. “I fully expected you to come out of my father’s study and announce your engagement to me. Instead, you chose Amanda. And all you told me—all either of you told me—was that you were sorry.”
“We were. I am.”
“Well, sorry’s not enough. I lay awake every night for months, wondering if I’d gone mad. I endured countless torturous hours, wondering if I’d imagined the affection between us, imagined the way you looked at me when you came home from the war.
“You hurt me, Jackson. You broke my heart. I have never felt so betrayed and so abandoned as I did the day you married my sister instead of me.”
Jackson’s throat closed up, and his chest burned with shame at the depth of pain he’d inflicted.
He blinked back tears of his own as he stared at the ones filling Caroline’s eyes.
When he finally got his voice to work, it was low and rough.
“I tried to tell you before I left, when we were standing by the coach, but you refused to even let me say goodbye.”
“You could have told me in a letter,” she replied in a voice that was as broken as his.
“I couldn’t risk it falling into the wrong hands. I hated leaving things that way, but I truly thought you’d figure it out, and I told myself you’d get over me sooner if I left you alone.”
“I’ll never get over you, as long as I live,” Caroline said in a low, anguished voice hardened by anger. “You did the honorable thing when it came to my sister, but you destroyed me.”
She turned and strode away, leaving a void that sucked the air from his lungs.
Caroline fled the barn and ran all the way to the house. She couldn’t stay at Jackson’s any longer. Being near him hurt too much.
She came upon Celia in the kitchen, chopping potatoes. “I need a favor,” she said, pasting on a smile and swiping the moisture from under her eyes.
Celia’s hands stilled as soon she looked Caroline full in the face. “I’ll oblige if I can.”
“May I ride with you to town?”
“Of course, you may.” She narrowed her eyes. “Those tears are not the kind shed over a grave. Does Missa Maguire need a sound thrashin’?”
A chuckle burst forth on a hiccup. “Maybe, but I don’t think it would do any good.”
Celia tilted her head and pressed her lips together then went back to chopping.
“I’m probably oversteppin’, and I don’t know if tellin’ you will make things better or worse, but…
” She lifted her head and held Caroline’s gaze firm and steady.
“Missa Maguire talked about you, back when we was at war. He hads to be tough in front of his men, but he could be hisself with me. He wrote you every chance he got, and your name—not your sister’s—crossed his lips more times than I can count. ”
Caroline swallowed down the sudden urge to cry. “I’m going upstairs to rest,” she said, unable to keep the quaver out of her voice. “Please, come get me before you leave.”
Every emotion, from bitterness to regret, poured out as soon as she shut the bedroom door. Jackson had loved her, and knowing that made the ache in her heart a hundred times worse.
Jackson slumped onto a wooden crate, wishing Caroline had never sought him out and demanded an explanation.
He’d lived all these years, stalked by her shadow, wondering with each sunrise if this would be the day the truth came out.
It felt good to be free of the dread, but what purpose had telling Amanda’s secret served?
Caroline’s heart was still as broken, and his was gouged anew.
Light spilled into the dark space as Noah burst through the door. He marched up to Jackson and planted his fists on his hips. “Aunt Caroline is leaving.”
“She said that?”
“No. Miss Celia did.” Noah huffed a breath through his nose. “Did you tell her she had to go?”
“No.”
“Well, you musta done something to upset her. Miss Celia said Aunt Caroline up and decided she’s going back to town with her. And ever since she told me that, she’s been all outta sorts and muttering under her breath. You’re the only one who makes Miss Celia that angry.”
Jackson pushed himself up from the crate. “I’ll talk to her.”
“Which her?”
“Both of them, I guess.”
Noah ran ahead, but Jackson’s steps dragged like a dull plow through hardpack. He’d buried a worse secret than the one he’d just told, a secret he’d never revealed to anyone, not even Amanda. He doubted it would change things, but maybe, if Caroline knew, she wouldn’t hate him so much.