Chapter 5
“Why did you come back?” Sibby demanded. She had asked him that three times now. He choked on an answer and filled her bowl with stew. Hungry as she was, she licked her lips and stared at it, sending a frisson of desire through him.
This isn’t the time for that, Caulfield.
“Slice that bread, if you please, Sibby. There’s a bigger question than the one you asked.”
She did as she was asked, her brow drawn up in a question. She didn’t speak.
“You never asked me why I left. Maybe we should start there.” He accepted a plate with slices of warm bread she had slathered with butter. It ought to be delicious, but he had never felt less like eating in his life. Considering some of the things he had endured, that was saying much.
Sibby waved her spoon in the air. “You disappeared. I went to the fishing shack the afternoon after the one when we, erm, enjoyed each other, expecting to see you, but you never came.”
Her face and tone made it a bald accusation of desertion. They had been young, so very young. Seth opened his mouth and closed it again.
“All right, then why. Why did you disappear without a word, and why did you reappear?” She put her spoon down and glared.
“Why not ask your brother?” he retorted.
“Samuel? What does he have to do with it?”
“You really don’t know?”
Suspicion flooded her expression. “Tell me,” she whispered.
He sank against the back of his chair. “I went to Somerton Hall to ask your father’s permission to marry you.”
“You felt honor bound.” Sibby didn’t appear pleased by that notion.
“I loved you desperately,” he shouted and drew in breath to calm himself. “I wanted you so badly I went, hat in hand, like a damned fool and offered to marry a viscount’s daughter and live with her over a store.” He shook his head at the innocent he’d been.
“He threw you out, and you ran. I’d have run with you if you had asked.” More accusation laced with hurt echoed in the words.
“Oh no. Your father was shrewder than that. He knew you were young and obstinate enough to try it. He beat me with a horse whip and turned me over to Samuel.”
“Samuel? My brother always resented you. You were smarter than he for one thing. Did he beat you as well?”
Seth grunted. “Samuel and the stable master were none too gentle when they hogtied me, bound me over a horse, and took me to Great Yarmouth. They gave me to a press gang.”
Sibby blinked, and her chin quivered. “Press gang? Forced into the navy?” She put her serviette on the table and swallowed.
“No one told me. I don’t believe your grandfather had any idea either.
I went to him the next day, and he said only that you had gone, he knew not where.
He said the same every week for some time until I stopped asking.
He grieved, Seth —grieved. It was two years—two full years—before he shared your first letter to him.
You were serving on a ship off the coast of Portugal.
You didn’t say how or why, and you didn’t mention me. ”
“It would only have hurt him if I told him the whole truth. Nothing good would have come of knowing. His letters were full of you, though. Baffling.”
“Baffling?”
“You were seventeen and due for a Season when they took me. I had assumed you had gone down to London soon after and were flooded with offers.”
She shook her head. “No Season happened. The first year he said I was too young. Before the second year, Samuel married, and father claimed the estate needed him. By the third year, he was ill and I cared for him. There were no offers, and I wouldn’t have accepted.”
“Why not?”
Her gaze, angry and full of accusations of stupidity, pinned him. “You, you lackwit. In those years I held out hope you would return. Father died just before Waterloo. The navy began to pull ships out of service, I was almost of age, and I hoped—oh how I hoped—you would come home. You didn’t.”
Seth stared down at his cooling meal. So much misunderstanding. So much separation. So much grief. His throat felt tight. “I had no idea you felt that way. Grandfather died that year as well.”
“You didn’t even come for his funeral.”
“I was on my way down the coast of Africa by then.”
She nodded. “That explains much. Why didn’t you sell his store?”
Seth glanced around the familiar room where shelves filled with the sundry needs of the villagers once stood in rows. “It didn’t belong to me. Grandfather rented from the Earl of Clarion. My father.”
“The Earl of Clarion?!”
Seth nodded. “Didn’t you realize? You knew my mother was never married. She brazenly insisted I have his surname, Caulfield.”
“I never cared,” she replied
No, you did not. It was one of the reasons I loved you.
“In any case, I assumed he would find a tenant or sell it. I forgot about the store,” he went on.
“Then why? Why did you come back.”
Seth blew out air from his cheeks and stood. “It’s complicated. Our dinner is cold. Let’s go see if Mrs. Duncan will heat it for us. Perhaps you can explain why you never married and why you live in that dingy dower house.” He scraped their untouched stew back in the tureen and picked it up.
Sibby rose to follow, looked over at Becky and paused. “As you said. It is complicated.”
* * *
Sybilla sat back down. Her hands shook. She had eaten nothing since breakfast and was far from fortified for the conversation that had just passed.
There’s more to come Syb. You best eat. She picked up the crusty bread, suddenly ravenous and ate it.
Becky stirred then, a faint whimper. Sybilla went to her.
“Miss S’bla? Sleepy. Did you see th’angel?”
Damned laudanum always brings strange dreams. Better angels than monsters.
Sybilla brushed Becky’s hair back. “She is here to keep you safe. You best sleep.”
Becky nodded, her eyelids drifting shut. Sybilla straightened the covers and gave them an affectionate pat. She liked children but had given up hope of having one of her own.
She turned at a sound to see Seth watching her from the doorway, a strange look on his face.
“She woke briefly, but I think she’s sleeping peacefully.”
He carried the tureen covered in flannel against the hot bowl, and set it back on the table. He also carried a bottle under his arm. He uncorked it and poured two glasses. “We best eat this time,” he said.
She sipped her drink, pleased to discover a fine claret.
They ate in silence for several minutes.
Sybilla broke it. “Samuel rented out Somerton Hall with the specification that I have the dower house for my use.” She swallowed another bite taking old resentment with it.
“He gives me an allowance.” When he remembers.
“The Hall looks empty.” He continued eating.
“A person from the manufacturing industry up north rents it. They come in the summer and bring their cronies. Folks are relieved when they leave.”
“What happened to the tenants?”
“Some remain. Samuel’s factor collects rents, denies their requests, and ignores their complaints. Ignores me. We’re glad when he leaves, too.”
“And Samuel? Does he come? Does he bring you to London?”
Sybilla scraped her bowl clean, finished the last bite, and put her spoon down. “Samuel and I don’t speak. He prefers to forget I exist, which suits the horrid woman he married as well as it does me.”
“Is it entailed? Would he sell it?”
“Yes. He can’t. So he lets it go to ruin.” Familiar grief joined her confusion of emotions.
“What of the dower house? Could he sell that.”
“He would have if he could. Shall we return to the real question? Why did you return? For that matter, when did you part from the navy?”
Seth refilled their glasses.
“You said its complicated,” she prodded.
He nodded. “First of all, word reached me on the return voyage that my father had left me something in his will. We finally docked in Portsmouth in March 1818.”
“Three years ago.” Sibby frowned at him.
“Three and a half. I was released then, with back pay in my pocket. There was nothing for me there, so I went on up to London to see about this inheritance.”
“What was it?”
“As you see.” He indicated the building around them.
“That was all?” The earl had been a rich man.
“Not quite. I was blessed—or cursed—with an interfering brother. In fact, a few of them. The old reprobate named a list of bastards in his will. Left us all something. Some more than others. Society—something I have little experience in and less interest—calls us the Clarion Bastards.”
“Still, three years ago, Seth.”
He nodded. “I’d been lucky on my first ship.
When the captain realized I could read and write, he ordered me to be the loblolly boy—the surgeon’s helper.
The seaman who’d been helping went back to crew gratefully.
I was needed, and raised to Surgeon’s Mate a year later.
It was a blessing, considering they’d dragged me off the docks hogtied. I was eventually warranted as Surgeon.”
She glared at him. “You’re making a meal out of a simple question.”
He sighed deeply. “I had some prize money. Not much. Some. My newfound brother David—the new earl—and his equally persuasive countess urged me to go to university. Edinburgh is best for medicine. To Edinburgh I went. I had enough for fees and to eat on. The course took two years.”
“And then?” Sybilla wasn’t going to let him off the hook. Not now.
“I spent some time at Clarian Hall in Ashmead, astonished to have family. David and his countess dragged me to house parties full of coxcombs, prigs, and gossips eager to pick over the bones of my origins. When they tried to bring me to London. I retreated to their home in Ashmead, a pleasant enough place.”
“But.” She fixed him with her firmest gaze. He would answer her original question.
“My new-found family were still strangers, and I did not want to live off their charity. Ashmead already had a decent physician. I needed my own practice. I had this place, the building and its contents. It had been locked up for six years by then. It took me a month just to clean the place up and create space to see patients. By then gossip had spread and they began appearing. That’s it. ”
She waited. There had to be more. He swallowed and added, “Ashmead wasn’t Astburn. It wasn’t home.”
“And so, you came home?” She reached across and lay her fingers over his hand. Their eyes held.
“I had to come and face… erm, everything. My past.”
Me. You had to face me. He didn’t say the words but he will. Oh yes, he will.
She watched him pile the dishes on the tray and brushed his hands away. “Let me do that.” She leaned in to fill the tray, but he didn’t move. She could feel his breath on her neck, and heat pooled in her belly. When she turned to look at him, she curled into his arms.
“Sibby, I—” Whatever he meant to say disappeared in the maelstrom that engulfed them.
His kiss, fierce and full of unspoken need, annihilated her breathing and took coherent thought with it. When he broke it off, she staggered back and reached for the chair to steady herself, searching his face for she knew not what.
He stood in place, as unsettled as she was, before dropping his eyes. “Sibby, I’m sorry. I—I need to retire for the night.”
He turned and strode out the door forgetting the tray. She raised a trembling hand to her mouth and stared after him.