Chapter 15
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Sometimes it’s like this.”
Vera nodded, swiped at her eyes with a handkerchief. It was full night, and two lanterns swayed from the poles above their plodding cart.
When the call came, they’d just been sitting down to an early supper. They’d run to the entryway and grabbed their supplies—Vera her basket, Stephen his handsome leather doctoring case. Elda, their silent shadow, had followed in their wake.
They’d been on the road within minutes, driving down the narrow lane at a teeth-clacking pace. They’d arrived just in time to give the family false hope, just in time to press bandages against wounds that had already bled too quickly and too much.
Then there was nothing left to do but to announce it to the family. The wife collapsed there in the yard with such alacrity, it was as if she’d been shot. Yet it wasn’t a tangible wound to her heart, but an emotional one.
Mrs. May’s husband was gone. He’d felled the tree and it had returned the favor on the way down.
“Those children,” Vera managed to warble, then gasped an inhale.
“I know.” Stephen nodded, his face grim.
“It’s the hardest part. It’s easy to help, or even to walk away feeling like you’ve done all you can.
But these kind of cases…” He shook his head.
“These are the ones that keep me up at night. What if we had arrived even five minutes earlier? There’s no way of knowing. ”
Stephen shrugged, and it looked like defeat. Vera rubbed at the ache in her chest. There were a few moments where the only sounds were the horse hooves clomping on the hard-packed road, the crickets’ song, Elda’s wheezing snore from the back of the cart, and Vera’s periodic sniffling.
“That was the hardest part about India,” he said, his eyes on the road but far away. “The children that I couldn’t save. There was a boy, came in with a fever. I tended to him for two weeks.”
“What happened?” Vera prompted when the pause grew too long.
Stephen gave a sad smile. “He got better. He went home. His mother brought me dinner to thank me, but it was too spicy—I couldn’t eat it.
” His chuckle dribbled off into nothing.
“Then I was called to an accident. That boy I’d spent all that time saving was crossing a road, talking to a friend.
Neither of them were paying attention and a horse cart just…
” He shook his head. “In my darker moments, I wondered if it wouldn’t have been better for that boy to die of fever.
If maybe, by saving him, I’d inadvertently killed his friend. ”
“Of course not. That’s not how life works.”
“I didn’t say the thought was rational. But it’s strange to think of how many lives were altered today, because we didn’t get there in time.
Those children without a father. That woman without a husband.
And even the connections further back than that—someone in India hurt me, and I decided to leave.
I’m still not certain whether I made the right decision. ”
Vera wasn’t sure if she should ignore his broken betrothal out of politeness. In the end, honesty won out. “Your mother told me months before you came home that you were engaged.”
He nodded, but there was no missing the tightness of his features. “Her name was Samantha, and I’m not sure she ever really loved me at all.”
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want.”
Heaven knew there were so many things that Vera didn’t wish to speak of—or to remember, for that matter.
“It’s all right. She wanted England more than she ever wanted me.” He gave a snorting laugh. “She settled for Italy—I guess it was close enough.”
Vera cringed. “I’m sorry.”
“The funny thing is, I don’t think that I am. I would rather know—without a doubt—that my wife would choose me.”
“But you regret coming to Devon?”
He shrugged, his eyes back on the dim road before them. “Do you?”
The question jarred her, until she remembered that he already knew her secrets. Ironically, he was the only one with whom she could freely discuss the truth.
Did she regret coming here? She thought about it.
The answer blurted out of her. “No. I don’t regret it.”
The admission made her feel lighter, somehow. She hadn’t realized how much she’d needed to ask herself that question.
“Interesting.”
“I don’t think it was a mistake for you to return to Devon, either,” she ventured. “I know you care about helping people, but your family needs you. Benjamin needs you.”
“I’m realizing this.” He cleared his throat. “My mother, too.” He leaned over and bumped her arm lightly with his. “Hamish and Benjamin helped me replace the fence along the back pasture yesterday afternoon.”
“So I heard.”
Vera had seen Stephen return to the house, his tunic clinging to his skin, his beard wild down his chest. She’d felt something, but she’d looked away before she could decide what it was. Revulsion, probably.
“I’m going to hire some additional men to tend the back fields. It’s my job to see to them, after all.”
“And you’re planning on being a doctor to the village, too?”
“You forget I have a new assistant who’s going to be helping me.”
“Well, this isn’t the first time I’ve been strong-armed into a position by a bully, but I do hope this time results in me receiving a reference.”
It was as if her words drew a shade over his face—his expression dimmed in an instant.
“I’m not your mother, Vera.” He scowled, as if the thought were abhorrent to him. “I’m not looking to trap you in a position you never wanted. I’m not trying to make your life miserable.”
“I know.” She was confused by the vehemence of his reaction.
“In fact, I’m very much trying to be your friend.”
She blinked, frowned. “You are?”
“Yes!” he snapped, throwing his hands in the air. “And you’re making it damn difficult!”
“Why shouldn’t I? You were—”
“Exactly.” He jabbed a finger between them, as if she’d just admitted something that sunk her entire argument.
“I was. I was awful to you when I first arrived home. I did do a terrible thing by invading your privacy and reading your personal correspondence. But I’ve apologized, and I thought you’d accepted that apology. ”
“I have.” Her tone was defensive, nigh on belligerent.
“Then why are you treating me as if you haven’t?”
“I’m not.”
How had this gotten so turned around? She had every right to be angry with him… Didn’t she? How was he making it seem as if she were the one in the wrong?
“You just called me a bully, Vera.” He shook his head. “Name the last thing I’ve done that’s actually been mean. Truthfully, what have I done lately to earn your ire?”
Her mouth hung open until she realized it and snapped it closed once more. Vera reviewed his actions and was shocked to find that, other than their first week or so, she came up with nothing.
Was he right? Had she been holding a grudge wrongly, viewing him through the lens of what he’d done weeks ago, when he’d apologized many times?
Stephen sighed as if hearing every word of her internal debate. “I know I hurt you, and I’m sorry. I wasn’t—I didn’t handle things in the right way, and I wish I could go back and change that, but I can’t. All I can do is show you who I really am now.”
“I can’t forget what you did that easily.”
He nodded. “I don’t expect you to, but will you please—at the very least—give the same weight to my actions now that you do to those in the past?”
Vera thought about it. Could she do that? She thought that she at least owed him the courtesy of trying. She nodded.
“Good.” His relief was evident in his voice. “Then can we please move forward as friends?”
Vera eyed the hand that he offered her, her lips pressed together. He kept it out, waiting.
Finally, she shook it. “Yes. Friends.”
His answering grin startled her. He had straight white teeth. It was an honest smile, a nice smile.
“Good.”
Vera went to sleep feeling more settled and secure than she had in a long time.
The feeling didn’t last long.
She woke up the next morning, dressed in a simple blue cotton day dress, and went down to breakfast. As had become usual over the past couple of weeks, she and Stephen were the first ones downstairs. His back was to her; he was loading his plate from the covered servers on the sideboard.
“Good morning, Stephen,” she said, smiling.
Vera felt lighter, felt as if their conversation the night before had cleared the last of the acrimony she’d felt from her mind. She felt as if they truly could be friends.
“Good morning, Vera.” He turned, smiling, plate still in hand.
Vera’s smile froze upon her face. “You…you shaved.”
His wild, dark beard that only yesterday rested upon his chest had been replaced by a closely-trimmed goatee and mustache. The planes of his face were fully visible; Vera no longer had to wonder what the woolly mass was hiding.
In the earliest days of their acquaintance, Vera had uncharitably imagined the curling bramble hid some terrible or disgusting deformity—a jagged scar, perhaps, or a mole with a beard of its own.
The truth was far more difficult to bear. The beard had hidden a handsome face and a strong chin, with sculpted cheekbones that stood in masculine relief to the hollowed planes of cheeks below.
“Indeed.” He smiled. “I just feel lucky you recognized me and didn’t make a run for the nearest fire poker.”
Vera felt she was in danger of some rash action, but it had nothing to do with impromptu weaponry. She could do little more than gawk as she retrieved a plate and began to move through the line next to him.
It wasn’t that he looked like a completely different person; he possessed the same dark eyes, the same tidy eyebrows that were ready to wing into a sarcastic angle at any moment.
No—the problem was that for the first time, he looked as he should.
He was now the picture of an educated, cultured nobleman who’d run off to India to help the populace.
She’d privately hated that beard. She’d partially blamed it for the calamity that was the start of her and Stephen’s relationship.