Chapter 32 - Vera
They slowly rambled down the hillside, Vera’s hand tucked neatly into the crook of his elbow.
She tried very hard to ignore that simple point of contact, the warmth radiating from it.
She knew the corresponding glow in her heart was due to the emotions that she’d been trying—very unsuccessfully—to repress.
They walked largely in silence, but it wasn’t uncomfortable on her end. She and Stephen were so often together they weren’t beholden to the same constraints of politeness as they would have been if they weren’t such good friends.
Friends. It was a word she’d been trying to reconcile herself to lately. And yet, it was too small a word to contain all her emotions. It was much like trying to shoehorn her ankle into her boot before the swelling had fully gone down.
“Vera,” Stephen finally said when they stood at the edge of the lower pasture. “There’s something I need to tell you. Something I need to ask you.”
Vera tensed. His tone held an element she couldn’t read, something she didn’t have a name for. That was rare when it came to him—she’d studied Stephen the same way she’d pored over the medical texts he’d lent her.
“Is anything the matter?”
She couldn’t think of anything that might make him frown the way he was. At least, not anything between them. The last few weeks as her ankle had been healing had been among the happiest times she could recall.
Stephen had regaled her with past tales from his doctoring.
He’d read her letters from his physician friends in London.
Apparently, doctors were all the same—they loved to discuss new medical treatments and procedures, even in the tedious format of long letters.
Vera loved that Stephen enjoyed sharing them with her, that he seemed to respect her ideas and opinions when speaking about them afterward.
If Stephen wasn’t out seeing patients, he’d always been nearby. He’d taken to bringing his ledgers into the library. Sometimes, they’d sit in companionable silence, Stephen working at the desk, Vera reading.
Unfortunately, that time together hadn’t muted Vera’s feelings in the least. If anything, they’d only grown stronger.
Her feelings were like one of those creeping vines that fought to enter the greenhouse.
Vera plucked one thought or emotion, only to turn around and realize several new ones had taken its place.
“I’ve truly enjoyed our time working together,” Stephen began, and winced.
Vera’s face fell, her stomach dropped. Oh no—in the busyness of the past weeks, she’d forgotten their agreement. Rather, she’d forgotten that their time together was drawing to a close.
Vera rifled through her mind, trying to remember the date. They’d fulfilled their three months nearly a week ago—it was a day that she’d been looking forward to, at least in the beginning. How had it come and gone without her realizing?
Stephen held a folded parchment in his hand. He was going to do as she’d asked and send her away with a recommendation—just as she’d wanted at the outset. Terror and pain sank their claws into her heart.
Vera had no idea what expression was on her face; she couldn’t have controlled it if she’d tried. All she could stupidly think was, Not another letter telling me I’m not welcome in my family anymore.
That was foolish—Stephen, Benjamin, Anne, and Jacqueline weren’t her family. Just because her traitorous heart had claimed them didn’t mean she had any right to them.
“Vera,” he started again. “I know that we had an agreement. I want to offer you this before I say anything more. It’s a recommendation—a glowing one.”
Vera opened her mouth—to say what, she didn’t know—but Stephen held up a hand.
“Wait. I need to say this. You’ve been an excellent medical assistant.
I’ve written to Dr. Halveston in London, and he’s very interested in taking you on as an assistant there, in the hospital.
They’re using young women as nurses more, especially to help with ladies, who might not be comfortable with a gentleman physician. ”
Vera’s eyes burned.
Letters were funny things, she thought, her eyes clamped on the folded parchment in his hand. A splash of ink, a bit of pulp, could change your life forever.
“But I hope you’ll stay,” he said.
“Wait. Pardon?” Vera glanced up at him, tears spilling over her eyelids and tracking down her cheeks.
Stephen’s face was alive with…something, some emotion she could only hope she understood.
“But I don’t want you to be my assistant anymore, Vera. I want you to be my wife.”
She nearly staggered back. “What?”
“I don’t want you to accept me because you feel that you don’t have options,” Stephen said quickly, the words tumbling out, one after another, as if he’d practiced them before and was in a hurry to have them done.
“I promise that if you don’t want me, you can still stay here.
We can go on as we are. I’ll try—” His voice broke on the word and he bit his lip.
“I’ll try not to make you uncomfortable with how I feel. ”
“With how you feel?”
Good heavens, she told herself. Close your mouth.
“I love you, Vera. So very much. I didn’t know the definition of the word until you came along.
” Stephen’s eyes were wide, the love in his face—for that’s what it was, she realized now—radiated from every line in his smile.
“It’s funny—I’ve studied the body for years.
Yet no one prepared me for how I feel when I see you walk into a room. ”
He held a hand to his chest. “No one’s explained the possibility of the hold you have over my heart.
The lightness I feel in it when you laugh.
The way it flutters when you smile at me.
The way it pounds when the candlelight softens your skin.
And no one taught me how the mind can be completely split in two—how I can be utterly focused on what I’m doing, but that part of me still wonders where you are, and what you’re doing at any given moment.
“And the hunger I feel here.” Stephen pressed his hand to his stomach.
“How I am still fully myself, just with a new obsession—that I long to know everything about you. When precisely you acquired each one of your lovely freckles. What you think about everything, all the time. How I find your interests just as fascinating as the ones I’ve always held for myself—not because they’re inherently interesting to me, but because you are.
“I find I need to apologize again for how I treated you in the beginning. Yes, I do,” he added as Vera shook her head, tears running unchecked down her cheeks.
“For I only recently realized that I treated you so because you scared me. I found you beautiful upon first glance—breathtakingly so. And the last woman I’d looked at in such a way had hurt me deeply.
I was foolishly trying to protect myself, and I did it at your expense. ”
“Stephen.” She shook her head. “You don’t have to—”
“Yes, I do. I adore you, Vera. And I know love is just a word, but I promise I’ll prove it to you every single day for the rest of my life, if you’ll let me. I would be the luckiest, the happiest man in the world if you would stoop to being my wife. Will you?”
“Don’t be daft,” she choked out.
It was all Vera could manage to say for the time being. She was strangled by the depth of her emotion. Stephen thought his heart affected? Hers felt as if it would pound out of her chest and run through the pasture.
At some point during his recklessly romantic speech, Stephen had taken her hand. Now her palm was pressed to his chest, and her focus flitted between the warmth of it sandwiched as it was between his capable hand and his waistcoat, and Stephen’s face—the hope and love she saw there.
Vera opened her mouth to give her reply.
“Vera!” a male voice bellowed from behind them.
They both turned. A man was half striding, half running down the green hillside behind them.
Vera pulled her hand from Stephen’s in her shock. “Bertrand?”
“Who is this?” Stephen said, his voice low.
“My brother.” Vera’s tone expressed how improbable it was, though it was her brother, Bertrand—the younger of the two—hurrying down toward them.
As he got closer, Vera saw his face was red; a sheen of sweat graced his forehead.
“Vera, for heaven’s sakes, there you are.” He pulled her abruptly into a hug. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
“You have?”
Bertrand held her back by the shoulders. “Would have been here an hour earlier, except Canterbury and his duchess put me through the wringer answering their questions.”
“They did?” Vera blinked.
“Not that I don’t understand, once they finally explained it. Did you truly believe we’d written you off like that?” Bertrand yanked her back into a hug as if he couldn’t help himself. “Dear heavens, Vera. You’re my sister.”
She squeaked some unintelligible response. Her eyes were leaking, this time in utter shock. Bertrand had been looking for her? He still acknowledged her as family? She couldn’t help it—she began to sob into his chest.
“Aw, blast it, Vera.” Bertrand patted her about the back awkwardly with his pudgy hand.
“Don’t cry. You know I can’t handle that.
It’s awful. Jane’s six now and she’s already figured me out.
I had to buy her a pony last month. A pony.
Her mother’s furious with me for being such a pushover about it, but Jane really does love taking her little cart into the park, so I think it’s all worked out all right. ”
Vera just cried harder, clutching the front of his coat.
She hadn’t realized until now how much she needed to hear those words from someone.
That she still was family. That she hadn’t been thrown away, abandoned.
Vera hadn’t realized quite how deep that injury had gone—not until someone came along and salved it.