Chapter 21
William shoves aside the memories—the ones in which he and Helen are happily married and nothing else matters—to make room for reality. That’s what he needs to hold on to now that the artist is knocking on his door.
He could ignore it, pretend to be out, but she’s found something on Merryn—why else would she come?
He limps over to the door and she’s there, rain pouring down her coat, and her lips aren’t red.
They’re pink and she looks almost ordinary.
Maybe she’s not such a bad…“Oh,” he says as he suddenly realizes she’s standing in the rain.
“Come in, come in.” His mind is elsewhere—on the fact that he has exactly one week until his wife vanishes into oblivion.
And the fact that it might be for the best.
She barges past him, trailing water and shedding her coat before the fire.
She’s shivering. He offers her tea and a wrap, but she shakes her head, staring into the fire.
She crosses her long legs and suddenly William doesn’t know where to look, or what to do with his hands.
How long until he can skip ahead to asking her what she’s found? “How was your trip? Here, that is.”
She glares at him, those newly natural lips disappearing.
“Ah, right. Terrible. Well then, I do appreciate you coming all this—”
“She married him.”
“What?”
“Covington. She married him.”
His jaw goes slack. “Merryn?”
She nods. “Although there was some confusion. Men fighting over her…”—she waves her hand about—“money…inheritance…a whole to-do with another man.”
“That would be AJ Winthrop.” He chews his lip. Glances up at the faraway look on Merryn’s face. “So who won?”
“Won?”
“Yes. Which bloke won out in the end? Covington, or the other?”
She shakes her head. “There are legends that tell it both ways. All I know for certain is that Covington does not share his personal life with anyone, so it’ll be near impossible to find out.”
“They ran away together, didn’t they?” A pang. He isn’t certain if he’s glad or sad at this.
“They’ve certainly become private, Covington and his wife. What makes you say they ran away? What did they run from?”
He waves her off. “Long story.” Thoughts churning, he returns to the refectory table, but his visitor makes no move to leave. She has more to say on the matter, but she doesn’t come out with it.
The kitten watches him, imploring with her look of misery. “Ah, there we are, Seph. Let’s get back to it, shall we?” He slides onto the stool and dips the rag into warm water, smoothing it over her crusted, goopy eyes.
“Seph? You’ve named her?”
“Persephone.” The kitten blinks bright eyes up at him, and the difference is remarkable. Her eyes are clear and focused, her face alert. “Lady Persephone of the Palace.”
A snigger draws his attention. The visitor’s anger has been replaced by amusement.
He straightens proudly. “She’s come a long way and thus deserves a name as extraordinary as she is.
” She’s quite demanding, this princess of the castle, with her dainty whiskers and light-as-feathers body leaping into his lap when he’s done.
“You’re a plucky one, aren’t you?” She twists her head in a questioning pose, then head-butts him again.
An odd delight sluices through him. Here, at least, is one being he’s able to successfully care for. He reties the pink ribbon he bought her around her neck and stands, cradling his tiny treasure as he faces his guest. “Sugar?”
“Thank you, but no.” She’s studying him, still with amusement.
He ignores her and lifts Persephone to his shoulder with a quick rub and turns to the painting, hoping to redirect his guest’s attention to the point of her visit.
“What did happen to you, Miss Merryn?” He turns to his visitor.
Francine? No, Florence. “Surely one of the artists in your art school can trace Covington, can’t they? Even if he isn’t publicly accessible.”
She purses her lips again—her signature gesture. “The legends of him are larger than life. I believe if anyone could verify them, they’d have done it. He’s such a secretive man, as if he’s guarding something.”
“Or someone. Do we even know if she’s still alive? This Merryn?”
She blows out a breath. “Enough about Merryn and Covington.”
His throat closes up as she sits sideways on one of the old chairs and brings it up close to him so their knees are touching.
“It’s you I want to know about.”
He cannot swallow. He tries.
“You’ve given me more holes than story, and I’ve not stopped thinking about it.”
“N-n-n-n-n-no. I sh-sh-shouldn’t have said anything b-before.”
She crosses her ankles and tucks them beneath the chair, leaning forward. “You owe me.”
He holds her stare, unable to look away. Wishing he could shove his chair back—way back—without seeming rude.
Finally she drops her gaze. “I had a fiancé once. I know, hard to imagine I snagged a man, eh? An airman by the name of Sammy. Lieutenant Sam Carmichael. He left right after our betrothal, and he promised five ways from Sunday he’d be back, so I waited.
I wrote him and I painted, waiting for peace to break so we could be married. ”
“He…he didn’t come back?”
“Oh, he came back.” She spins her hair around her finger. “The shell of him, leastwise. The rest of him died on the battlefield with his mates.”
William grips the stool and glances away. He feels the truth of those words deeply.
“Wouldn’t tell me a blamed thing, but he wasn’t the same.
His mum told me later he had nightmares, and he ran screaming out of the house once, in the middle of a snowstorm.
” Her slender arms tremble. “He’d snap at me for every little thing.
’Twas a wretched time, that. I thought he’d found some foreign tart and had a mind to make me break it off, but I wouldn’t. I’m that much a fool.”
“You’re loyal.”
This draws a sad half smile from her.
“Anyway, go on.”
“Eventually I put the pieces together and realized what the battles had done to him. He was always a sensitive bloke, my Sammy. People walking all over him, leaving their footprints on his soul.” She shakes her head. “Should have seen it. Should have known how deeply the war had broken him.”
His toes curl in his too-big work boots.
“Couldn’t you…go to him? Tell him you understand?
” Or is that too difficult? Too impossible?
Suddenly lightheaded, he glances at the pile of smashed pottery that will never be fully repaired again.
Half of it is dust. What is broken cannot be unbroken.
It’s never the same again. “He…he might not know. That you still love him, I mean. You should go to him.”
She gives a short laugh. “Maybe, when he’s released from St. Lawrence’s.”
His breath stops. “Oh.” An asylum isn’t the sort of hospital a person recovers from.
She leans forward. “See here, I’m only telling you this because…well, because I know that look you wear. The broken and lost one. The look of a body who hasn’t slept in a hundred years because resting might just be…”
He drops his gaze, a rock in his chest.
“No one understands. No one—but you. Will you visit him? That’s my favor.”
He widens his stance and leans his elbows on his knees. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“Who better to reach him than you?”
His shoulder tics. “I’m not exactly a prime example of healing.”
She pauses for a moment. “You’re more alive than he is.”
He just stares at that broken jar.
“You men should know,” she says quietly, “that the women you love wear your pain too. We feel it, because our souls are still connected to yours. And we only want to…to…Look—you talk to him, and I’ll speak with your wife. I’m jolly good at patching things over.”
“No.” Muscles jerk and ripple across his back. “It’s…not that simple. Not in my case.”
Her nostrils flare. “So, things aren’t perfect in your home. That’s no reason—”
“It isn’t that. Well, it isn’t only that.”
She frowns up at him. “Then what is it?”
He heaves a deep sigh and says the words aloud for the first time. “I’m missing.”
“You’re what?”
“Technically I’ve been declared missing in action. Presumed dead.”
Her jaw hangs open.
“So she isn’t waiting around for me. Might have even married again.”
Her jaw snaps shut. Her eyes blaze. “You cannot do that to her!”
He stares at the spot on Florence’s arm he viciously grabbed in the shop. Shame flashes hot and cold. “I must.” His voice is rough and vicious.
Tears well in her eyes. “How could you?”
“Better a dead husband than one—”
“In the county asylum,” she finishes.
“Sorry.”
A quick tip of one shoulder, as if that’s all she can expect from life. Existing as best one can while the curse of living on this earth marches over each of our lives.
“For what it’s worth, this is why I’m chasing down the story of this painting.
Because if it is a true Covington, it’s worth a fair bit, and my Helen needs that money.
It’s one way to be a husband to her without…
without…” Burdening her with himself. He closes his eyes and inhales, then lets it out with a long, cleansing breath.
Why must the world be so broken? Why must he?
Damaged souls cannot do anything but damage others with the broken shards.
“We had two sons once. The younger fell ill when he was young, and when he was better, I snuck him out for fresh air.”
“That’s good of you.”
“Helen asked me not to. He grew worse…and he died.” He forces the bald facts out of his tight throat.
“Oh.”
He’ll never forget that sinking feeling when Pete woke the next day, feeling poorly, shivering in his bedclothes.
Those blue moons beneath his eyes, his skeletal figure bent in a C shape, are forever etched upon his memory.
William could hardly bear to look at his boy, knowing what he’d done to him.
And then when their Peter died, he wasn’t able to look at Helen.
Not at the funeral, not at breakfast the following morning, not in the many long weeks and months and years afterward.
It had become a thing between them, hard and round and impenetrable.
He’d cost her a son. “She never forgave me.” He fingers the smooth band of skin on his left ring finger.
“That was the reason why, a decade later, we argued over a poor investment I’d made and she left to stay with her sister in Northampton.
She hated when I made decisions without her, like the investment—like sneaking out our Peter.
” He paused and let the boy’s name shimmer between them.
“I waited about for days, then I enlisted as an engineer in the Royal Navy.” The ring was on their bureau when he left.
Now, tucked away in Dunn Cottage with a stranger poking into the details of his marriage, he wishes he never let that precious band of gold out of his sight. Some things, once set aside, don’t fit anymore when one goes to put them back on. Yet they leave their mark on your finger. On your soul.
She’s quiet for a moment, then her voice is soft. Careful. “Then I suppose we must track down this Merryn’s story and validate that painting.”
Pressure rolls away, and the world suddenly seems more manageable.
Softer. He lifts his gaze to her face, and the truth they’ve both come to know is settled there—love always slips through the cracks.
No matter the heartache or inconvenience of it, love is powerful.
Enduring. It can be bent and misshapen and even broken, but it doesn’t simply go away.
He nestles Persephone with his beard, kissing the rounded top of her fuzzy head. “You hear that? We’re going to figure it out.” She purrs and stretches over his shoulder.
His muscles loosen. Finally, a way forward.
Some good he can do. He can see Helen’s face, lit up the way it once was as she looked down upon their babes late at night, in those perfect twilight hours when she let her long hair down, her sweet hum echoing through the nursery.
He sees strength and femininity and everything he first loved about her… but magnified.
He cannot let that woman suffer. Especially after what he already cost her.
“What if you could have her back?” She says, and the ache of longing leaves him breathless. Florence leans forward again. “What if someone were to help? Wouldn’t you want that with everything in you?”
He indulges in the memories until they avalanche and the ache widens and wraps around his chest. He’ll be calling Helen again on the morrow at this rate.
The need to hear her voice beats against the inside of his head.
Words cannot express the sheer pleasure of imagining her arms about him again.
Helen slipping up behind him in her long nightgown and snuggling her face into his back, sighing and—
He shoots out of the chair. Paces. Tosses woodchips into the fire.
Florence touches his back, and he freezes. “Just think about it. Sammy would be ever so happy to meet you. And in the meantime, we’ll go on looking for Merryn—for Helen’s sake.”
Muscles ripple and twitch beneath her hand. “I’ll think about it.”
“Promise?”
He nods. But he’s still swimming in images of Helen. Her laugh, her colorful, infectious joy, her softness. Memories are a terrible, wretched reminder of all we’ve lost, because they aren’t the present. Mixed with a human’s creativity, they even, at times, rewrite reality.