Chapter 21
A gouge from a drunken fool meant nothing.
Tom shrugged off the insults the same time he ripped his blasted neckcloth loose. He slung it to the stable floor. He should not have come. Meg had told him not to, and he hadn’t listened.
“Ye never listen.” Papa only said it twice after Caleb was buried. Once, three weeks after the accident, when Tom had been helping Mamm chase down the loose guinea hens. He’d forgotten to latch the pen.
He forgot everything those days, because he couldn’t eat and he couldn’t sleep.
Mamm had only smiled, sad, and put on her muddy boots to help him catch the animals. Papa had watched from the window.
The second time had been four months later.
Tom had thought about it for six nights in a row—what he would say to make Papa punish him or forgive him. Whatever had to be done to make things right. When he finally approached Papa’s bedchamber, while Mamm was tucking the little ones into bed, his knees had been like unstable sea legs.
“Sir?”
Papa had been stripping off his clothes, hair mussed and pipe still smoking from the stand beside the bed. He’d looked at Tom with a void expression.
“I’m sorry.” He had so much he’d wanted to say. That was the only thing that came out.
Papa draped the clothes across the chair back.
Tom lifted the back of his shirt. He turned, breathing fast, a sob bubbling up in him. “Ye can whip me. Ye never finished whipping me.”
“Go to bed.”
“I wasnae allowed to play there. I didnae listen to ye.”
“Ye never listen.” Papa’s rough hand had landed on Tom’s shoulder. He was never certain if the squeeze was a reprimand or the first—and last—unhating feeling the man had left. “Go. Dinnae make me tell ye again.”
Tom had cried most of the night, stifling the sounds in the feather pillow lest any of the other children hear him blubbering. He never pleaded with Papa again for forgiveness.
Now he never could.
That same old sickness opened up inside him as Tom moved down the row of cribs and found his horse. He slung on the saddle.
Och, enough of this.
’Twas over.
Done.
He didn’t need Papa’s forgiveness, and he didn’t need God, and he sure as brimstone didn’t need Meg Foxcroft. Lord Cunningham had been right.
Mayhap it was time to leave the past behind him.
Meg tore open the arched stable doors, out of breath. She’d run so hard one of her jewel-studded shoes had slipped free in the abbey, and the granite floor felt gritty and shocking against her bare foot. The dress was too tight. The bodice constricting against her pulsing chest.
“Tom.”
He stepped out from one of the stalls, leading his chestnut mare into the center aisle. He turned. His eyes flickered across her face, impassive, before he murmured something to the horse and started forward.
She remained braced in the brick doorway. “He was mistaken.”
He came so close she thought the horse might plow her down, but Tom halted several inches from her face.
“About the marriage,” she stammered. “We are no longer betrothed.”
A muscle flexed in his jaw. He tilted his head as if asking her to move aside. “If ye please.”
“I am not finished.”
“I am.”
Her pulse jumped, and she wiggled off her second shoe so she no longer stood lopsided.
Or was it because she could not bear to look at him?
Because she needed to fidget. Because whatever Lord Cunningham had accused him of still hung in his eyes, bare and tenuous, like something she could reach out and shatter.
He was mischief. He was outlandish grins and the playful side of a world that had turned strict and demanding.
He was not this.
Or was he?
How much about Tom McGwen did she really know? Had she bothered to know? A shudder of remorse curdled in her, and against all the reasoning in the world, she lifted her hand to his arm.
Stiffening, he tried to shoulder past her. “I have to go.”
She blocked him. “What Lord Cunningham said—”
“It doesnae matter.”
“He was wrong.”
“Move.”
“I cannot allow you to leave like this. You have borne my secrets. Someone should bear yours.” What was she doing? “I am sorry. I did not know about your brother. I must have known before.”
He looked away.
“Did I not?”
“I cannae do this with ye.”
“Tom—”
“I can’t.”
“Because you are afraid.”
“Nay.” He took another step forward, closer to her unbudging body. He was so near the sweetness of his breath carried over her face, raising her skin in bumps, vaulting her stomach upside down. “Because ye wouldnae care anyway.”
“If that were true, you would have told me before.” She lifted her hand to his chest, hesitated, then rested her fingers against the soft wool fabric. “But you did not. Did you?”
His eyes were hollow, then frightened, then sad, then bottomless with an unspeakable wound. He blinked and the blackness was gone. “I have to go.” When he pushed past her, she did not stop him.
She leaned back into the stable doorway, gnawing her lip, as the realization drained through her. He had not told anyone. All these years, he’d been alone.
She’d failed him.
Not just as Margaret Foxcroft of Penrose Abbey without her memories.
But as the Meg of before, who’d walked beside him and loved him and played with him—but still had not known him at all.
Joanie was already asleep when Tom returned to the cottage. He took creaking steps across the room, grabbed his clothes from the floor, and was just leaving when her groggy voice called out to him.
“Back to sleep with ye. It’s only me.”
“I want to hear about tonight.”
“In the morning.”
“Was it lovely?” With a yawn, the pallet rustled. “The dinner and the courses and all the guests, I mean. It must have been grand. Like the lord’s carriage.”
“Aye.” Grand as the devil. He pulled two floral-stamped biscuits from his pocket, ignoring the tightness bludgeoning his chest. “I saved these for ye. For breakfast.”
“I have something for you too.” The slightest edge of emotion in her voice made him straighten. “I hope you won’t be angry. I should have given it to you sooner, like Mamm said, but I just—”
“Given me what?”
Joanie sat up, cocooning the blanket around her shoulders. “I was a little frightened when I first came. Keeping it made me … well, it was like I was keeping a piece of them. I could hear Papa in my head.” He heard a smile in her words. “It’s on the table.”
He already knew.
“I dinnae want that, lass.”
“You’re their blood.”
“Ye’re their family.”
“You are too.” Her shadow sagged. “Just because you left doesn’t change that.”
’Twas not leaving that changed that. ’Twas what he’d done before he left. “Sleep, lass. Goodnight.” Gripping his clothes, he shut her back into the room, shredded the fancy clothes like they were on fire, and pulled on the comfort of his own worn trousers and shirtsleeves.
He avoided the table.
He moved to the windows and inspected, not for the first time, the yellow sprigged-cotton curtains. Meg had sewn them?
No, not Meg.
A stranger.
When he finally crossed the room, when he lit the tallow candle and scooted it close to him, the frayed black book faced him. He touched the cover. The faded gold designs. The taunting words: The Holy Bible.
He resisted the memory of all nine children cross-legged on the cottage floor, with Mamm mending shirts or socks, and Papa raising his soothing Scottish voice with scripture.
Tom had never paid much attention.
He’d whispered to Caleb or pulled one of the girls’ braids or sprawled out on his back and counted the cobwebs in the rafters. The same restlessness soared through Tom now—but with poignancy and unshakable power.
He shoved the book away from him.
Then stretched across the table and pulled it back. He took a seat and riffled through the pages. He stained them wet until the candle flickered out.
Nighttime air played with the tendrils of her hair. If she were the girl who remembered the alley, perhaps this would be frightening. Perhaps it should be anyway.
Out here, alone with the blackness.
She didn’t fear the dark.
She should.
Damp grass parted around her legs, and the crescent moon cast off just enough light to glow through the treetops. She had not slept. Partly because she rose every hour, slipped to her uncle’s bedchamber, and peered into a still-empty room.
And partly—mostly—because Tom festered her. Like a thorn beneath her flesh, everything bothered her. The anger on his face when he’d leaned over her in the drawing room and scolded her not to raise her voice. The dinner table. What Lord Cunningham said.
The way Tom dug into himself, built bulwarks, and blocked her out.
All this time, she’d wanted him to leave her alone.
To forget her.
Then why in the name of mercy should any of this matter? Why could she not bear that he was … unhappy with her? Disappointed? Angry? Hurt?
She didn’t know what he was.
No more than she understood what she was doing now. But as she scaled the last hill and the cottage appeared over the rise, a rising sense of blood-heating anticipation glided through her. She waited until her breath evened.
What would she say?
He would demand to know what she was doing. How she could be so absurd.
The same questions she asked herself.
Her hand shook a little when she tapped her knuckles against the white-painted door.
Silence.
Then creaking. Thumping. The door whining open. “What are ye doing?” He leaned out with a bleary face, hair askew across his forehead, cheek dented as if he’d slept on his fist.
She said the first thing that came to her mind. “I came to sit with you.”
Tom leaned his shoulder into the doorframe. Either his brain was slush from sleep or Meg was three kinds of a fool. Had he fight in him, he would scold her—but he didn’t.
Not tonight.
Hesitating, she pulled the silky hood of a silver cloak from her head. “Have I fallen so deep in your despicable graces you will not ask me in?”
“Ye walked here in the dark?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I told you.”