31. Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter thirty-one
Reginald had told her the truth of Canterbury. Not the old, guarded telling. Not the version wrapped in loyalty, obedience, and all the language men used when they needed to keep living with themselves.
He had stripped it down until nothing stood between them but the act and the choice.
That truth moved through Aingeal like cold water. But what struck deepest was not only what he had confessed. It was the way he had said it. Without excuse. Without trying to lay the weight somewhere else. He had given her truth.
And because he had done that, something in Aingeal could no longer stay hidden behind its own old defenses. If she kept silent now, if she remained upright and cold and judged him from behind the safety of her own buried history, then she would be answering truth with cowardice.
She looked away from him and toward the candles. Her throat ached. When she spoke, her own voice sounded strange in her ears. Thinner than she expected. “I was not always afraid of marriage.”
Reginald did not move.
That, somehow, gave her courage. She kept her eyes on the nearest flame. “When I was younger, I thought what girls are taught to think. That if a man chose you above all others, it meant love. That to be wanted was a kind of blessing.” Her mouth tightened. “I learned otherwise.”
The candle flame bent in a faint draft and steadied again.
“My sister was Máire.” Pain flared beneath her ribs.
“She was not older than I by much. Only enough that it mattered when we were children and did not when we were women.” Aingeal’s gaze stayed fixed on the flame.
“She was prettier than I was. Or so everyone said. The sort of girl men looked at and thought themselves noble for wanting to protect.” She almost smiled.
“I loved her. We fought as sisters fight. We laughed as sisters laugh. There were days I would have done anything for her and days I could not bear the sound of her voice.”
She sighed softly. “That is what sisters are.” She could feel Reginald listening with the same grave, stripped attention he had brought to his own confession.
“There was a man,” she said. “Not a grand man. Not a lord worth songs. Just a man from a neighboring holding. Strong. Loose with smiles. Too ready with a sweet word to whichever girl stood nearest. The sort of man an older woman would have dismissed in a glance.”
Her fingers tightened against one another. “But we were not older women then.” She looked down at her hands. “I thought he loved me.”
The shame of it still lived within her. Not because she had been young.
Because she had wanted so badly to be loved.
Because she had built meaning from glances and pauses and the foolish little scraps girls were given and taught to call hope.
“I thought I had seen it in the way he looked at me,” she said.
“In the way he lingered when I spoke. In the small things foolish girls build futures from.”
Her voice roughened. “Then I saw him kissing Máire.”
Reginald’s breath hitched.
“In the orchard,” she said. “I had gone looking for her because she was late for the evening meal, and Father had begun asking for her. I found them instead.”
The memory returned sharply, like glass turning beneath her ribs. “He had his hand at the back of her neck. She was smiling.” Aingeal closed her eyes once. “That part has never blurred. She was smiling as if the whole world had just confirmed itself to her.”
Blood beat loud in her ears even now, just as it had then.
“I do not know whether she knew I thought I loved him. Perhaps she did. Perhaps she only guessed. Perhaps he told her. I have turned that part over so many times in my mind that the edges have worn smooth.” She opened her eyes again. “It no longer matters.”
Reginald’s brows drew together.
Her hands knotted harder. “What matters is that when she saw me, she did not look ashamed.” The words came flat now. Old and sharp. “She looked triumphant.”
Reginald lowered his gaze then, not from discomfort, but with the grave stillness of a man who understood he was hearing the center of a wound.
Aingeal forced herself onward. “I said ugly things. She answered with uglier. We walked from the orchard toward the hill beyond the chapel path because neither of us wanted servants to hear. By then, we were both angry in the way women are taught not to be. Sharp. Mean. Hungry to wound first.”
She could see it all in her mind. Máire’s brown braid half loosened by the wind. The flush in her face. The man already gone, leaving the sisters to bleed for what he had stirred and abandoned.
“I accused her of stealing him because she needed every man’s admiration.” Aingeal’s mouth twisted. “She accused me of believing I was owed whatever I wanted.”
Her voice thinned. “I said she had never once understood loyalty. She said…”
Reginald did not press.
Aingeal swallowed and made herself speak the words that had followed her for years. “She said, ‘I wanted to be chosen.’”
The sentence fell into the chapel and stayed there.
Aingeal lifted her eyes to him for the first time since she began.
“I had wanted that too,” she said quietly.
“That was why it cut so deep. Not because she had stolen what was mine. Because she had spoken aloud the thing I was most ashamed to want.” Her breath trembled.
“To be chosen. To be seen first. To be loved above another woman.”
Rain moved against the stone in a soft, steady hush.
“I shoved her,” Aingeal said.
Reginald shut his eyes.
“We were near the slope behind the chapel. The ground was slick from earlier rain. She turned as if to walk away, and I…” Her face tightened. “I was so angry. I put my hands on her and pushed.”
The memory did not blur there. It sharpened. The brief, startled widening of Máire’s eyes. Then the slipping.
The fall.
The crack below. “She lost her footing. She went down the slope and struck her head on the stones.”
The chapel had grown very quiet. No sound now but the rain, the candle flame, and the roughness of her own breathing.
“I ran to her. I remember that. I remember falling beside her in the mud and trying to lift her and saying her name over and over as if enough repetitions might call her back.” Her voice dropped almost to nothing. “There was blood in her hair. Her eyes opened once. I do not know if she saw me.”
She turned toward the altar because she could not look at him just then. “She died before anyone else reached us.”
For a few breaths, Aingeal only stood there, feeling the old helplessness move through her body again. Young hands slick with rain and blood. The world already divided into before and after.
“I confessed it,” she said, looking up at the crucifix.
“Not at once. It took me two days to force the words out. Father Cillian heard me. He gave me absolution. He told me what priests tell the guilty and grieving. That God knew the difference between malice and madness. Between planned murder and one terrible moment of rage. He told me repentance mattered. Mercy mattered. That I had not ceased to be redeemable because of one terrible act.”
She looked down at her hands. They had twisted themselves into something that looked almost like prayer.
“I did penance. I fasted. I prayed. I stood through Mass with the taste of shame in my mouth and told myself I had been forgiven.” Her mouth trembled once and steadied.
“I have repeated that to myself for years.”
Reginald spoke at last, very quietly. “But you never absolved yourself.”
Aingeal looked at him. “No.” The answer felt both small and enormous.
She bowed her head. “I never trusted the girl who pushed her. I buried her under duty. Under caution. Under all the coldness men mistake for pride and women mistake for strength. I told myself I had learned. That I would never again let love outrun judgment.”
Her mouth trembled again, then hardened. “That is why marriage frightened me. Not only because men are faithless, though many are. Not only because wives are often miserable, though many are.” She lifted her gaze to his. “It frightened me because I know what I become when love mixes with shame.”
Understanding moved through Reginald’s features.
Aingeal saw it arrive in him and knew, suddenly and completely, that he understood what jealousy had meant. Why étaín’s brightness near him had cut so sharply. Why the thought of loving him without certainty had filled her with terror.
“It was never only you I feared,” she said. “It was myself. What loving you might wake. What being betrayed by you might make of me.”
Something in his expression gave. Just slightly. As if the words had found some old scar and pressed living flesh beneath it.
“When I saw étaín looking at you, part of me hated myself before I hated either of you. Because she would never deliberately hurt me. I knew that. I have always known it. But I also knew how quickly pain can turn inward and outward at once. How quickly a woman can become uglier than the wound she has suffered.”
She swallowed. “And then you lied to me. And I loved you. And every fear I had buried began to rise.”
The candles bent and steadied.
“I am not telling you this to compare what I did to Canterbury,” she said.
“They are not the same. Do not grant me that false balance.” Her voice sharpened.
“I am telling you because when you said you chose, when you stopped hiding behind obedience, I knew I could not go on judging you from the safety of silence. Not if I meant to be honest.”
Reginald stood very still. He looked, for one brief moment, less like a warrior than a man who had just been handed something more terrible and more precious than mercy.
Truth.
Aingeal felt her own heart beating hard now, but not with the old panic.
Not with shame either. Only with the strain of standing at last without pretending innocence she had long ago lost. “I am not pure in this,” she said.
“Not morally above you. Not untouched by blood or wanting or the excuses people make afterward so they can bear themselves.”
Her gaze held his. “I am not judging you from some white height. I lost that long before you came here.”
Reginald lowered his head once in acknowledgment. When he looked up again, his eyes had gone darker than before. “That is why you turned from the kisses,” he said quietly.
Aingeal almost smiled. “Yes.”
“And why you feared me.”
“And myself,” she said.
He nodded. There was sorrow in his face, and understanding, and something else too. Something almost like reverence.
That frightened her more than pity would have done bBecause pity would have kept them apart.
“Aingeal,” he said.
She could not bear tenderness just then. So she looked toward the altar and said, “Do not make comfort of this.”
He was silent for one heartbeat. Then he answered in the only way that could have steadied her. “I will not.”
She had not given him confession in exchange for gentleness. She had given it because truth deserved truth, and because after hearing the whole of him at last, she could not go on pretending her own darkness was smaller, cleaner, or irrelevant.
She looked back at him, taking one slow breath and letting it out. The grief was still there, but something had shifted beneath it.
He knew her.
And she knew him.
Not enough to heal. Not enough to forgive. But enough that neither of them could hide from the truth of the other again.