33
“Come now, fresh air will do you good,” Thornston said as he practically dragged Robert out of the house and into the too-bright sunshine.
Robert growled and shielded his eyes as he shook his friend’s hand from his lower arm and followed him.
“I doubt it,” he mumbled under his breath as they made their way through the garden to the path to the beach.
“I am certain of it. You have been sequestered in the house for days, doing God knows what.”
Robert made a non-committal sound.
He was not going to tell his friend of the hundreds of letters he had tried to write Jo over the past four days. All of them had ended up in the stove in the kitchen late at night, when everyone else was asleep.
Besides that, he had not done much. Hardly eaten, slept through the day, but been awake at night.
Not washed, not even changed his clothes.
It was a wonder Thornston wanted to be seen with him in this state.
Robert was sporting four-day-old stubble.
Luckily, the state of his hair could be covered by his hat.
They walked along the beach in silence. When they were so far from Brighton that they felt certain they would not meet others, they removed their coats, shoes and stockings and continued.
Thornston waded through the water, apparently not caring that his beige breeches became wet, and Robert walked parallel with him in the sand, about fourteen or fifteen feet between them at all times.
A couple of times, Thornston stopped and handed Robert a leather flask of water, and Robert drank greedily as the heat started to affect him.
They did not stop until they reached the part of the cliff that had fallen.
Robert’s stomach turned at the sight of it.
The fear of Jo being buried underneath it felt fresh and raw again.
He stared at the mixture of grass, sand and chalk that could crush a person underneath it.
He could see his own feeble attempts at digging into it on one side.
Luckily, she was not there, but she felt just as far away as if she had been.
He lifted his gaze, hoping to see her tracks on the other side as he had that day, but they had been washed away by the high tide and occasional rain.
He had to swallow at the thought that this trace of Jo had disappeared.
“I have never seen you as scared as when you thought she was trapped beneath this,” Thornston told him quietly. He was standing much closer now than Robert had realized. “Not even when Philomena was sick. Or your stepfather.”
Robert gulped at the painful memories.
“I was… that was… different…” he mumbled as he tried to figure out why Thornston’s quiet observation affected him so.
“Why don’t we sit? I had your cook make us a couple of sandwiches,” Thornston said as if his words had not been a grenade to Robert’s mind.
They sat beside each other on the sand a good thirty or so feet from the debris. Thornston found a couple of slightly smashed sandwiches in the pocket of his jacket and handed one to Robert without a word. Robert wolfed it down in only a couple of bites, suddenly feeling starving.
“Can I ask you something?” Thornston was looking at the ocean as he spoke.
Robert only grunted, not in the mood to point out that he already was.
“Are you in love with her?”
Robert stilled at the words and had to think of how he normally moved his body when he was sitting in the sand.
He stared at the sea while he tried to process Thornston’s words.
His mind kept coming up with arguments about why he could not be in love with Jo, but all of them seemed to stumble into the abyss that her leaving had caused.
“This is not what being in love feels like,” he finally said out loud in a hoarse voice. Because he had to say something. He could not keep the words contained in his mind any longer.
“I wouldn’t know,” Thornston told him as he looked at the sea.
He had taken off his beaver hat and carefully placed it on his jacket beside him so that it would not touch the sand.
His light brown curls were blowing in the wind.
He looked younger and less like the charming, slightly world-weary dandy he tried to present himself as to the rest of the world.
He looked much more like the boy Robert had once befriended.
“I am marrying a stranger, remember?” Thornston’s voice was casual, but Robert sensed the vulnerability behind it.
“Have you found them?” Robert asked quietly, referring to Thornston’s cousins. His friend shook his head as he looked at the sand.
“Soon, I think.” Thornston gulped loudly. “Do you have any advice on proposing to a stranger?” Some of the mirth was back in his friend’s eyes as he looked at Robert, who shook his head and huffed a laugh.
“You will have to ask Jo, I suppose,” he muttered and thought of the courage it had taken for Jo to walk up to a stranger and propose marriage. She was so brave. So clever. So funny. So beautiful. Robert’s body felt hollow at being so far from her.
“When I met Lucretia, I knew the instant I saw her. That I loved her,” Robert told Thornston and looked back at the sea. This conversation would probably be much easier to have if they were not looking at each other.
“You did?”
“Yes, I remember seeing her laughing and instantly knowing that I wanted to become intimately acquainted with her… not just like that,” he told Thornston and shoved his arm when his friend huffed a suggestive laugh.
“And what did you think when you saw Jo?”
Robert thought back to the meeting in the Thistleworth ballroom. Jo, who stood opposite him and proposed to him. But before that, before she had even said anything…
“I found her attractive, before she said anything, but after she spoke, I wanted to let her down kindly. Then protect her from her cousin and cronies laughing at her.”
“And what made you marry her? I have never understood.” Thornston’s voice was kind as he said it.
Robert thought of the dark night in the garden. How Jo had intrigued him, her meticulousness, her lists – the first and then presenting him with the second. Allowing him to kiss her and knowing he could stoke her desire. But he had made up his mind before that.
“I remember I had this image in my mind,” Robert told Thornston in a low voice as he buried his feet in the sand and looked at them.
“Of us at Riddlesmarsh Hall – with our children.” He had to swallow before he went on.
“It would be mayhem as they were brought into the sitting room, all five of them,” he trailed off, as Thornston chuckled and muttered:
“Of course, you would want a large brood.”
“I thought of how we would call them to order; I would have the youngest on my knee while the rest of them settled around Jo on the sofa as she read a book to them.” Robert swallowed several times, becoming emotional at the vividness of the picture and remembering it so clearly again.
He had not allowed himself to do so for the past four days, since it felt impossible that it would ever come to be.
“But couldn’t you have that with whomever you married?” Thornston asked, sounding genuinely confused.
Robert mulled the matter over as he ran his hands through the coarse sand.
Jo had said something similar, that he could have chosen anyone at the Thistleworth ball. It did not feel like it, though.
He had never imagined having a family with Lucretia, despite it being his wish.
He had assumed children would come when they married and did not take the necessary precautions anymore.
Lucretia had had two sons with her late husband when she was very young, before they met, but had always been careful not to conceive again.
Now that he thought of it, she had never spoken much of her children.
Robert wracked his brain with remembering any other woman who had been at the Thistleworth ball. None of them had captured his interest the way Jo had. He had gone along with Thornston’s half-assed idea to have a tryst with someone but had never truly considered any of the women there.
“But when you fall in love, it happens instantly,” Robert argued without answering Thornston’s question. “Look at Xavier. He spent one night with that woman and is still pining over her five years later.”
“Heavens, I wish I had been there that night.” Thornston straightened as he spoke. “To see the type of woman to twist his head like that.”
Robert smiled at the memory, forgetting his own troubles for a moment.
He and Xavier had been in Vauxhall Gardens.
The plan had originally been Thornston’s, but he had stood them up to visit whomever he had been sleeping with at the time.
Robert remembered the way Xavier had hung on the dark-haired woman’s every word and Robert’s surprise and delight when his stepbrother disappeared into one of the dark walkways with her.
He had felt certain that his brother had found the woman he was going to marry, even though she was evidently lower class, but afterwards, Xavier had refused to speak about what had happened and would become upset whenever Robert did.
“Exactly, it happened in just one night,” Robert said hotly, even though Thornston was not arguing with him. Truth be told, he was not certain who he was arguing with.
“Fine, then you are not in love with Jo. You only love her.” Thornston’s voice was dripping with sarcasm.
“I… no,” Robert said instinctively even as he felt the words in his chest. Like a warmth spreading as he allowed it to. A rightness. “Perhaps maybe… but only as a family member… the same as my siblings…”
The thought did not sit well with him though. The way he felt for Jo was different from what he felt for his sisters and Xavier. For Thornston. For his mother. It was much fiercer than his feelings for any of them.
“But if I’m in love with her, why doesn’t it feel the same as it did with Lucretia?” He was mostly asking himself, but Thornston answered anyway.
“I can’t say, but from the outside, what you had with Lady Egerton never looked like love. It looked like she was toying with you, and you were too blinded by her…” he cleared his throat, “cunt, to be able to see it.”
“Blast it, Thornston, don’t talk about her like that,” Robert reprimanded him, even though the words felt a little too true.
Ever since Lucretia had dismissed him, he had sometimes wondered whether the inferno he thought was a testament to the strength of their love was instead a sign that it was unhealthy.
“Fine, I beg your pardon. The real question is what you want to do about your Jo predicament. Showing up and telling her you love her should help matters, but it will only get you so far. How are you going to apologize?”
Robert played with the sand again. She had told him that he did not know her. And he had to show her that he did. Deeply. That he would never cross the boundaries they set. It was paramount to him that she understood.
He did not know what his feelings for her meant. But he knew he needed her. Beside him. Always. But how could he show his affection for Jo?
When the idea struck him, Robert looked at his friend with a blinding smile.
“I think I know how. Do you have a pencil and paper?”