Chapter 28
“Did my sister sing last night? She is usually prevailed upon to do so.” At Lucy’s invitation, she and Nate were walking along the shore the morning after the gathering at the Arms.
“Aye.”
Lucy looked sideways at him. “Is that all you’ve to say about it?”
It was all he would say. He’d lain awake long into the night, restless, thinking about the song Isobel sang to great acclaim from the merry crowd. The hint of grief edging her mouth as she sang—who was it for?
“Why were you not there?” If Lucy thought to needle some sort of reaction from him, he’d turn that scrutiny back onto her. He ought to leave it alone, perhaps . . . but in his mind’s eye was Isobel’s face, talking wistfully about making music with her sister.
Besides which, he was coming to appreciate Lucy fully in her own right. He understood her well enough now to know she’d not walked away lightly from something she’d once loved. “Isobel says you are a violinist of considerable skill. She also said you’ve not touched it since coming here.”
“Oh, I’ve touched my violin,” Lucy said wryly. “But no, I have not played.”
“Why not?” he asked bluntly. For all that they clearly loved one another, the sisters trod carefully around one another on some topics, perhaps both afraid after the year prior to disturb the tenuous peace that enveloped them here. But Lucy’s demeanor towards him had never demanded similar care.
Most days, she would have offered something biting in return. Today she only sighed, taking a long time to put an answer into words. “I suppose . . . It is too difficult. Remembering who I was— Before. Who I cannot be again.”
“So you’ve given up something you loved.”
“Unlike you, I suppose? Who has done nothing of the sort? Isobel has said you were little more than a boy when you took up your commission. What was it that you loved as a boy?”
She’d skillfully deflected his comment. “I was sixteen. Out of boyhood.”
She shook her head. “Younger than I am now. You were thrown quickly into war, were you not? Did it not change you almost overnight?”
“Aye. In some ways.”
“Surely it took from you things you loved,” she persisted. “Things you had to discard, quickly, entering into such a new life. Pieces of yourself you cannot now have back, no matter how you wish it.”
She’d neatly turned the entire conversation back on him with the precision of a seasoned interrogator. “I became what life made of me.”
She tsked. “Did you dream of military life as a small boy, or had you other dreams once upon a time? Gentler dreams? Surely you did not spring fully formed into such as you are now.”
No, although the core traits had always been there. He’d been serious-minded as a lad; that was no different. Too, he’d always been determined, sometimes stubbornly so, to excel at whatever he tried his hand at, although not for the adulation of others so much as quiet pride in himself.
He’d enjoyed his studies to the delight of his father, who saw in him the potential to succeed him as steward, a position requiring an educated mind as well as a love for the land.
He had liked in particular the challenge of puzzling out other languages, the marvelous way that the shapes of sounds could be reconstructed or reordered in new ways altogether to convey the same fundamental substance.
He’d picked up the classical languages and French with gratifying ease.
Other languages—and texts in those languages—had offered windows into worlds far distant from the Kentish shore.
Much as he’d loved Chestfield and Whitstable as a boy, he’d also dreamt of seeing more. Which he had, with the Rifles.
But he’d also loved, too, going out with boat or nets with his grandfather and uncle, how with their hands they gathered in the sea’s bounty.
He still remembered the sheer joy of slipping away from the adults sometimes to fish on the sly in upland streams with other village boys or to shoot the flintlock his father had taught him to use for those occasions when he was granted permission to shoot in the estate park.
By twelve years old he’d been an excellent shot, owing as much to his drive to master it as natural skill.
Things he’d loved as a boy were weaponized—but of his own volition, mostly. Or perhaps more accurately, with his tacit cooperation. He’d not left those things behind so much as had them reshaped irrevocably into something new.
But . . . he’d also been tenderhearted to a fault at times about things over which he had no control. That was stamped out of him almost at once after coming into the Rifles.
So aye, Lucy’s point stood.
When he gave her no answer, she resumed walking, and he followed suit.
“Here is what I think.” She stooped briefly to pick up a shell, brushing silt off it and tilting it, examining the inside.
“I remember too well who I was before. At present I find it too painful to reconcile those memories with what remains. Perhaps someday I will make my peace with that. Perhaps not. It was only eight months out of twenty years, after all, for all that it might as well have been eighty. You have spent a decade or more of your life choosing not to remember at all, who you were.”
Shell in hand, she marched briskly off after those cryptic words. He did not immediately try to catch up.
She went only as far as a rocky outcropping. There she leaned, looking out to sea. When she finally looked back his way, he walked slowly to rejoin her.
She drew in a breath, held it. Released it heavily. “I am sorry. That was quite rude of me. I intended no offense.”
“I took none.” He hadn’t, truly. The two of them understood one another in a way that didn’t always need careful words.
“It is only—” She blew out another breath.
“I do not know exactly what is between you and my sister now. Or what was, months ago. And once upon a time, I’d have marked it as none of my business in either case.
But not after . . . not after the sacrifices she made, finding me. Not when— She’s all I have left now.”
And that was the source of at least some of her sharpness with him. He’d never found it in himself to be irritated, recognizing that. It was very similar sentiment as that which had driven Isobel to France, searching for Lucy.
Lucy wasn’t quite finished. “It requires honesty with oneself first to be honest with another.”
“Aye. Sound advice. Do you plan to follow it yourself, then?” He matched her wry tone of earlier.
She smiled, a genuine smile that reached her eyes. “Just because I enjoy dispensing directives does not mean I’ll accept them, thank you.”
Something of his conversation with Lucy lingered for the remainder of the day alongside Isobel’s song.
Repairs to the crofter’s cottage were nearly complete.
He would need to decide soon what came next.
And he and Isobel had never spoken of anything beyond the present.
Or rather, the near future as pertained to the work he was doing for her.
They’d discussed building additional shelter so that the sisters might acquire a few more animals next spring.
He’d drawn up some plans for it. And when that project finished?
He could find work here as an oysterman if he stayed.
It was years since he’d done it, but adolescent memories of it were in his fingers.
It was an honest trade, all the more appealing after what he’d done before now.
But he and Isobel had not had such conversations. It was ironic in its way after the stripped-down honesty of what had occurred between them in France.
He’d never had much language for what love was. He had loved his family, certainly, and they had loved him, but the structure of that love had become indistinct with time. Memories of his mother especially were faded and soft at the edges.
Two lonely people in an untenable situation: That was what he and Isobel had been in France. Anything more than a few stolen nights by lamplight was impossible. But in making his way northward to her, he’d been hoping maybe it wasn’t entirely impossible after all.
Several years of his life had been given over to maintaining necessary lies, his own and others’.
Somehow he’d stumbled onto something real in its midst. Or rather, Isobel had stumbled into his path.
He’d never allowed himself to want something, and he’d believed that the absence of love in his life made no difference to him.
Isobel unwittingly exposed that for a lie.
It had been creeping up on him for some time. Or— No. It was merely realizing he loved her, not the fact of it. He’d likely already been halfway in love with her before she left France; he just hadn’t recognized it at the time, and afterwards he’d pushed it well below the surface.
After the Compton case concluded, it was Isobel he’d sought. He’d rationalized it with a variety of excuses at first, but in the end it was to her he’d gone because she’d been the only thing that made sense to him anymore.
In France she’d still been shadowed heavily by her grief for Jamie. Undoubtedly she would mourn him always. She had loved Jamie.
He was not jealous of a dead man. He’d know himself beyond fortunate if he could spend the rest of his life and hers valuing her capacity for love and honoring the man who had loved her first. But he had nothing to offer her right now that she didn’t already have for herself.
He was not a broken man, but he was still working out a future he’d never allowed himself to envision. It might take him the remainder of his life, discovering what he could make of it. He could see himself doing that here, in Kirkcudbrightshire. Here, with Isobel.
All he had to truly offer her right now was his heart—but did she want it?
Isobel went to Nathaniel the second week of May, when spring was well advanced on the Solway. Did she not go to him now, she might never. Repairs on the crofter’s cottage were nearly complete, and she did not know if he would stay afterwards or leave.
I have endured so much loss already. Surely I will bear it if he leaves. But her mind blanked at that and refused to consider it further.
Heart in her throat, she noiselessly opened the door to his room. If he is asleep, I will just leave quietly . . . But no, there was a candle burning. He was propped on one elbow, a book spread open on the bed beneath one hand.
She moved just inside the room, silently pulling shut the door behind her and setting down her candle on the washstand. He was already motionless, but he became somehow more still yet in that particular way he had of taking the quiet into him.
Her mouth went dry.
She took a single step towards him. Carefully, without looking down, he closed the book and laid it on the floor. His eyes devoured her.
Wordless, whole body trembling, she went to him. His arms came around her as she knelt on the edge of the bed, and for a moment he only clasped her tightly to him.
And then his hands skated lightly up her thighs and along her hips to gather up her shift and draw it over her head.
So difficult to breathe from that slight sweet contact of palms and fingertips along her naked flesh.
She shivered, spine arching, as his mouth found the precise juncture of neck and shoulder.
Just below her rib cage, bared to his touch, his hands settled, featherlight.
She undressed him as quickly as her shaking hands allowed.
He pulled her down to the bed then, skin against skin, and his lips found hers.
Owing to Lucy down the hall, they did not speak, made no noises except for stuttered breaths and the small gasps and sighs impossible to contain.
Words were unnecessary in any case, with touch and taste to reacquaint them to one another.
Time lost all meaning except the here and now, the shape of him in her arms.
When he at last entered her, it was without force or haste.
Unhurried movements, exquisitely excruciatingly slow, a careful inch at a time, so creaking of the bed would not betray them.
Resolution should have been impossibly out of reach with such caution, and yet tension built gradually, inexorably, until Nathaniel shuddered with the effort to constrain movement, and her entire body trembled head to foot until she thought she might die of it.
But then she was lost over the edge, and so was he.
He lay heavily on her afterwards, still joined to her, his face turned in to her neck. She kept her arms and legs twined tight about him, holding him to her despite the chill in the room rapidly stealing heat from their damp bodies.
His mouth moved to her ear: Stay. A word breathed with little more than air.
She tightened her arms around him in response, a wordless yes. His tongue traced her ear, teeth closing on the earlobe as he groped behind him to find the blanket.
They were still joined, still tangled length to length. She couldn’t risk speech in the silent house, so let this speak for her instead: his face cradled in her hands, kisses infused with all the longing for him that was rooted so much deeper than physical desire alone.
He was hers right now, and she would claim him, future heartache be damned.