“You found her?” she whispered.
The horror of his young life pounded her with desolation and pain, made her thankful for all she had – a devoted family to love and protect.
“Yes,” he answered, quite matter of fact, although his grip tightened on her shoulders. “No one else cared that she’d been missing some four hours. I found her stockings and shoes by the lake and dived in, thinking she’d gone paddling and slipped but…”
Jack’s eyes briefly closed and when they reopened, no suave rogue or affable marquess stared back, just a devastated boy. “I dived deep and there she was, floating like one of your Cornish mermaids, sunlight breaking the water to glint in her blond hair.”
Tears slid down Tamsyn’s cheeks, dripped onto her dress. His face held a bleakness; how could it not? Yet he spoke with such…normalcy. “And your father?” she croaked.
A shake of the head. Curl of lip. “He wasn’t home. I cut the ribbons, and with her in my arms, I waded out. Mama’s sodden skirts were so heavy, I had to clamber from the shallows on my knees.”
Tamsyn closed her eyes to the horror, images forming nonetheless. Of Jack, a young boy crawling in the lake’s mud with his dead mother in his arms, fingers scrambling at the bank, cries of anger and pain and misery.
Alone on a beautiful summer’s day.
Gentle thumbs wiped the tears from her cheek. “Don’t cry, Tamsyn. She is at peace now and if we bury ourselves in the past, we become mired also.”
She shook her head. Yes, there were tears for his poor mother but most were for this man.
Her angel and devil, his dark and his light.
Jack wasn’t sure he’d ever made a woman cry before, but he’d sensed she needed something.
Something of him.
He’d reconciled himself long ago to his mother’s choice and no torment troubled his soul. There had been nothing that Jack, a mere boy, could have done. She’d chosen where her peace lay.
The best he’d been able to do as a son was gently untie the pink ribbons about her wrists, say he’d heard a cry, that she must have slipped, that he’d been too late. Far too late.
In that way, she would at least be granted burial within the churchyard and not banished to unconsecrated land for the manner of her death. He believed God would welcome all. Only man would be so cruel.
They’d laid her next to Vincent. Safe from harm.
And Jack had vowed that as a Winterbourne through and through, he would never hurt a woman in such a way, never crush nor quell, disregard nor pain – neither in body nor spirit.
Father had even missed her funeral due to a new mistress but evidently realised something was amiss as he’d mumbled his gratitude at their next encounter, muttering there would have been nothing worse than a scandal of female madness in the noble Winterbourne lineage.
Bloody fiend. Jack hadn’t done it for him or the Winterbourne name, marred as it already was in defilement and brutality.
He focused on the painting over Tamsyn’s shoulder, saw the love with which it had been imbued.
One had to seize joy in this fleeting life.
And his gaze fell to the woman he held.
“Allow me to share your burden, Tamsyn. Tell me of that night and carry it alone no longer.”
A nod and her clear blue eyes met his. “I want to tell you all, Jack.”
Chapter Eighteen
A burden no more.
Cuddled up on the old chaise, with capable arms encircling her waist, Tamsyn shared that which had held her captive for so long.
Foolishly, she’d thought they’d sit across a desk. Him with paper and quill, scratching notes, herself nervously stuttering through the events, hands twisting and voice quaking.
But this was Jack and instead he’d shrugged off his tailcoat, stretched across the blue chaise, parted his legs and patted the seat in between.
