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“You paid the price ten years ago for your choice to live as you needed. He’s yet to begin.”
“That’s the crux of it. I don’t know all the dimensions of his suffering, but it’s there. He’s done everything he can to measure up to others’s expectations. He’s tried to be the son Father wanted.”
She squeezed his hand. “You would solve it for him if you could, I know. I can see how pained you are for him. I’m sorry.”
“Ten years ago, I had to make my own way. I couldn’t do otherwise, not any longer. Now it’s Adrian’s turn. He’ll find his way. He’s a good man. He just hasn’t been able to…be himself.”
As if a ghost passed between them, Helen’s face transformed.
“What is it?”
She sat quietly for a long while before answering. “There are two kinds of agony when a person isn’t able to be himself. His own. And that of those who care about him and bear witness but can’t fix it. You’re living it with Adrian.”
“You have lived it, haven’t you?”
She nodded. “With Robbie. He wasn’t suited to working at the shipyard. Half the time he paid it no heed, and detested it the other half. He wanted to break free but didn’t know how. He wanted to be the son his parents wished, yet knew he never would be. It…paralyzed him.”
“Will you tell me how your marriage came about?”
Helen withdrew her hand from his and shifted on the settee to face forward, away from him.
“Before we married, Robbie and I were friends. Different as night and day, but friends. He was between my age and my brother’s. At some point, after Elijah left, Robbie was like my older brother. And when I was eighteen, I—I made a grave mistake.”
Her voice was cold now, but Nicholas knew without a doubt that underneath the veneer of ice was a well of pain. “What happened?”
“I gave my virtue to a seducer. He’d moved to Boston recently and came by looking for work. We didn’t have any for him, but he kept visiting the yard. I believed him unmarried and newly from Ireland. That we would marry. But he was already married.”
Nicholas forced his breathing to calm—he didn’t want her believing he was upset with her—and he stroked her cheek. She stayed in place, but he could sense that she was torn between accepting the comfort and pulling away. He dropped his hand to her knee. “May I have his direction, that I might find him and skin him alive?”
She gave a small laugh and covered his hand with hers. Then her expression wiped clean as she continued. “I discovered the truth soon after our first time. The entire experience with him was dreadful. Nothing like what you and I have shared. And it left me terrified I was with child.”
“Unmarried. Running your father’s lumberyard.” He left unspoken what they both knew—that whatever sins the lying seducer had indulged, it would have been Helen who absorbed all the dire social consequences. “Of course you were terrified.”
“I thought Robbie was my savior when he proposed marriage. That he was trying to protect me. I confessed everything, and he wasn’t angry with me. Didn’t castigate me. He said if I was with child, he’d raise it as his own. That no one would know how the child was conceived. He wanted to marry right away.”
“Before you knew if you were with child?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “If only I’d waited. For there was no child. But by then, it was too late. My life was changed forever. I became a…Gray. My father died within a month of the marriage. Almost as if he could let go, believing I was married off. I don’t know. Perhaps it’s good he never saw what became of us.”
“What did become of you?”
“At first, I believed the marriage was for the best, even without being with child. Robbie had seemed relieved when I agreed to marry him—as if he wanted it, too. I should have known better. Ididknow better! But I thought with time, we could find our way. As for the Grays, they were almost ecstatic. I’d feared they’d be against the marriage.”
“Why?”
Her laugh was bitter. “Oh, for every reason. My mother was an Irish Catholic. I ran wild and didn’t behave as a lady should. They never would have chosen me.”
“Why were they in favor of you marrying, then?”
“Robbie was in love with someone else. Someone…they could never accept. Never. They knew about it. In fact, the day before I told Robbie of my problem and he proposed, his parents had discovered him…in bed with…” She swallowed. “I didn’t know then what his parents had seen, but I, too, knew of his love for this other. Just as I knew they could never be together.”
“His parents hoped the marriage would change his affections.”
“Yes. For a time, they welcomed me into the family. Until it became clear that I had failed.”
Nicholas took umbrage at that. “Thatyoufailed?”
“The Grays believed that if I were a proper wife, Robbie would be a proper husband. We both tried in our own way. But he was who he was. His heart couldn’t be changed. He never stopped loving the other. When we found him in the opium den, it was…a horror to witness. But it was also the first time I saw him free of suffering. The opium deadened it all. He’d been so full of pain. Then he was just empty.”
