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“Even with Angus?”
“No. No, that was quite unfair of me. Angus brought him great joy. He was everything he could have wished.”
“But?” he said gently, insistently.
“He was!”
“There is a shadow in your voice, a hesitation,” he insisted. “What is it? What was it in Angus, Lady Ravensbrook, which made Caleb hate him so passionately? They were close once. Why did they grow so hideously far apart?”
“I don’t know!”
“But you guess? You must have thought about it, wondered. Even if only for the pain it brought your husband.”
“Of course I thought about it. I lay awake many hours wondering if there were some way they might be reconciled. I searched my mind. I asked my husband often, until I realized he knew as little as I, and that to speak of it gave him pain. He and Angus were not …”
“Not what?”
She spoke reluctantly. He was dragging the words out of her, and he knew it.
“Easy in each other’s company,” she admitted. “It was as if the shadow of Caleb were always there, a darkness between them, a wound that could never be completely forgotten.”
“But you liked Angus?”
“Yes, yes I liked him.” Now the shadow was gone, she spoke wholeheartedly. “He was extraordinarily kind. He was a man you could admire without reservation, and yet so modest he never put himself forward, was never pompous. Yes, I liked Angus enormously. I never saw him lose his temper or perform a cruel act.” The marks of grief were plain in her face, but simple loss, without doubt or underlying darkness.
He hated himself for persisting, and yet the nagging anxiety was in his mind like a toothache, dull and ever present, and sometimes giving a stab so sharp it robbed the breath.
“Never?”
“No,” she said as if she had not expected to feel so. “Never. I am not suiprised my husband loved him. He was all he could have wished in a son, had he been granted one.”
“He must have hated Caleb for destroying him,” he said gently. “It would be understandable if he could never forgive such an act of treachery. Most especially since Angus still kept such loyalty towards Caleb.”
She turned away, her voice even lower. “Yes, I could not blame him. And yet he does not seem to feel the anger I do. It is almost as if …”
He waited, leaning forward, the silence in the room prickling his ears.
She turned very slowly to look at him.
“I don’t know what you expect me to say, Mr. Goode.…”
“The truth, ma’am. It is the only thing clean enough, the only thing which will in the end stand above all the pain.”
“I don’t know it!”
“It was almost as if … what?” he
prompted.
“As if he had known one day it must happen, and it was like a blow he had long awaited, and the reality of it is the end of the tension, almost a solace. Is that a terrible thing to say?”
“No. It is merely sad,” he said gently. “And if we were honest, perhaps something we might all say. One can become very tired.”
She smiled, for the first time some brightness reached her eyes.
“You are very kind, Mr. Goode. I think perhaps you are well named.”
For the first time in many years, he felt the color warm in his face, and a strange mixture of pleasure and an awareness of how lonely he was.
