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The room was full of sunlight.
Robert was lying back against his pillows, smiling, his attention entirely upon Victoria. She was reading to him from Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, the love story of Tristram and Isolde. Her voice was gentle and urgent, filled with tragedy, and yet there was a music in it which transcended the immediacy of the quiet sickroom in an elegant London house and became all magic and doomed love, a universal longing.
Hester crept away and went into the dressing room where she had a cot bed made up so she could be close to Robert and respond instantly if he called her. She busied herself with a few duties of tidying up, folding and putting away clothes the laundry maid had brought back.
It was fifteen minutes later when she tapped on the door between her room and Robert’s, and then gently pushed it open to see if perhaps he would like something to eat or a cup of tea.
“Next time I’ll read about the Siege Perilous and the coming of Sir Galahad,” Victoria said eagerly. “It is so full of courage and honor.”
Robert sighed. Hester could see his face, pale and pinched with a kind of sadness at the corners of his mouth. Or perhaps it was fear. Surely he must have realized that he might never recover. He had said nothing to her, but he must have lain alone in that silent, tidy room with everything placed there by his parents’ love. They were always just beyond the door watching, aching to help him, and knowing that nothing they could do did more than touch the surface. Underneath, the consuming fear, the darkness of dread, was beyond their ability to reach. It must never be out of their minds, and yet they dare not speak it.
Looking at Robert’s eyes with the shadowed skin around them, thin and bruised, Hester knew it was just under the surface of all he said.
“Good,” he replied politely to Victoria. “That’s very kind of you.”
She looked at him steadily.
“Would you rather that I didn’t?” she asked.
“No!” he responded quickly. “It sounds an excellent story. I think I probably know much of it already. It will be good to hear it again, as it should be told. You read so well.” His voice dropped on the last word, in spite of his effort to be courteous and appreciative.
“But you don’t want to listen to stories about heroes who can fight, and wield swords, and ride horses, when you are lying in bed and cannot move,” Victoria said with shattering bluntness.
Hester felt a chill run through her as if she had swallowed ice.
Robert’s face went white. He was still for so long she was afraid that when he did speak he would say something so violent it would be irretrievable.
If Victoria was afraid, she hid it superbly. Her back was ramrod stiff, her thin shoulders straight, her head high.
“There were times when I didn’t want to either,” she said quite calmly, but there was a tremor in her voice. The memory hurt.
“You can walk!” The words tore out of Robert as if speaking them caused him a physical pain.
“I couldn’t for a long time,” she replied, now almost matter-of-factly. “And now, when I do, it still hurts.” Her voice was trembling, and there was a flush of shame and misery on her cheeks, the delicate bones showing under the too-thin flesh. “I walk badly. I’m clumsy. I knock things. You don’t hurt.”
“I …” He started to retaliate, then realized he had no grounds. His pain of the body was almost gone. Now it was all the desperate, aching, helpless pain of the mind, the knowledge of imprisonment with his lifeless legs.
Again Victoria said nothing.
“I’m sorry for your pain,” he said at last. “But I would rather hurt, and be able to move, even awkwardly, than spend the rest of my life lying here like a cabbage.”
“And I would rather be able to lie beautifully on a chaise longue.” Her voice was thick with emotion. “I’d like to be loved by an honorable family, knowing I would always be cared for, never cold or hungry or alone. And I would love not to dread the pain coming back. But we can neither of us choose. And perhaps you will walk again. You don’t know.”
Again he was silent for a long time.
Behind the door, Hester dared not make the slightest movement.
“Will your pain get better?” he said at last.
“No. I have been told not,” she replied.
He drew a breath as if to ask her more, perhaps about her means and why she feared cold and hunger, but even in his distress he pulled back from such indelicacy.
“I’m sorry.”
“Of course you are,” she agreed. “And it doesn’t help in the slightest, knowing that you are not the only one to suffer. I know that. It doesn’t help me either.”
He leaned back on the pillows, turning away from her. The soft brown hair flopped over his brow and he ignored it. The sunlight made bright patterns on the floor.
