AllFreeNovel
Share Us
They still sat on the table, taking up too much room. She picked them up and held them out.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I already knew you loved her.”
He took the letters, considered them. “It wasn’t a love match, but we were friends.” He glanced up. “I wrote these to her after she died. I missed her.”
His dark eyes were tinged with anguish, an old sorrow, a new anger, and she belatedly grasped the full horror of their theft.
“And they stole them! I swear, Joshua, if you don’t shoot them, I will.”
He brushed a finger over her cheek. “Don’t bother. They’re not worth it. We’ll finish them easily enough.”
She had made a royal mess of his cravat, and he went to the mirror to retie it without seeking her help, so she did not offer it. Instead, she watched him peering at his reflection as though tying his cravat was the only thing on his mind. How curious people were: that they could experience something like that—that lovemaking that made the world splinter and dance—and then settle into domestic routines as though nothing at all had passed.
Although she was not sure what had passed. Certainly, she did not know what happened next. The world outside that door was demanding her attention and she wanted to be alone.
“How did you meet her? Rachel.”
“Her father was John Watkins, who owned the manufactories where your father found me a job as an errand boy,” he said, looping the cloth efficiently around his neck. “I worked my way up, and by the time I was nineteen, I was a senior clerk and Watkins was grooming me to take over. He had no succession plan because Rachel was his only child, and she was twenty-seven and unwed, and until me he had not found anyone suitable. She wanted to manage the business but Watkins didn’t take her seriously, and she felt the men who courted her didn’t either. She offered to marry me if I let her run the factories with me.”
“And did you? Let her run them?”
“I’d have been a fool not to. She excelled at it, knew every inch of the business. Watkins never realized how much she had to offer. Even when we were doing well, he thought it was all me.” He finished up the imperfect knot, patted it, and shrugged. “It still stuns me,” he added, turning back to her. “How much is wasted when men decide that certain babies are worth nothing because of their birth or class or sex or skin? How much do we all lose, as a nation, as humans, by dismissing people simply because they are not like us?”
“Like what happened to you.”
“What the blazes are you on about now?”
“I mean, you were a lord and then overnight the world decided you were worth nothing, but you proved them wrong. You could have given up, or become bitter. But you learned and now you want to make the world a fairer place for others too.”
“You think that I…But I’m just…” He made a frustrated sound and scrubbed his hands through his hair. “I’d better go.”
“Will you…” She paused. “I suppose I shall have to cancel my evening plans, spend the evening with Lucy and Emily and figure out what to do about them. Will you join us for dinner? I mean…”
“I don’t know about dinner,” he said. “But I’ll come to you tonight. If you’ll have me. Once is not enough.”
* * *
Joshua wentabout the rest of his day with renewed vigor, until finally it was night, and time to go to her. He made love to her properly, with no fabric between them—with nothing between them but the candlelight.
And when the candles were out and he held her against him, their skin so close he could not find the edges, he listened to her breathe and stared into the darkness and said, “Rachel and I had a son.”
She jerked out of his arms. It was too dark to see her expression, which is why he’d told her in the night.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “Papa never said.Younever said.”
“It never came up in the conversation.”
“Oh, maybe when I expressed my desire to have a child? You might have said, ‘I already had a child and I lost him’.”
He pulled her back against him. She gave him her weight and did not argue anymore.
“He was barely five when…” He closed his eyes in the darkness. “One day he was fine, then he was sick, and then he was gone. There was nothing we could have done differently. Just one of those things. One of the ways the world likes to laugh at us, to remind us that we are never in control.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t want your sympathy.”
“Too bad. You have it anyway.”
