AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Truth was, she didn’t like birds, much.
She looked at Papa. “If you could have had a choice, you would not have chosen me, would you?”
He needed no explanation. His eyes went straight to the portrait and back to Queenie. “You know that’s not it,” he said, his hand resting on the parrot. “I would have chosen you both.”
“But you lost only one, not two. Yet you could not be pleased with the child that remained.”
He said nothing.
“I loved him too,” she said. “He was part of me, my twin. Always at my side.”
Silence filled the room, so dense even the parrot dared not break it.
Finally, Papa dropped his hands and took a deep breath.
“He still is,” he said quietly. “Every time I look at you, I see him. Right there.”
Now she knew why Papa could hardly bear to look at her.
“Maybe if you had not been twins, maybe it would have been different. I know it was not your fault, it was never your fault. But… When I look at you, I see what I could have had. What could have been and never was.”
The jury of dead birds stared at her, their glass eyes as cold and judgmental as ever.
“So you found fault with me,” she said. “I would never have pleased you. I worked hard to excel, and the world sang my praises, but not you. Never you. It wasn’t about whether my hair was messy or my dress was flawed, or my fingers were stained from blackberries or my tongue too sharp. It was because I was a living reminder of your loss. I didn’t only lose my twin brother. I lost my father too.”
He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’ll be different now. You’ll see. Everything will be fine.”
All these years she had been fighting, and the whole time it had been in vain. She had lost before she’d even understood what the battle was about.
“You are not taking my children from me, Papa. Any child I have, I will keep with me for as long as I am fortunate to have them. You have taken too much from me already.”
* * *
The wind slicedArabella’s cheeks as her horse galloped along with bone-jolting speed, but the effort to keep her seat meant she could not think, not until she reached the abbey ruins and toppled out of the saddle onto unsteady legs.
But even up here, even a good hour since her quarrel with her father, she found no peace, no escape from the eruption of messy, hot, stinking emotions. In the dull light, these abbey walls, too, were haunted by memories. Here she had played at knights with Oliver. There, they had picked blackberries. And that wall there—that was where Guy had walked, traipsing along carelessly on a sunlit day.
Curse him for going to Birmingham. She needed him. She needed his arms, his comfort.
She needed to grow up.
Yes, Oliver was always by her side, the little boy who never grew up. And here stood proud, arrogant Arabella Larke: the little girl who never grew up, still eight years old, trying to bend the world to her will, waiting for her life to go back to how it was, when their family was happy and she was always welcome, Oliver’s sister and protector.
What a tragic pair they made, she and Papa, so terribly alike, both trying and failing to fill the hollow left behind, in their own pointless, useless ways.
Thus had begun her struggle with her father. Poor Mama, caught in the middle. Even Sculthorpe had been a casualty of it. And now Guy was swept up in it too.
If it wasn’t for this futile fifteen-year struggle with Papa, she would never have become engaged to Sculthorpe, never have devised her scheme, never have chosen Guy, never have gone to his house that night in London.
And she and Guy would never have ended up here: due to be married in a few days. Instead, she would likely have married someone else years ago, and Guy would have been free to choose the life he wanted after all, with the amiable, pleasant wife of his dreams.
In the end, they had wanted the same thing, she and Guy: a warm, safe, loving home.
He wouldn’t get what he wanted, not with her.
“No,” she said out loud, to the stone, to the blackberries, to the cluster of Michaelmas daisies by the wall. “No. He will come back from Birmingham. He will marry me.”
Papa might not have wanted her, but Guy did. Papa had resented her all these years, but Guy had chosen her.
