Someone to Love (Westcott #1)(99)

“Terrifying?” Her eyes widened.

He closed his eyes and took several slow, deep breaths. “I married the wrong woman,” he murmured, his eyes still closed, “or else the only right woman. You will not remain on the surface of my life, will you, Anna Archer? You will not be content to bring me comfort and delight, though there has not been much of either, has there, since we returned to London. Is it because this question has needed asking and answering? Is it because you will not be content until you have seen to the very core of me? And perhaps because I will not be content until I have allowed you there?”

He opened his eyes and looked at her. Her own were still wide. Her face had lost color. He smiled ruefully at her. “There should be someone to warn a man what he is facing when he marries.”

He tossed his napkin onto the table, got to his feet, and reached out a hand for hers. “Come,” he said.

She frowned for a moment, eyed his hand with obvious unease, and then placed her own in it.





Twenty-four




He took her upstairs, past the drawing room floor, past the bedchambers on the next floor, and on up to the attics. He turned left and into a large room. He had been holding her hand tightly, but let it go after shutting the door and strode about the room to light all the many candles that were placed about it, in wall sconces, on the floor, on the windowsill. He lit them despite the fact that the evening sunlight was still slanting in a bright band through the window.

The room was bare apart from two wooden benches along one side of it and lots of cushions—and all the candles. The floor was of polished wood. There was no carpet. There was something about it all that Anna would not have been able to explain in words if she tried. It was alien, strange, yet she felt instantly and thoroughly at home there and at peace. There was the faint scent of incense.

“Wait there,” he said without looking back at her, and he disappeared through a door across from the benches. Anna was still standing just inside the door when he came out again a few minutes later, wearing loose white trousers and a loose white jacket that wrapped across the front and was belted at the waist. He was barefoot. He strode toward her, his hand outstretched for hers.

“Come,” he said, and led her to the wooden bench closer to the window. When she had sat down, he moved a cushion and sat on it facing her, his legs crossed, his hands on his knees. “No one comes in here except me. I even clean it myself.”

Yes, she could sense that about the room. It felt a bit like a sanctuary or a hermitage despite its size. “And now me?”

“You are my wife,” he said, and for a moment there was a look in his eyes that was almost bleak, almost fearful, almost pleading. But it was gone before she could quite grasp it. It was a look of vulnerability, she thought. He was afraid.

“Avery,” she said, her voice almost a whisper, as though they were in church, in a sacred place, “I do not know you at all, do I?”

“I have made myself unknowable,” he said. “It is a comfortable way to live.”

“But why?” she asked.

He sighed. “I will tell you a story,” he said, “about a little boy everyone thought ought to have been a girl because he was small and delicate and pretty—and timid.”

It was of himself he spoke—in the third person, setting himself even now at a distance from his own story.

“His mother adored him and coddled him,” he said. “She devoted almost all her time to him and admitted only her old nurse into the inner circle. She taught him his lessons because she refused to allow a tutor near him and could find no governess who suited her exacting standards. She kept him from his father as much as possible—not a difficult thing to do, as it happened, because his father looked upon him with a sort of puzzled disfavor. And then, when he was nine years old, the child’s mother sickened and died. The nurse stayed on to care for him, but after another couple of years his father decided it was time to toughen him up and sent him off to school.”

“Poor boy,” she said, keeping up the illusion that he spoke of someone else. “I wish I had had him in my schoolroom.”

“You were five years old at the time,” he said. “All new pupils in a boys’ school are vulnerable to bullying. It is not even frowned upon. It is considered part of a boy’s education. School is meant to toughen him, to bring out the brute in him so that he will be able to survive and thrive in a man’s world. Bullying is something boys take from above and give below. It is a system that works beautifully well. Our society is founded upon it. The strong rise to the top and rule our world. The weaker find a useful place in the middle. The weakest are destroyed, but they were useless anyway. The child of my story was the very weakest. He was a timid, puny, pretty, frightened little boy.”

Anna leaned slightly forward and began to reach out one hand toward him, but she returned it to her lap to clasp the other. His story was only partly told.

“I refused to be destroyed,” he said. “I discovered a stubbornness in myself even while everything I tried—boxing, fencing, rowing, running—resulted only in failure and ridicule. I tried harder—and harder. And I survived. Perhaps I would have clawed my way up into the lower part of that middle group by the time I left boyhood behind. I was the heir to a wealthy dukedom, after all, and that would command some respect. But then something happened. A life changer. When I was walking back to school alone one day during my second to last year, I saw an elderly Chinese gentleman in a bleak and barren empty space between two buildings. He was dressed as I am now, even down to the bare feet.”