Blackmoore(89)

It had been the right decision for me to run away. I knew that with even greater surety than I had known it one year ago. But, oh, the sac-rifice! It was a burden I carried with me always. India had not disappointed me—not in the way I had feared it would. It had granted me the freedom and the power of independence I had longed for so fiercely.

Aunt Charlotte had granted me that. But life in this world disappointed me—the life that required giving up my heart for the sake of my soul.

Sleep eluded me all night, and at breakfast Aunt Charlotte peered at me over her cup of tea.

“You look terrible, my dear,” she stated.

I grimaced. “I didn’t sleep all night.”

She set her cup down carefully. “Hm.” Resting her chin on her hand, she gazed at me over the table with a keen look that made me feel very transparent. “It might help to turn your attention to other men. Fill up your heart with someone else.”

I shook my head. There was no question of that. If I couldn’t have Henry, I didn’t want anyone. Besides, I had left my heart with him. It was not that my heart was empty and needed filling up—it was that my heart was absent. It had been thoroughly, irreversibly claimed.

“Well, then, let us think of something else to amuse us,” she said.

“I have heard a ship has docked recently. I wonder it there will be letters from home. Perhaps Oliver will have written? Or perhaps we may make new friends of the passengers. Somebody might even arrive today!”

I offered a small smile for her sake. “I am not depressed, Aunt Charlotte. Simply . . . contemplative.”

Her compassionate smile told me she did not believe me. But she was kind enough to let the subject drop. After breakfast I returned to the pianoforte and played more of Herr Spohr’s piece. It did something to the demon within me every time I played it. And this time the demon told 271



J u l i a n n e D o n a l D s o n

me to write. So I abandoned the music for paper and ink. I sat at the writing table in the parlor and wrote a letter of my own.

Dear Henry,

I have played Herr Spohr’s music all night. My heart is as weak as it has ever been, or maybe it is stronger than it has ever been. I hardly know. I only know that my will has weakened with wanting you, my heart longs for you, and if I truly had wings at this moment, I would use them only to fly to wherever you are. I know that I doubted the persistence of love, but I am beginning to doubt my own wisdom. My love for you will not die. It will not falter. It will not leave me alone. If anything, my longing for you grows with each passing day. My emptiness without you grows. And I doubt my experience with love. I wonder if my parents ever knew what it was to love. I wonder if I was wrong about the possibility of becoming them. And for the first time in my life, I— The sound of a blackbird’s whistle pierced my thoughts. I froze, wait-ing to hear it again. The whistle of homecoming. Had I just imagined it?

A soft meow pulled my attention away from my letter. I sat up and looked in amazement as a grey cat ran into the room, sliding across the tile floor to rub its head against my leg.

I reached down to stroke its head and saw a flash of white on its chest.

“Cora?” I asked, unbelieving.

A soft rap sounded at the door. I lifted my head and could not com-prehend what I was seeing. It was Henry, looking more handsome than ever and more tanned than I had ever seen him, and surely his shoulders had gotten stronger too. He was not moving—just standing there and staring at me as if I were water in a desert.

Then Henry stepped into the room and said, “I have brought you 272



your heart.” He gestured toward Cora. “And I have come to tell you that something has changed.”

I stared at him, not really believing he was actually standing there.

Surely this was a figment of my imagination—a product of too much Romantic music and too little sleep.

He walked toward me, moving slowly, carefully, as if I were a wild thing he was afraid would fly away if startled. “You said, at Blackmoore . . .

You said that you would make the same decision, every time, unless something changed.” He was standing right in front of me now. “Something has changed, Kate. I have refused my mother’s plan for my life.”

Now I could see the details of his face—his clear grey eyes, the faint streak of freckles across his tanned cheeks. He looked as if he had spent months aboard a ship, in the sun, and I finally believed it was real. I finally believed he was real. I could not breathe.

“I have told Juliet that I will not marry her. I realized that I couldn’t marry her. After you left, I tried to think of my life with her with any de-gree of hope or happiness, and I couldn’t. I realized—” He raked a hand through his hair, leaving it mussed. My heart melted at the sight. How many times had I watched him do that very thing? “I realized, darling, that Juliet would have been my cage, and I could not make myself do it.

She understood. She was quite generous, actually. She said she supposed that I had loved you all along, which was absolutely true.”

He knelt in front of me. My face flushed, and my hands trembled, and my hope lifted again and again, but I beat it down, not daring to truly believe yet that my dreams were coming true. But then Henry said, “I have left Blackmoore in the keeping of my brother George, and I have taken a position with the East India Company. I have traveled halfway around the world to find you . . . to show you that I will never resent you for robbing me of my home, because I have given it up freely. Now I have nothing left for you to rob me of, except my heart, but you have long been guilty of that already.” His mouth twisted in a half-smile, and I saw in his grey eyes an ache of hope and dread and fear and love all mixed 273