His At Night

Chapter Twenty-one

A death in the family, especially a death under such strained circumstances, required much to be done in its wake.

Edmund Douglas’s body had to be claimed and buried, his solicitors consulted with regard to his will and his estate. Had things been different, Elissande would have taken care of matters. But with her battered face—the bruises had turned a cringe-inducing mélange of purple, green, and darkish yellow—Mrs. Douglas had insisted that Elissande remain home to recuperate. She would go in Elissande’s stead.

It was time she took a greater interest in matters of her own life, said Mrs. Douglas. Vere, who had anyway needed to go to London, volunteered to accompany her. They also brought along Mrs. Green, who would see to it that Mrs. Douglas was comfortably put up and meticulously looked after.

And now Mrs. Douglas dozed in their rail compartment, her weight against Vere’s arm as insubstantial as that of a blanket.

Memories surfaced of her daughter sleeping next to him on the train. He remembered his resentful bewilderment that he could have been drawn to someone of such questionable character. His intellectual self had yet to recognize what a deeper, more primal part of him already sensed at first sight: her integrity.

Not integrity in the sense of unimpeachable practice of morality, but a personal wholeness. Her trials under Douglas had not left her unmarked, but neither had they lessened her.

Whereas he had been both scarred and diminished.

He had always used the language of Justice to relate to his work. True justice was motivated by an impartial desire for fairness. What underlay his entire career had been anger and grief: anger that he could not punish his father, grief that he could not bring back his mother.

That was why he derived only negligible satisfaction from even his greatest successes: They reminded him of his impotence in his own life, of what he could never accomplish.

And that was why he had been so livid at Freddie: part of it had been envy. By the time he had spoken to Lady Jane, his father had been three months dead. And yet Vere’s obsession had only grown. He could not understand how Freddie could let go and move on, while he remained stuck between the night of his mother’s death and the night of his father’s.

Thirteen years. Thirteen years of chasing after what could never be had in the first place, while his youth fled by, his erstwhile ambitions lay forgotten, and his life grew ever more isolated.

A single snore in the compartment brought his attention back to his fellow traveler. Mrs. Douglas fidgeted, then slept on. On the way to the rail station, she had shyly confided that before she’d met him, she’d already seen him in a laudanum-fueled dream—he’d rather wondered what she’d made of his presence in her room. One day, when he had his life in order, he would tell her the truth and apologize for frightening her.

She fidgeted again. Vere studied her: the cheeks, still pale, but now with a whisper of color; the neck, still thin, but no longer sticklike. When he’d first met her, he’d assumed her permanently broken. She had instead proved herself a dormant seed that needed only a less hostile environment to come alive.

He turned to the window again. Perhaps he too was not as permanently broken as he’d believed.

This time, instead of using his own key, Vere rang Freddie’s bell.

He was shown into Freddie’s study, where Freddie was checking a book of rail schedules, his finger moving down a column, searching for what he needed. Freddie looked up and dropped the book.

“Penny! I was just coming to see you.” He rushed up to Vere and embraced him anxiously. “If you arrived fifteen minutes later I’d have left to Paddington Station already. I heard the most bizarre rumors this morning: Lady Vere’s uncle escaped jail and abducted you—and you had to fight for your life. What happened?”

The words were on Vere’s lips—Oh rubbish, don’t people know how to gossip properly anymore? I didn’t have to fight for my life. I subdued that toothpick of a man with one finger—and an expression of thick satisfaction was already rising to his face.

The temptation to fall back on the idiocy he played so expertly was enormous. Freddie didn’t expect anything else of him. Freddie had long become accustomed to the idiot. They were still brothers—loving brothers. Why change anything at all?

He crossed the study, poured himself a measure of Freddie’s cognac, and tossed it back. “What you heard was a lie I told,” he said. “Mr. Douglas had abducted Mrs. Douglas, in truth. But once we rescued Mrs. Douglas, we decided that it was better for her to go home to recuperate rather than talk to the police. So I took Mr. Douglas to the police station and made up a cock-and-bull story.”

Freddie blinked. And blinked again several times. “Ah—so, is everyone all right?”

“Lady Vere has some bruises; she won’t be able to receive callers for a few days. Mrs. Douglas had quite a fright, but she came with me today and is currently enjoying herself at the Savoy Hotel. Mr. Douglas, well, he’s dead. He decided that he was better off swallowing cyanide than taking his chances in court.”

Freddie listened attentively. When Vere had finished speaking, he looked at Vere for some more time, then gave his head a small shake. “Are you all right, Penny?”

“You can see I’m perfectly fine, Freddie.”

“Well, yes, you are in one piece. But you are not acting like yourself.”

Vere took a deep breath. “This is who I’ve always been. But it’s true that sometimes—most of the past thirteen years, in fact—I haven’t acted myself.”

Freddie rubbed his eyes. “Are you saying what I think you are saying?”

“What do you think I’m saying?” Vere asked. He thought he’d made himself clear, but Freddie hadn’t reacted as he’d expected.

“One moment.” Freddie reached for a small encyclopedia and opened it to a random page. “In what year was the first plebeian secession?”

“In 494 B.C.”

“Dear Lord,” Freddie muttered. He turned the encyclopedia to a different section, then looked up with an expression of such singular hope that Vere’s stomach wrenched. “Who were Henry the Eighth’s six wives?”

“Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, and Catherine Parr,” Vere said slowly. He could have recited the list much faster, but he dreaded finishing answering the question.

Freddie set down the book. “Do you support women’s suffrage, Penny?”

“New Zealand granted unrestricted voting rights to women in ’ninety-three. South Australia granted voting rights and allowed women to stand for Parliament in ’ninety-five. The sky hasn’t fallen in either place, last I checked.”

“You have recovered,” Freddie whispered, tears already coursing down his face. “My God, Penny, you have recovered.”

Vere was suddenly crushed by Freddie’s embrace.

“Oh, Penny, you have no idea. I have missed you so much.”

Tears rolled down Vere’s cheeks: Freddie’s joy, his own shame, regret for all the time they had lost.

He pulled away.

Freddie did not notice his distress. “We must tell everyone right away. Too bad the Season is finished. My goodness, won’t everyone be in for a genuine shock next year. But we can still go to our clubs and make the announcements. And you are not leaving town right away, are you? Angelica is up in Derbyshire visiting her cousin, but she should be back tomorrow. She will be thrilled. Thrilled, I tell you.” He spoke in such a rush his words were shoving one another out of the way. “Let me ring for Mrs. Charles. I think I have a bottle or two of champagne lying around. We must celebrate. We must celebrate properly.”

Freddie reached for the bellpull. Vere grabbed his arm. But what he needed to say stuck in his throat like wet cement. He’d steeled himself to face Freddie’s wrath, not this overwhelming joy. To speak more on the subject would annihilate the happiness that flushed Freddie’s face and glistened in his eyes.

But Vere had no choice. If he allowed himself to stop here, it would be another Big Lie between the two of them, where there were piled too many lies already.

He dropped his hand from Freddie’s arm and clenched it into a fist. “You misunderstood me, Freddie. I haven’t recovered from anything, because there was nothing to recover from. I never had a concussion. It has been my choice to act the idiot.”

Freddie stared at Vere. “What are you saying? You were diagnosed. I talked to Needham myself. He said you suffered a personality-altering traumatic injury to the head.”

“Ask me again about women’s suffrage.”

Some of the color drained from Freddie’s cheeks. “Do you…do you support women’s suffrage?”

For some reason, the role did not immediately come to Vere, as if he were an actor who had already left the stage, stripped off his costume, wiped clean his makeup, and fallen half-asleep, and then was suddenly asked to reprise his performance.

He had to take several deep breaths and imagine strapping a mask over his face. “Women’s suffrage? But what do they need it for? Every woman is going to vote the way her husband tells her to, and we will still end up with the exact same idiots in Parliament! Now if dogs could vote, that would make a difference. They are intelligent, they are loyal to the Crown, and they certainly deserve more of a say in the governance of this country.”

Freddie’s mouth dropped open. He flushed with embarrassment. And then, as Vere watched, his expression slowly darkened into anger. “So all these years, all these years, it was just an act?”

Vere swallowed. “I’m afraid so.”

Freddie stared at him another minute. He drew back his fist. It landed on Vere’s solar plexus with an audible thwack. Vere stumbled a step. Before he could recover, another punch landed. And another. And another. And another. Until he was pinned to the wall.

He’d had no idea Freddie was capable of violence.

“You bastard!” The words exploded in a roar. “You swine! You bloody sham!”

He’d had no idea Freddie was capable of swearing, either.

Freddie stopped, his breaths hard and heavy.

“I’m sorry, Freddie.” Vere could not meet his eyes. He stared at the desk behind Freddie’s back. “I’m sorry.”

“You are sorry? I used to cry like a frigging fountain whenever I thought of you. Did you ever think of that? Did you even care about the people who loved you?”

His words were shards of glass in Vere’s heart. He had tried to spend as much time away from Freddie as possible in the months following his accident, but there had been no mistaking Freddie’s devastation, the tentative hope at the beginning of each new meeting fracturing into splinters of despair.

And now the moment of reckoning had come. Now Freddie saw him for what he truly was.

“And I have never let anyone call you an idiot,” Freddie snarled. “I almost came to blows with Wessex over that. But my God, you are. You are such a sodding idiot.”

He was. God, he was. A sodding idiot and a selfish bastard.

“It was as if you had died. The person who was you was gone. And I had all this grief that I couldn’t even speak of, except maybe to Lady Jane or Angelica, because everyone kept telling me that I should be thankful you were still alive. And I was, and then I would look at this stranger who had your face and your voice and miss you desperately.”

Fresh tears rolled down Vere’s face.

“I’m sorry. I was fixated on Mater’s murder and Pater’s guilt and I was furious you didn’t tell me anything—”

Freddie clamped his hand on Vere’s arm. “How do you know about them?”

“I heard Pater on his deathbed, trying to bully the rector to absolve him of the murder.”

Freddie’s expression changed. He walked away, poured himself a full glass of cognac, and emptied half the glass in one gulp. “For a moment I thought Lady Jane or Angelica told you.”

“Angelica knows too?”

“I would have told only Angelica, but she was away that summer with her family.” Freddie thrust his hand into his hair. “But I don’t understand. What does your knowing what happened to Mater have to do with your act?”

“I’ve been an investigative agent for the Crown, as Lady Jane had been in her day. I thought that was how I would be able to find a measure of peace. And the idiocy was a guise, so nobody would take me seriously.”

Freddie spun around. “My God! So when you saw Mr. Hudson injecting Lady Haysleigh with the chloral, you didn’t stumble upon it by accident.”

“No.”

“And Mr. Douglas, you were investigating him too?”

“Yes.”

Freddie emptied the rest of his cognac. “You could have told me. I would have taken your secret to my grave. And I would have been so proud of you.”

“I should’ve. But I was still seething at you for not telling me—for depriving me of any chance I had to punish Pater.” Vere cringed at the rampant immaturity his words revealed—and the narrowness of his views. Anger and obsession had been for him the only acceptable reactions to the truth. “I seethed for weeks. Maybe months. And when I’d finally calmed down some it seemed that you’d already made your peace with the new me.”

Most of the angry red had faded from Freddie’s cheeks. He shook his head slowly. “I never completely made my peace with the not-you. And I wish you’d come to me; then I could have told you that Pater didn’t need you to punish him: He was in hell already. You should have heard him that night. He begged for three hours, cowering under his counterpane all the while. I had to sit down because I got so tired of standing.”

“But he never showed the slightest remorse.”

“It was his tragedy: He stewed in so much fear without the least understanding that he could and should repent. That he even brought this up with the rector tells me he was terrified of eternal damnation. I pity him.”

Vere braced his hand against the side of a bookcase. “Did you know that I envied you, Freddie? You were able to move on, whereas I wouldn’t and couldn’t let go. I’ve always prided myself on my cleverness—but it is an empty cleverness. How I wish I had some of your wisdom instead.”

Freddie sighed. When he looked at Vere again, there was a deep sympathy in his eyes. Vere almost had to look away; he didn’t deserve Freddie’s sympathy.

“What has it been like for you all these years, Penny?”

Vere blinked back further tears. “It’s been all right and it’s been terrible.”

Freddie was about to say something, then he started. “My God, does Lady Vere know?”

“She does now.”

“And does she still like you?”

The anxiety in Freddie’s voice made Vere’s throat tighten once more. He didn’t deserve Freddie’s concern either.

“I can only hope.”

“I think she will,” said Freddie, his eyes once again shining with that clear earnestness Vere loved so well.

Vere caught his brother in an embrace. “Thank you, Freddie.”

He didn’t deserve Freddie’s forgiveness today, but one day he hoped to. One day he would make himself equal to it.

Mrs. Douglas sent Elissande telegrams. She dispatched one upon arriving at each new destination to assure Elissande of her well-being. An enthusiastic paragraph arrived after Vere took her to the Savoy Theatre to watch a comic opera called The Yeomen of the Guard, which she adored even though she was strong enough to sit through only half of the first act. And one very brief cable simply said, Mrs. Green allowed me a spoonful of ice cream. I had forgotten how divine it is.

Her telegrams also brought news. The first significant piece of news came after she and Vere had met with Douglas’s solicitors. In a will that dated to the beginning of the decade, Douglas had left nothing to his wife and his niece and had instead bequeathed everything to the Church. Elissande had chuckled. Truly, he was nothing if not consistent in his spite.

A companion cable came from Vere, explaining that not inheriting Douglas’s estate might be a blessing in disguise—Douglas had borrowed heavily against the worth of the diamond mine and could prove to have nothing but debts to bequeath. The Church’s lawyers would have a trying time with this particular gift horse.

A cable the next day was much more jubilant: Vere had located the jewels that Charlotte Edgerton had bequeathed to Mrs. Douglas, but which Douglas had immediately confiscated. A thousand pounds’ worth of jewels.

Elissande reread the cable several times. A thousand pounds.

The morning after Exeter, when she woke up, both Douglas’s diary and the chest were gone from her room. Where the chest had been, there was an elegant ebony box, in which the mementos from Charlotte and Andrew Edgerton were neatly stowed. In her dressing gown, Elissande had stood before the box, her fingertip grazing its edges, and hoped that the gift of the box meant what she wanted it to mean. But her husband had left soon thereafter, with only a solemn word to her to look after herself.

She had not been able to do much in the two days since his departure, except to try to come to terms with the fact that he had not changed his mind. The last time she had been furious; this time she only grieved. She did not want to lose the man who had held her hand when she most needed him.

There were ways she could justify remaining longer at Pierce House: She herself first must recover; then the news must be broken very gently to her mother; after that they must take their time and choose where to go.

But she had already begun to turn on those reasons. If she must leave—and she must—this was as good a time as any, with you are a diamond of the first water still echoing faintly in her ears, rather than tarrying until they wore out their welcome.

Now, with a thousand pounds at her disposal, they could ponder their eventual destination from anywhere—an inn, a house for let, the Savoy Hotel itself, if they were so inclined. And there was no gentle way of breaking it to her mother, was there? No matter how long she beat about the bushes, the truth of the matter would not dismay Mrs. Douglas any less.

She directed the maids to pack their belongings—it was less painful to delegate the task—while she tried to cheer herself. A new place, new people, and a brand-new life—those were the things that would have thrilled her during her captive days at Highgate Court. But one look out of the window to the fading but still beautiful garden and her heart would pinch with how much she loved this place, this life, and this man who had taken her mother to see The Yeomen of the Guard at the Savoy Theatre.

Without quite thinking, she left the house and walked to the spot above the River Dart where she had come across her husband on his long hike. She supposed when they were long gone, he would still walk these acres of rolling countryside, still stop occasionally on a slope to gaze down at the river, his hat by his side, leather patches on the sleeves of his tweed coat.

And she ached for his long miles of loneliness.

When she returned to the house, she went to her husband’s study.

Within the first few days of her arrival in Devon, she had seen a book in the study entitled How Women May Earn a Living. Then it had seemed a bizarre tome to come across among the collection of a man who never needed to earn a living; now she’d become accustomed to the broad, deep, and eclectic compilation of knowledge he had at his fingertips.

As she searched the shelves for the book, her eyes landed on the corner of a postcard that had become wedged between two books. She pulled out the postcard and gasped. The sepia-toned image was all pounding ocean and high cliffs. Capri, her mind immediately decided, before she saw the words at the bottom left corner of the postcard: Exmoor Coast.

She called in Mrs. Dilwyn to help her find Exmoor Coast on the detailed map of Britain that hung on the wall of the study. It wasn’t that far, a little more than fifty miles away on the north shore of Devon. She showed Mrs. Dilwyn the postcard. “Do you think I will be able to find this particular spot if I am on the Exmoor Coast?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” said Mrs. Dilwyn after one look. “I’ve been there. It’s the Hangman Cliffs. Lovely place, that.”

“Do you know how to get there then?”

“Indeed, ma’am. You take the train from Paignton to Barnstaple, then you take the local branch line and go to Ilfracombe. The cliffs are a few miles more to the east.”

She thanked Mrs. Dilwyn and spent some more time gazing wistfully at the postcard. Such a place as the Hangman Cliffs was difficult to visit: Her mother would not be able to navigate the steep paths that led to the top.

The idea came suddenly: She could go by herself. Her mother was not expected home until day after tomorrow. If she left first thing in the morning, she would be back by tomorrow evening, in plenty of time to greet her mother the next day, all the while having experienced what she had dreamed of for so many years: standing atop a precipice above a temperamental sea.

If she must begin a new era in her life for which she was less than enthusiastic, she might as well end this one on an extraordinarily high note.

“Still thinking of Penny?” Angelica asked.

“Yes—and no,” said Freddie.

Freddie had been waiting outside her house when she returned from Derbyshire. And for the past hour and a half they’d talked of nothing but Penny’s revelations, recalling dozens of instances where some words or actions of Penny’s could be reinterpreted in the light of his service to the Crown.

She had been outraged at first. She and Freddie had always been closer, but Penny had been the godlike elder-brother figure of her childhood. There had been times when she and Freddie had cried together, mourning the young man they both loved, not gone but lost all the same.

But because Freddie already forgave him, she was, given some time, willing to forgive him too.

She rang for a fresh pot of tea. All the talking had made her thirsty. “How can you be thinking about him and not be thinking about him at the same time?”

Freddie looked at her a long moment. “I was glad Penny came clean. And we talked a good hour before he left to take Mrs. Douglas to see her husband’s solicitors. But I was still plenty unsettled after he left and I wanted to speak to you”—he stopped for a second—“and no one else but you. Those were some of the longest twenty-four hours of my life, waiting for you to come back.”

It was most gratifying to hear. After all the time and effort she’d expended to take them from friends to lovers, now ironically she sometimes worried that their lovemaking—delicious as it was—had taken over everything. Silly of her—of course they were still best friends.

She smiled at him. “I’d have returned sooner if I’d known.”

He didn’t quite return her smile, but reached for the teapot instead.

“There’s no more tea in there,” she reminded him.

He reddened slightly. “Well, of course not. You rang for a new pot just now, didn’t you?”

Fresh tea arrived. She poured for both of them. He raised his teacup.

“Don’t you want some milk and sugar?” He never drank his tea black.

He reddened further, set down his teacup, and rubbed his fingers across his forehead. “I still haven’t answered your question, have I?”

She’d already forgotten what question she’d asked. Somehow his sudden nerves made her tense too.

But he seemed to have made up his mind, whatever it was. He gazed directly at her, his voice firm. “I’ve struggled for a while now to characterize what it is I feel for you, which is so much more potent than friendship, yet nothing like what I have experienced of love.”

She had been reaching for a biscuit. Her hand stopped in the air. She had to force her fingers to close around the biscuit. They’d yet to bring up the word love in conversation—at least not with regard to the two of them.

“With Lady Tremaine, I was always the humble worshiper. Every time I walked into her drawing room, I felt as if I were an acolyte approaching the altar of a goddess. It was electrifying and unnerving at the same time. But your drawing room has been more like an extension of my own home. And I didn’t know how to interpret that.”

Their eyes met. She had no idea, she realized, not a single one, what he would say next. Her heart struggled to contain her dread—and a rising anticipation.

“And then this wait for you to come back. As I walked up and down the street outside, I realized at some point that I never went to Lady Tremaine unless I felt I had something to offer. When I called on her just because I wanted to see her, I always feared that I’d wasted her time.

“But you I want to see in all my moods. When I’m particularly pleased, when I’m simply going about my day, when I’m utterly overwhelmed, as I was yesterday and today. And it honors me that when I bring myself, I seem to have brought enough for you.”

Her hand unclenched from the biscuit, which she’d crushed into several pieces in her palm. She let the pieces drop onto the tablecloth and breathed again.

“In doing what he did, Penny took me for granted. But he wasn’t alone in it: I took him for granted also, before his ‘accident.’” He smiled slightly, his eyes deep and warm. “Like Penny, you too have been a pillar of my life, which would have been far less meaningful without you. And yet I’ve taken you for granted too.”

He came out of his seat. It seemed only natural that she should rise also—clasp his hands in hers.

“I don’t want to take you for granted ever again, Angelica. Will you marry me?”

She drew back one hand and covered her mouth. “You have become full of surprises, Freddie!”

“Whereas you have been the best surprise of my life.”

A surge of pure happiness nearly knocked her over. And of course he meant every word—he never said anything he didn’t wholeheartedly mean.

“I can’t imagine a better way to go through life than with you beside me,” he continued.

“Constantly reminding you not to take me for granted?” she jested. She might start blubbering otherwise.

He chuckled. “Well, maybe not constantly. Quarter days should be fine.” Placing his hands on her arms, he gazed into her eyes. “Does this mean you have said yes?”

“Yes,” she said simply.

He kissed her, and then held her tight a long time. “I love you.”

The words were sweeter than she’d thought possible—and she had exorbitant expectations, having wanted to hear them for so many years.

“I love you, too,” she said. She pulled back a few inches and winked at him. “A second nude portrait to commemorate our engagement?”

He laughed and crushed her to him for another kiss.

Ilfracombe was a severe disappointment. A fog as thick as old porridge had come to make chill, damp love to the coast. Visibility was so reduced street lamps had to remain lit during the day, faint rings of mustard-colored light amidst gray vapors that hid everything farther than five feet from Elissande’s person.

She did derive some pleasure from being on the coast: the smell of the sea, bracing and salty; the surf crashing wild and harsh upon unseen cliffs, nothing like the gentle tides of Torbay; the deep tenor of foghorns from passing ships in the Bristol Channel, forlornly romantic.

She decided to stay the night. Should the fog clear, there would be enough time in the morning to see the cliffs and return to Pierce House—she was schooling herself to stop thinking of it as home—ahead of her mother and her husband.

And then she must break the news to her mother and bid adieu to her marriage.

At the sight of the suitcases in his wife’s room, a fist closed around Vere’s heart.

He and Mrs. Douglas had arrived in London in mid-afternoon. There was no question of further travel the rest of the day for the exhausted older woman. Vere put her and Mrs. Green up at the Savoy Hotel, then rushed home by himself. Now that he’d spoken to Freddie, there was so much he needed to tell his wife: how stupid he’d been, how badly he missed her, and how eager he was for their marriage to begin anew.

He pulled open her drawers—empty. He yanked open the doors of her armoire—empty. He glanced at her vanity table, empty except for one single comb. And then a sight that made his stomach lurch: a book on her nightstand entitled How Women May Earn a Living.

She was leaving.

He sprinted downstairs and grabbed Mrs. Dilwyn. “Where’s Lady Vere?”

He could not disguise his distress, his voice loud and brusque.

Mrs. Dilwyn was taken aback by his abruptness. “Lady Vere has gone to the Hangman Cliffs, sir.”

He tried to digest this information and failed. “Why?”

“She saw a postcard in your study yesterday and thought the view marvelous. And since you and Mrs. Douglas weren’t expected until tomorrow, she decided to go first thing today.”

It was almost dinnertime. “Shouldn’t she have returned already?”

“She cabled an hour ago, sir. She has decided to stay the night. It was foggy on the coast today and she wasn’t able to see anything. She hopes for better weather in the morning.”

“The Hangman Cliffs—so she would have gone to Ilfracombe,” he said, as much to himself as to Mrs. Dilwyn.

“Yes, sir.”

He was out of the house before she’d finished speaking.

The sun seared her eyes, the sky so harshly bright it was nearly white. An arid mountain gale blasted. She was desiccated, her skin as fragile as paper, her throat sandy with thirst.

She tried to move. But her wrists were already bloody from her struggles against her chains, chains sunk deep into the bones of the Caucasus.

The piercing cry of an eagle made her renew her struggle, a frenzy of pain and futility. The eagle glided closer on dark wings, casting a shadow over her. As it plunged into her, knife-sharp beak gleaming, she twisted her head back and thrashed in agony.

“Wake up, Elissande,” whispered a man, something at once authoritative and soothing about his voice. “Wake up.”

She did. She sat up, panting. A hand settled on her shoulder. She wrapped her own fingers around it, reassured by its warmth and strength.

“Do you want some water?” asked her husband.

“Yes, thank you.”

A glass of water found its way into her hand. And when she had quenched her thirst, he took the glass away.

Suddenly she remembered where she was: not in her room at home—Pierce House—but at a hotel in Ilfracombe—a hotel that looked out to the harbor, but from the windows of which she had barely been able to see even the street outside.

“How did you find me?” she asked, amazed and baffled, while an excitement, so hot it singed, began pulsing through her veins.

“Rather easily—there are only eight hotels in Ilfracombe listed in the travel handbook I bought on my way. Of course, no reputable hotel would give out a lady’s room number—I had to use slightly underhanded means to gain that information once I found out where you were staying. And then it was just a matter of picking your lock and dealing with the dead bolt.”

She shook her head. “You could have just knocked.”

“I have a bad habit: After midnight I don’t knock.”

She heard the smile in his voice. Her heart thudded. She dropped her hand, which had been clasped about his. “What are you doing here?”

He did not answer her, but only spread his fingers on her shoulder. “Was it the same nightmare you told me about—the one in which you are chained like Prometheus?”

She nodded. He would have felt her motion, for his hand had moved to just below her ear.

“Would you like me to tell you about Capri, to help you forget it?”

He must have stepped closer to her; she became aware of the scent of the fog that still clung to his coat. She nodded again.

“‘Looking seaward from Naples, the island of Capri lies across the throat of the bay like a vast natural breakwater, grand in all its proportions, and marvelously picturesque in outline,’” he spoke softly, his voice clear and beguiling.

She started. She recognized those lines: They were from her favorite book on Capri, which she had lost when her uncle purged his library.

“‘Long ago, an English traveler compared it to a couchant lion,’” he continued. “‘Jean Paul, on the strength of some picture he had seen, pronounced it to be a sphinx; while Gregorovius, most imaginative of all, finds that it is an antique sarcophagus, with bas-reliefs of snaky-haired Eumenides, and the figure of Tiberius lying upon it.’”

He eased her back down on the bed. “Do you want to hear more?”

“Yes,” she murmured.

He undressed, tossing down one garment after another, the clothes landing with the softest of plops that made her throat hot and her heart wild.

“‘Capri is not strictly a byway of travel.’” He removed her nightdress and skimmed his fingers down her side. “‘Most of the tourists take the little baysteamer from Naples, visit the Blue Grotto, touch an hour at the marina, and return the same evening via Sorrento.’”

He kissed the crook of her elbow, the pulse of her wrist, and gently bit the center of her palm. She shivered in pleasure.

“‘But this is like reading a title-page, instead of the volume behind it.’”

His hand moved up her arm and kneaded her shoulder. His other hand cradled her face. Lightly, ever so lightly, disturbing not at all the bruises that had mostly faded from their unruly colors but were still sensitive to pressure, he traced the outline of her cheekbone.

“‘The few who climb the rock, and set themselves quietly down to study the life and scenery of the island, find an entire poem, to which no element of beauty or interest is wanting, opened for their perusal,’” he recited, as his thumb pulled down her lower lip.

She emitted a whimper of need. His breath caught.

“But you are more beautiful than Capri,” he said, his voice at once fervent and wistful.

She crushed him to her and kissed him fiercely. From there, Capri was forgotten and they had lips and hands and minds only for each other.

“What are you thinking?” Vere asked, his head in his palm, lying on his side.

He could not see her. She was only the rhythm of her breaths and the warmth of her skin.

Her hand traced the scars on his rib cage. “I was thinking that, one, I have never, ever, not once in all my years of reading travelogues, realized that they could also serve as tools of seduction. And two, that this must be the first time we’ve both stayed awake afterward.”

He made the sound of snoring.

She chortled.

“If you are not too sleepy, I’d like to tell you a story,” he said.

It was time.

“I’m not sleepy at all.”

He wanted to give her some warning. “My story, it isn’t always happy.”

“No story is. Or it wouldn’t be a story; it’d be a paean.”

Very true. So he recounted for her the events that had led to the creation of his double life, starting with the night of his father’s death. Despite his warning, her whole body turned rigid with dismay. Her hand clutched hard at his arm. But she listened quietly, intently, if with breaths that caught and trembled.

“And perhaps my life would have continued indefinitely on that path—it was a well-worn path, after all—if I’d never met you. But you came along and you changed everything. The better I knew you, the more I had to ask myself whether things I thought were immutable were truly set in stone, or simply seemed so because I was afraid of changes.”

As his story moved away from the initial devastation, her person had gradually relaxed too. Now his hand upon her shoulder no longer detected as much tension.

“Two days ago I confessed everything to Freddie. It was a terribly difficult conversation going in, and yet afterward I felt light and free, as I haven’t been in the longest time. And for that I have you to thank.”

“I’m very, very glad you and Lord Frederick had your talk, but I don’t see what I have to do with it,” she said, her befuddlement genuine.

“Remember what you said a few nights ago about Douglas? ‘I will not let him diminish me from beyond the grave, just as I never allowed him to take a piece of my soul while he yet lived.’ Those words shattered me. Until that moment I had not understood that I had let a piece of my soul be taken from me. And until I recognized that I was no longer whole, I could not begin to put myself together again.”

He was full of gratitude toward her. But it was yet another sign of how secretive he’d become that she had no idea of the changes she’d wrought in him.

“It’s wonderful that I could be of some help,” she said, sounding both pleased and embarrassed. “But I must protest that I don’t deserve nearly the credit you give me. You saw it: Just now I had another nightmare. I’m nobody’s shining example.”

“You are mine,” he said firmly. “Besides, I came equipped for the nightmare, didn’t I?”

“I was just going to ask! How did you happen to know one of my favorite books by heart?”

“I asked your mother if she remembered any books on Capri you liked. She quoted me a passage, but she couldn’t recall the name of the book, only that you loved it. So I set to work.”

He had seven bookshops deliver to his hotel every single travel guide they stocked that so much as mentioned Italy. After he and Mrs. Douglas returned from the Savoy Theatre, he stayed up most of the night perusing any and all pages that dealt with Capri, until he came upon the passage Mrs. Douglas had recited.

“I found the book with the intention of reading it to you until you fell back asleep, should you have your nightmare again. But then I realized that reading would require a light. Better just to commit it to memory, which was what I did on the train going back to Devon.”

“That is—that is incredibly sweet.” The bed creaked. She pushed a little off the mattress and kissed him on the lips.

“I have only two more paragraphs of text left in me. But had I known that travelogues had such erotic properties, I’d have memorized the whole thing.”

She chortled. “Oh, you would, would you?”

He combed his fingers through her cool hair. “If you want me to, I would—even if I’m banned from ever seducing you with Capri travelogues again.”

She leaned her cheek against his, a simple gesture that almost caused his gratitude to spiral out of control.

“Would this be a good time to apologize to you for my having been a complete ass when we were in the castle ruins?”

His conduct that day had chafed his conscience ever since.

She pulled back slightly, as if to look him in the eyes. “Only if it’s also a good time to apologize to you for having forced you to marry me.”

“So I’m forgiven?”

“Of course,” she said.

He used to believe that to forgive was to allow an offense to go unpunished. Now he finally understood that forgiveness was not about the past, but the future.

“And me, am I forgiven?” she asked, a note of anxiety in her voice.

“Yes, you are,” he said, and meant every word.

She exhaled unsteadily, a sound of relief. “Now we can go on.”

Now they could look forward to the future.