My Dearest Enemy (40 page)

In the end it was Polly Makepeace who took command. The daughter of farmers and with practical experience in many medical matters, she calmly directed Avery to carry Bernard to the sea-facing southern nursery on the topmost floor. There she swung the windows wide open, letting the fresh, clean air scour the thickness from his lungs. She stayed in the room, ostensibly to keep Evelyn company, but it was soon apparent that it was her unperturbed and watchful eye that offered both mother and son the peace of mind they needed in order to relax and finally rest.

Avery, haggard and drawn, went searching for his own respite in the orchard. That is where Lily finally found him, his back settled against an ancient tree trunk, his wrists on his knees, his hands lax and his eyes shut. Quietly, she sat down a few feet from him, breathing deeply of the sweet, cidery scent of ripening apples. How long she watched him sleep she'd no idea but by the time his eyes opened the mid-morning air had lost its tang.

He saw her and immediately straightened. "Bernard?"

"Is fine. He's still resting. I came to find you."

He nodded and slouched back against the tree trunk. "I see."

With the moment upon her, she didn't know how to begin. He took the initiative, by beginning what he must assume would be one more painful, impossible conversation, because she did not want to and, as John Neigl had said, Avery would always do what needed to be done, no matter what the cost to himself.

"I know you said you'd leave Mill House, Lily. I can't very well make you stay, but I sincerely hope you'll reconsider." His gaze was steady, fatigued. "It wasn't fair for Horatio to put either of us in this position, but it was least fair to you. He assumed you'd lose, he counted on it, and yet he was willing to let you bleed sweat into this place for five years just to prove that a woman was not as capable as a man."

"I knew. I accepted anyway," she said quietly.

"Who wouldn't? What self-respecting, intelligent, slightly desperate"—here his wry smile robbed the word of its sting—"person wouldn't accept such an opportunity?"

"You wouldn't."

"The hell you say," he scoffed and laced his fingers around his knees.

"You wouldn't," she insisted. "Because you would see it for what it was, a challenge made not to offer a homeless, uppity young woman a chance to win a home but to shame a young man. And, too, you wouldn't have accepted the challenge because if you'd won it would have been dishonorable, unfair to the dispossessed heir."

"But no one expected you to win."

"That wouldn't have mattered to you, Avery. Tell me if you can, that I'm wrong. Would you have accepted the conditions of that challenge?"

He met her eye squarely. "No."

She blew out a shaky laugh. "At least you haven't claimed that honor is the sole province of men."

"I might have at one time. Before I knew you."

"And I taught you its presence in others through its omission in myself?" she asked, aware that the bite of her tone cut her more deeply than him.

"Don't berate yourself for accepting Horatio's challenge five years ago, Lily," he said gently. "You've fretted about it, stewed about it, and now you've finally got an excuse to walk away from it. You can finally satisfy your honor."

"My, we
have
been busily cogitating away, haven't we?"

He looked past her. She followed the direction of his gaze and saw Mill House, a mellow, square edifice basking in the warm summer sun, its ivy mantle just acquiring a claret tinge in readiness for the coming autumn. The windows gleamed and the shell drive sparkled. It was gorgeous.

"It's a house, Lily. It will not be easy for either of us to walk away from. It's what it means that's so hard to abandon."

"Oh?" She bit on her lip.

"Family," he said quietly and when she did not answer, he went on in the same steady voice, stripped of arrogance and force. "I love you, Lily."

He smiled again, as sadly and kindly as if he'd just dashed her hopes instead of fulfilled her dreams. She waited, mute with confusion. They sat only a few feet apart, he'd just told her he loved her, and yet they might as well have been separated by an ocean.

"I have loved you for a long time, long before I laid eyes on you, I think. When I saw you, I was confounded by your appearance, and all the old insecurities came rushing back, because then I wanted you, and it seemed extraordinarily unlikely that you could want me, too. Then you kissed me and I can't begin to tell you the havoc that played with my heart."

She leaned forward drawn to him as she'd been from the start. "Avery—"

He drew back, just a trifling movement but one that hurt. "I've never been a lady's man, Lily. What with desire and love and this onerous contest mucking things up between us, I have done incredibly stupid things. But none was stupider than making love to you."

"No," she said, reaching out to him, "it wasn't wrong. It was… wonderful."

He looked at her hand but made no move to take it.

"Wonderful?" he echoed, testing the word. "Yes and yes and yes but also stupid, Lily. And hurtful. Because you'd already told me that you wouldn't marry me and I knew you would never say something you did not mean." He laid his head back. The sun glanced off his eyes in prisms of blue-green light. "I love you, Lily. But I can't live with you unwed."

She listened carefully, finding more than promises and hopes in his voice, finding truth.

After a moment he continued. "I would not be worthy of the name 'father' if I were to give any child created out of our love anything less than all the protection and benefit and advantages I could bequeath it. You wouldn't ask me to love our child less than I love you."

His brow furrowed and his gaze fell to his hands, clasped now between his knees and Lily was startled to see that his knuckles were white. "Lily, you are center of my heart, my lodestone, my companion, and my lover. Can't you trust me as I trust you?

"The only way you would ever hurt me is by leaving me. But know this, Lily, it will be a mortal wound. Because I'll never find the likes of you again. I've wandered all over this world, Lily, waiting to come home. I'm here. Now. Please. Don't send me away."

He did not look up as he spoke and she saw that his eyes were squeezed tightly shut and realized that he was waiting, in strained silence for her answer.

As though her spirit discovered wings, a sense of release, of heart's ease, of pure and soft joy suffused her. She crept to Avery and put her arms around him, and laid her cheek against his chest. His arms seized her, clasped her in an iron embrace. "Foolish Lily," he said. "Don't you know why I haven't touched you? Didn't you guess that once you were in my arms I would never let you go?"

"Don't. Because I won't release you, Avery. I love you."

"Dear God," he whispered. He gathered her closer, pulling her onto his lap while murmuring endearments in a soft, shattered voice.

"Here is my heart, Avery," she whispered. "Here is my past. Here is my future. They've been yours all along. I was just too blind to see."

The back lawn at Mill House overflowed with children. Teresa's twin brats and a few of Kathy's older girls were chasing Merry's eldest boy. All were hooting with unparalleled delight. Under strict orders from their mother, the twins left Merry's youngest girl—who had a tendency to tears—alone. This so enraged her that in order to impress her older, god-like companions, she decided to climb the ancient cypress tree at the corner of the house.

She'd reached the top and begun shouting her bravura before it dawned on her how very high she'd climbed. Her gleeful shouts became a frightened wail.

When it became clear that no one else was going to rescue the gooey faced six-year-old, Karl Thorne ungraciously succumbed to his genetic predisposition for chivalry and began climbing. This attracted the attention of his youngest sister, Pamela, a bossy eight-year-old. Dropping Kathy's newest infant in her aunt Evelyn's lap, Pammy posted herself beneath the boughs of the giant cypress and offered advice to her brother, who'd already climbed halfway up. This munificence went unaccountably unappreciated by Karl whose pithy response to her encouragements would have made her mother gasp—possibly with laughter.

Pretty soon the rest of the children appeared shouting encouragement to the gallant, albeit grumbling, Karl.

Only Jenny, the oldest of the Thorne children and the most serious, seemed disinterested in the nearby proceedings. Spread out on a blanket by the edge of the mill pond, a furrow creased her brow as she read through the first edition of her uncle Bernard's
Biography of a Romance: The Unabridged Letters of Avery and Lillian Thorne
.

Around her the adults chatted. Aunt Evelyn, Kathy's drooling infant cuddled against her neck, was waxing eloquent about the advances in the laws governing child labor while Aunt Polly patched up Karl's rugby bat.

Cousin Bernard was staring at Jenny's mother—but then Bernard always stared at her mother—and her father was trying to convince Great Aunt Francesca to come to Egypt with them that winter. So far he'd made no progress, but from the look on Great Aunt Franny's face, she'd soon capitulate. Her father could charm the sun into shining.

"Don't be a fool, Francesca," he was saying, "London's a cesspool in the winter and you came down sick with the influenza last year. Best thing is to escape. Or did you like puking your guts up for three weeks?"

"You just want me to come along to act as nanny to your three brats."

Father glanced over at Mother and what the family universally knew as "that look" came into his eye. "Hmm," he said. "There is that."

Great Aunt Franny laughed. "Perhaps, I will. But only if I get an occasional night off…"

The rest of what she said was lost because Jenny, who'd just finished the year 1891 in the book, shut it with an emphatic sound of disgust.

Bernard looked over as she scrambled upright and began folding up the legs of her trousers. "Going somewhere, Puss?" he asked mildly, his glorious dark gold head turned thoughtfully in her direction.

"To the mill pond. I'm going wading."

"Oh? Cooling off, are you?"

"Yes," she replied trying to ignore him, which was hard when one was ten and a Greek god was addressing you. And that was what Bernard was, a bloody Greek god.

Tall, slender, and remote, he had an intellect nearly as keen as her father's. Therefore it had disappointed her extremely to see he'd so misrepresented her mother in the pages of his latest book.

"Might one inquire why?" he asked.

Her detachment crumpled. "These—these letters you say Mother wrote Father."

"Yes?" he said. "What of them?"

"They aren't from my mother."

"I am extremely sorry to contradict you, Jenny beloved, but they are indeed. Your mother kindly allowed me to copy them verbatim for this book."

"And why the hell she gave you leave I will never understand," her father said, having overheard them. "Why would anyone want to read someone else's letters? None of their damned business."

"Come, Avery," Bernard said, giving one of his rare smiles. "You're not exactly a nonentity. The courtship of one of England's most celebrated explorers and one of the suffragists' most celebrated orators? Who could resist?"