Once Upon A Winter (32 page)

The scent of the perfume she always wore lingered in the still, warm air of Bryn
Heulog; especially in this room. Silas stood, drinking it in, blinking down at the photograph of Ellena. A different girl in many ways to the woman he had been obliged to call Nell. He had cared about that girl, perhaps a little more than he had cared about Lydia and the others. Although timid and shy, she had been funny and sweet, too, without realising it. But he hadn’t loved her.

For the first time, though, Silas was beginning to understand the fear that drove a man to conceal his true feelings. He was still in shock at how it had come over him with such stealth, so quickly. How a woman had come to fill his waking hours, and even his dreams at night, so completely and obsessively. There was no compartmentalising, no ability to keep emotions - however basic - separate from sense.

It was messy. Unavoidable. It spilled over into every thought and impulse. Like a form of insanity, it led him to imagine saying things, doing things, that were out of character.

‘Silas?’

Nell’s sharp voice, coming from behind him, made Silas jolt. He swivelled round, sending the empty teacup and saucer flying off the bedside table. Instantly, he fumbled to pick them up, and spotted a chip in the rim of the saucer.

‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered. ‘I -’

‘What are you doing in here?’

‘I . . .’ How could he answer that? He had been draw
n into the room. Lured. ‘I’m sorry. I was looking for you, and I glanced in . . . I saw the photograph of you and the children . . .’

Nell looked down at the picture. She said nothing.

‘Your grandmother suggested I sleep in your father’s room tonight,’ Silas broached. ‘The weather’s only getting worse.’

‘Oh . . .’ Nell hesitated; she seemed put-out, but accepting. ‘Um . . . I suppose she’s right. It would be sensible. I’ll check it over, once I’ve got Joshua to bed.’

‘I think perhaps Joshua might like to stay up a while longer, if you agree. He’s good company for your grandmother, she’s grateful to have him there. And he’s excitable tonight. I’m not sure he’ll fall asleep easily.’

‘Oh. Right.’ Nell nodded slowly. ‘OK.’

‘Maybe, if you’re ready, we should talk,’ suggested Silas.

‘Talk?’ She seemed to gulp. ‘I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready. And I don’t know what
else there is for you to explain. I - I get it. I get why you married me in the first place, and why you left, and why you’ve come back. I needed to know the truth about Joshua, and I appreciate that. It’s made things clearer. Complicated, but clearer. And if it sounds like a paradox, that’s because it is.’

‘I just want to make sure you’re all right. That you understand everything. But I want your honesty - not your reasoning. I want you to say what you feel, and not think about it first.’

Nell frowned slightly. ‘That’s an awful lot of “wanting”, Silas.’

He stared down at her. Her brown eyes flecked with gold and her hair shot through with copper. She didn’t know the half of what he wanted. He was filled with
heat himself at some aspects of it.

‘OK.’ Nell sighed. ‘Wait for me downstairs. I’ll be there in a few minutes.’

‘Thank you.’ Silas inclined his head. ‘I’ll - er - put this saucer and cup by the sink. I’m sorry for the damage.’

She stared at him with a residue of indignation. In the grand scheme of their lives, chipped crockery could hardly mean that much, after all. For a heady, reckless moment, he could have let the cup and saucer drop again. He could have pulled her into his arms and held her as he’d held her in the churchyard, her warm, supple body, pressed against his. And he could have kissed her, the way he had never kissed anyone, but now longed to do more than he had ever longed to do anything.

But Silas was rarely impetuous, and he had never been more afraid; more fearful of the consequences, and of Nell’s own reaction.

And then, afterwards, if she dared to accept him, what would he do? How could he leave her again? How could he stay? He would be more adrift, more lost, more alone. 

Silas backed away from her. He made his way heavily downstairs. After leaving the cup and saucer in the kitchen, he drifted through to the study, where a fire crackled in the hearth, reminding him of past nights and past fires, and all that his father had ever warned him about.

He sank like lead into one of the armchairs, and lowered his head into his hands. If he had known what it was to shed tears, Silas would have wept.

Nell
found Silas in her father’s den. For a moment, she thought he was asleep. His head was bent and his eyes closed. He seemed less of a granite tower tonight. More scalable. Nell presumed it was the fact that he had made himself vulnerable.

I
t was courageous of him to have done so. He had been in hiding within himself for so long, it must have been daunting to thrust the true man into the spotlight.

Nell glanced down at the other armchair, but it was too far from the fire, and too heavy for her to push nearer. She crumpled, shivering, on to the shaggy
hearth rug and pulled her knees up to her chin, huddling into a ball shape for warmth.

‘Are you cold?’ came his voice, gravelly and concerned.

Nell looked up. ‘I thought you might be asleep.’

‘Just resting my eyes.’ Silas frowned down at her. ‘You’re shivering.’

‘Maybe I’m coming down with Nana’s cold.’ Nell shrugged. ‘Or it could just be that I’ve not been sleeping well lately.’

‘Neither have I . . . if that’s any consolation.’ He dragged himself to his feet, and scooped up an ancient tartan blanket that lay in a basket near the door. Before she could protest, he had draped it around her shoulders. ‘You should be wearing a jumper in this weather, not a thin blouse.’

‘I’ve got a vest, too!’ sniffed Nell. ‘Besides, you’ve got a shirt on. I don’t see you wearing a jumper.’ The wool of the blanket was scratchy against her neck, its warmth more than welcome, though.

Silas sank on to the opposite end of the ru
g, stretching his long legs in front of the fire and resting his back against the armchair. ‘You’re wearing the necklace Abe gave you,’ he stated quietly.

She fingered the delicate pendant, watching it glint in the firelight. ‘Rebecca
Golding was a lucky woman, to have had such a devoted husband.’ Nell spoke before she even realised the implications of her words.

‘You wish you could have been as fortunate?’

‘No,’ she said instantly, but then remembered that Silas had asked for her candour. ‘I mean - yes. Of course. It’s what most people want. That level of devotion.’

Silas reached into the breast pocket of his shirt, and plucked out a folded sheet of yellowing paper. It looked thick, like parchment. ‘Here. This is the devotion of my father for my mother. It was all he had left of her. Apart from the antique ring I tried to give Freya for Christmas.
My father gave the ring to my mother, but she was too afraid to keep hold of it herself. She made him look after it, until the day they could finally be together.’

‘And
apart from you, Silas. Your father had
you
. You’re half of who she was, even though you seem to think the women don’t contribute as much to the gene pool.’

He nodded hesitantly
. ‘Aside from me. But I look like my father. As my father probably looked like
his
father.’

The piece of paper he had handed her was a portrait of a girl. A hurriedly drawn sketch, really, nothing more. The girl was very pretty, even though her dainty features had been slightly smudged over time, the paper folded and creased too often.

‘This is Anna Lambert?’ said Nell. ‘Your mother?’

Silas nodded. ‘It was in the box. I sneaked it out just now, while we were upstairs. My father drew it. She was barely seventeen. But he loved her as honestly as any man can love a woman.’

‘He was a good artist.’

‘As I’m good with wood. There’s always some creative element about us. Joshua will discover his talent soon enough.’

‘He writes amazing stories. His imagination’s so vivid.’

‘My mother was an avid reader, apparently. Her favourite book was George Eliot’s
Silas Marner
. It had only recently been published back then.’

‘Which is why
your father named you Silas, presumably.’ Nell passed back the sketch. ‘Freya’s mad about reading. And Joshua’s getting more into it, too. Despite those crazy, wonderful stories of his, though, he prefers non-fiction.’ There was a pause. Nell shifted slightly, and grabbed at the blanket as it tried to slide off her shoulders. ‘Do you wish your father had lived long enough to meet Joshua and Freya?’

Silas stared into the fire. ‘I never gave it much thought.’

‘I couldn’t
stop
thinking about it, when they were born,’ said Nell. ‘How much I wished my mother could be there to hold them.’

‘I’m sorry I allowed Calista to trick you into going to your mother’s grave.’

‘I’m not,’ said Nell, after another short silence. ‘I needed the push. I couldn’t run away forever. It made me realise something anyway - that the thing I’d feared most wasn’t even true. Whatever remains there are of her there, that’s just the shell of who she was. She isn’t really in that graveyard any more. She hasn’t been there in a long time.’

‘I scattered my father’s ashes,’ said Silas. ‘Over my mother’s grave. I felt they ought to be together at the end. I suppose that’s the reason I keep coming back to Harreloe. Why I’m drawn to this place. I have too much history here. Perhaps that will come back to bite me one day.
I’ve always been careful in the past, not to be too conspicuous around here. To leave enough years between visits so that people’s memories fade, and anyone who might have seen me once, in passing, looks at me again and can’t quite place my face. And even if by chance they could, logic wouldn’t allow them to think anything of it, other than the fact I bear some resemblance to someone they met briefly, when they were younger.’

Nell felt a tear jab at the corner of her eye, but although she was ready to dab it away, it never quite trickled out, as if it was trapped there. ‘How does your special brand of mortality work, Silas? If you get hurt, do you h
eal faster than a normal person, or do you just not get hurt in the first place?’

‘I can’t get mortally wounded
, unless it’s my time to go. I’ve never exposed myself to any threat
unnecessarily
, though. I’ve never . . . flaunted this gift, if you can call it that.’

‘
Do you ever get sick?’

‘I haven’t
had a cold as an adult. Or anything along those lines. That doesn’t mean I won’t as I grow older. I had them as a child. But you’ll find that with Joshua, although I’m willing to bet he gets ill less than Freya.’

Nell considered it. ‘Actually, no. I suppose it’s a twin thing, but they always seem to get
sick together.’

‘That surprises me.’ Silas shrugged, then spread his hands
out in front of him, palms up. ‘Look closer. Can you see?’

Now that his hands lay still, and Nell had been asked to study them, she noticed how calloused and scarred they were. Without much conscious thought, she wriggled across the rug until she was close enough to touch him. With one hand she gripped the blanket
around her shoulders, with the other, she lifted the fingers of Silas’s right hand. Not the smooth digits of the man she had once known, so well groomed back then she had accused him of having professional manicures in secret.

‘
A craftsman’s hands,’ stated Nell.

‘I feel pain
more than ever these days, like anyone else.’ Silas seemed reluctant to withdraw his fingers from her own. ‘I scar, the same way you would.’

She
slipped her hand away, tucking it under the blanket out of sight. ‘Maybe on the outside. But I doubt you do in other ways. You need to feel something real and deep before you can get hurt.’

The green of his eyes flashed irritably in the glow of the fire. ‘You’re still underestimating me. I miss my father, even to this day. Why should his loss have meant any less to me than your mother’s did to you?’

‘I’m sorry . . . What I meant,’ she continued inflexibly, ‘was about the women you supposedly married. I don’t think you were the most grief-stricken of widowers when they passed away. I’m not implying you didn’t care, simply that -’

‘
“Supposedly”? What are you saying, Nell?’

‘Well - any official documents . . . they can’t be real, can they? They’d need your date of birth, and you can’t provide your proper one.’

His brow puckered. ‘Does that worry you?’

‘Not being legally married?’ She shrugged, and the blanket slipped off her shoulders. This time, she made no move to retrieve it. She wasn’t cold any more. In fact, sitting so close to Silas and the fire, her internal thermometer was on the rise. ‘What bothers me is that we need to go through the charade of a divorce. If we’re not
actually
married, then -’

‘We’re as married as two people can be,’ said Silas, too fiercely, she thought. ‘Our marriage is as real as I am. I need to exist in a distorted sense of reality, and anything I do within that is as genuine as it could be. Including the surname I gave you when we married. You never reverted to your maiden name. Why, Nell?’

‘If it wasn’t for the kids, I probably would have gone back to being Nell Mason,’ she admitted frankly. ‘But, Silas, wouldn’t it be simpler if none of it was official - however “distorted”. If you could just walk away from this - from
us
- without all the legal rigmarole, and do whatever it is you want to with Lauren?’

Silas leaned petulantly towards her. ‘That woman’s name again . . . Nell, what is it you think I want with her?’

‘Aside from the obvious . . .’ Nell gave a small, nervous grunt, skittishly playing with a lock of hair that had come loose from her pony tail.

Silas
held her chin in his hand, and forced her to meet his gaze. ‘Nell, Lauren Guthrie isn’t interested in me as anything other than “eye candy”. Isn’t that the term nowadays? She never cared about anything I had to say. All that she really needed was someone to listen to her. It just eased the way that she found me attractive.’

‘You obviously find her attractive, too. And you deliberately asked her up to the house that day just to spite me.’

‘To
spite
you?’ Silas’s deep, grainy voice rose half an octave. ‘I only wanted to gauge your reaction - and hers. Whatever history you had is still there, festering. That much was clear. You need to let go, Nell. She isn’t a threat to you any more. On the contrary, it’s the other way around.’

Nell jerked her chin free, and lowered it against her chest, avoiding making eye contact again. She felt swelteringly hot now, and more than a little jelly-like from his touch. ‘Well, just to warn you - I don’t really appreciate having been your wife out of pity; I’m sure Lauren wouldn’t like it, either.’  

‘Why are you so infuriating?’ Silas grabbed her by the shoulders this time. ‘You want some hard facts? Will you even listen to them, or just trip around neurotically inside your own head? Lauren Guthrie is still in love with her ex-husband. With Daniel. She’s a fool of a woman who tried to provoke a reaction out of him but let it get too far. And now she’s trashed her life and doesn’t know how to fix it.’

Nell looked at Silas,
her breath catching in her chest. ‘Daniel? Lauren still loves
Daniel
?’

Silas’s face was even closer now. He stared at her searchingly. ‘Daniel wants to move forward with his life, Nell. He cares about you a great deal, that much is obvious to anyone. And he doesn’t even know the full truth about Lauren. If he did . . .’

‘The full truth?’

‘Over a year ago, she had a fling. A very brief affair. I don’t know who with. She only alluded to it because she was trying to persuade me that her marriage had been over for a long time, even though the divorce was recent. And although she didn’t admit
as much, the guilt has been eating away at her ever since. She was trying to convince herself as much as me. But I’m guessing the marriage hadn’t been faltering when she had the affair, not on Daniel’s side.’

‘But if he knew now . . .’

‘It’s not up to you to tell him, Nell. And it isn’t my responsibility, either. Daniel can be yours without resorting to that. You only need say the word. It’s as straightforward as that.’

‘Really?’ murmured Nell. She inched closer to Silas, as if she were a scrap of metal to his magnet. Their eyes seemed suddenly locked. Fused. He withdrew a hand from her shoulder, only to curve it around the back of her head and gently ease the scrunchie out of her hair. Slowly, carefully, as if arranging an artistic display, he spread her hair out around her face.

‘Daniel would be fortunate to have you,’ he muttered. ‘Any man would.’

‘I don’t want any man,’ breathed Nell. ‘I want . . .’

Silas had never looked at her this way before, she realised, as if the direction the world was about to turn in hinged on her reply.

Nell moved forward, just a little, but enough for her lips to meet his. It was the reply he clearly wanted. Before she could even drag her wild, straying thoughts into some semblance of a coherent whole, Nell found herself lying on her back on the hearth rug. Silas lay beside her, an arm around her waist, pulling her against him, his free hand losing itself in her hair, cradling her face close to his own. Their kiss seemed destined to last forever, as if they had both been craving it, dreaming of it, consumed by the thought of little else lately.