Sea of Secrets: A Novel of Victorian Romantic Suspense (15 page)

All I could say was, “Did anyone else see him?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I was ahead of the others; I wanted to be apart from them. You understand?”

I nodded.

“I knew then that he had appeared to me for a reason, and that it could only be because he had died unnaturally. It can only have been my uncle. He killed my father.” His voice trembled with intensity.

Troubled, I looked again at the group by the fire. I tried to visualize Lord Claude approaching his own brother with a gun. Aiming it coolly, pulling the trigger, taking a moment to ascertain that the bullet had done its work; then shouting out in pretended shock and alarm. Now, as he sat so relaxed at his wife’s side, smiling at some witticism, was he playing a part? Was every expression calculated to disguise what he really felt? The thought made me hunch my shoulders in sudden chill. I could not bear to think that this man who, on such short acquaintance, had already won my respect and affection, could be so cruelly deceptive.

But still less could I bear to consider the alternative. If Lord Claude was innocent, then Herron…

“Have you seen the figure since then?” I asked.

“No, not once. I still believe he wants to contact me, to tell me what really happened, but I’ve not seen one sign of him during all those nights I’ve spent waiting.” He rubbed at his temples, and a painful stab of sympathy pierced me. “Sometimes I just stand there where he stood the day I saw him and think how easy it would be to let myself fall. All I would have to do is lean forward a little—just a little—as if I were walking into a wind. Then it would all be over.”

I searched his face, hoping he was exaggerating, but could find no trace of levity in his expression. I wanted to protest, but somehow I knew that to try to badger him out of the idea would only make him reluctant to confide in me again. I had to content myself with asking, “What would be the good of that?”

He turned to face me, and I was shocked anew at the simple, blank misery in his eyes. His resentment against his uncle seemed to have been forgotten for the moment, and he looked at me with the uncomprehending pain of a child. “All the good in the world,” he said quietly. “Can you think of any better way to end all the mad unholy wretchedness of it all? To hover for a moment, pillowed on sheer air like a falcon, then to just—not be? You can’t imagine how many times I’ve thought of it. To just slip gently off to sleep…”

“To sleep,” I echoed, beguiled in spite of myself. I could imagine it, could feel what it would be like, arced briefly in the air, then gently overtaken by oblivion. Had my mother felt that curious comfort as she lay buoyed by the sea, letting the waters lap at her fingertips? Did she feel soothed as the waves closed over her face, as softly as a nursemaid pulling a coverlet over her?

“…instead of being forced to watch that Cain slither his way into my father’s place.” Herron’s voice startled me; it had turned bitter again, with the note I disliked. But his resentment was less frightening than his strange fascination with following his father.

“Why do you stay, then?” I asked, although the thought of his leaving opened a gulf of emptiness in me. “You could go back to Oxford, couldn’t you?”

He shrugged, and the gesture was a surrender. He looked as weary as a man three times his age, as if his spirit were broken. “I can’t leave. I can’t let myself lose a chance to see him again, no matter how small. I know I’m probably a fool to continue to hope, but I can’t stop looking for him, waiting for him to come back. One of these nights he’ll return, and I must be here when he does.”

I thought of him keeping that dark vigil on all the nights since his father was buried, and I no longer wondered that he longed for the oblivion of sleep, even eternal sleep. Weariness was probably coloring his emotions; Charles had been right when he expressed concern over his stepbrother’s health.

“You must be very tired,” I said.

“I haven’t slept much since he died,” he said simply, and I reached out to touch his cheek, unable to speak. For a moment he held my hand against his face, pressing his lips to my palm. Involuntarily I glanced up to see if anyone had noticed. No one was watching us, but Charles was just looking away.

“I must go,” said Herron, getting swiftly to his feet. “It’s getting late. You understand.”

I nodded, and he left without so much as a glance at the others. His parents looked up as the door closed behind him, and I hid my hand in my skirt, feeling his kiss still imprinted on my skin.

That night I lay awake for a long while, listening to Herron’s footsteps drumming over my head. In a strange way it was comforting to know he was so near. But I could not relax; whenever the steps slowed, my body tensed, waiting for them to resume. I was seized with the fear that he might succumb to the desire he had spoken of. When at last I heard him descend the stair at the end of the hall, I sighed and slept.

“You spend so much time by the shore,” Felicity said one day at tea. “Anyone would think you were waiting for a ship to come into harbor. What can you find that’s so fascinating there?”

“It’s very refreshing to walk on the beach. It clears my mind.”

Felicity made a face. “I would much rather clear my mind with a cup of cocoa next to a warm fire. Wouldn’t you, Zeus?” and she leaned down to feed a morsel of toast to the spaniel, who thumped his tail agreeably.

I could see her point of view. Indeed, sometimes the raw December wind, flinging the salt spray into my eyes, would drive me back indoors to toast my feet by the fire. But on most days when the weather was at all bearable I would make time for a walk by the sea. I had much to think about.

Herron’s confidences, not unnaturally, had disturbed me profoundly, and I needed time to think through all that he had told me. I also needed time alone; although I was more strongly drawn to him than ever before, I found that when I was with him it was more difficult to think clearly. Those long walks along the shore, which to Felicity represented soaked hems and windblown hair, afforded vital time for contemplation, for adjusting my mind to all the astonishing and unpleasant ideas Herron had introduced into it.

That his uncle was a murderer I could not believe, but the thought was a grain of sand lodged in my mind: a tiny enough presence, but a constant irritant. Equally disturbing was the idea that Herron’s ideas were rooted in some distemper of his mind. He did not seem to be mad—the very word was repellent, nauseating—but if he was not, if there was truth to his suspicions, then I was living in the presence of something more awful than anything in my former life had prepared me for.

Despite this, I could not deny my attraction to the man himself. Even though he carried darkness with him, with his anger and pain and distrust, there was yet a brightness banked within him that flashed out in rare moments. I may have been the only one to see it. His family, for all their love for him, could only see the way he had fallen off and become someone apart, a morose reminder of events they would choose to leave behind. But I saw something golden, and for its sake I could not choose but ally myself with him.

Sometimes when I went to the shore I found him there, and we would walk together in silence or sit on the rocks girdling the bay. “I believe I’ll start calling you Ondine,” he said one day when he came upon me. “You look so much at home here, stationed on your rock, as if you’ll slip back down into the sea when I turn my eyes the other way. You seem to belong to the sea.”

For some reason the fancy pleased me. No one had ever likened me to as ethereal a creature as a water nymph. At all events, Ondine was much more to my taste as a nickname than Mouse.

He still spent much of his time alone, on long solitary rides or walks. He did begin taking dinner regularly with the rest of us, though, and I know it reassured his anxious parents, even though he spoke little and pointedly sat beside me instead of at his mother’s right hand. If he did not disappear altogether afterward he would find me, where I sat apart from the company, and lounge at my feet, staring into the fire. He watched his uncle sometimes, and always with the same level stare of hatred. It was unnerving to see and must have been even worse for Lord Claude. But the duchess, oblivious to subtleties of atmosphere, found his relatively gregarious behavior encouraging.

“I believe you’re good for Herron, child,” she told me. “He isn’t as aloof and shy of company as he was before you came. He must find your company soothing.”

“I’m glad,” I said; it was all I could say. She looked at me keenly, and I wondered with some uneasiness if she was going to reprove me for being too free of my company. We had scarcely been discreet.

“Does he confide in you?”

I hesitated. “He speaks a great deal of his father, of course.”

“Of course… and nothing else?” When I looked at her without speaking, she had the grace to blush. She gave a little laugh, embarrassed and rueful. “I know I’m prying, my dear. But when my own son will hardly bid me good day, I must rely on others to tell me of him. I have worried a great deal about him, and I would so like to know what is in his mind—unless you feel you should keep his counsel.”

“He is still very distraught,” I said carefully. As much as I could understand the duchess’s hunger for news of her son, I felt uncomfortable divulging what he had told me privately. “But I believe it helps him to speak of his grief. He has said as much.”

She let out a long breath. “Good. If he cannot confide in me—and, like any mother, I am selfish enough to wish he could—then I am glad he has found someone he can trust in you.” She reached out to squeeze my hand and gave me a painful little smile. “I am glad to know that you will look after him, since he will not let me do so. I need not be so anxious about him.”

I was anxious, though.

His vigils continued. Some nights he would come to my room when he gave up pacing the leads; I might wake to feel his body beside me, one arm thrown negligently over my waist as he slept. On other nights he would shake me out of sleep to huddle by the fire and talk, long into the night. If either of us thought of the dangerous impropriety of this, we quashed the idea. For me and, I believe, for him, our time together was as much a necessity as food and water.

He would lie on the hearth rug with his head in my lap and talk of his father as he remembered him, so that I came to have an image of a mighty, splendid man, majestic in his dignity and strength and wisdom; a massive, bearded Jove who watched over his wife with silent adoration and guided his son with calm sagacity. If sometimes this figure seemed too splendid to be an accurate depiction, I did not wonder at it: I had seen grief work this way on my father, removing all the imperfections of the dead. It seemed to be enough for Herron that I listened, so listen I did, running my fingers through his dark hair and gazing down at his face with its endlessly captivating contradiction of fierce brows and tender mouth.

Sometimes I spoke of Lionel. When I did it was with a stumbling and awkward tongue, since I found it difficult to put into words the way I missed that maddening, reckless, big-hearted boy. It was easier to sit in silence with Herron, whose dark velvet eyes seemed already to know all the sorrow I could not put into words.

At times his grief was quiet, and he could speak of his father calmly, subdued in his pain; at others it seemed to strike him anew like a lash, and under the scourge of it he would rage in futile protest against his father’s death. In those moods he would press me to him with a kind of desperation and kiss me as deeply as if he were trying to drink in my soul. Even though I felt I was helping him, the dread never left me that one night he would cease to resist whatever was compelling him toward oblivion, and when he broached the subject I always felt a wrench of fear.

“It would be a sin to kill yourself,” I pleaded one evening, a handful of days after he had told me of his suspicions of his uncle.

“Would it? Why should it be a sin to end a useless existence?” His back was toward me as he stood at my study window, staring out into the darkness. He had been waiting there for me when I returned from the drawing room after dinner. He must have only just lit the fire, since it had not taken the chill out of the room; I wrapped myself in a shawl and held my hands out to the flames. The snow had turned to rain, which fell hissing into the fire.

“It isn’t useless; it only seems so because of your grief. I know what it feels like—”

“How could you know? You’ve never lost a father.”

This silenced me. I had indeed lost my father, but not the kind of father Herron had known, or in any way he could understand. “Perhaps you are right,” I said after a moment. “I only meant to say that I know how the loss of someone you love can make you feel as if your own life is futile and empty, as if there isn’t any purpose in continuing to exist. It’s only an illusion, but it feels like truth.”

He turned swiftly to come to my side. “My sweet Ondine, forgive me. I was forgetting about your brother. Yes, of course you’ve known pain too.” For a moment he held me and stroked my hair, and I hoped the subject I dreaded was lost for a time. But then he put me away from him so that he could look into my face. “Can you not then understand why I feel as I do? Why I can’t imagine any point to dragging myself through the days, unless it is to kill him?”

A cold torrent seemed to flow over me. “You wouldn’t do that.”

“I think of it all the time.”

“Herron, that isn’t at all the same thing. Do you honestly feel yourself capable of killing another person? Much less your own uncle?”

He dropped his head into his hands and rubbed at his temples. “I don’t know,” he groaned. “I truly don’t. Sometimes I’m afraid I’m a coward after all, and that I will never nerve myself to do it. I might as well destroy myself if I can’t even summon the courage to execute my father’s murderer.”

“But if you kill your uncle you will be no better than what you think him to be. A murderer.” I flung the word at him, hoping its ugliness would wake him to the enormity of his intentions.