Silent Melody (26 page)

“Sell Penshurst to me,” Major Cunningham said. “Sell it and go elsewhere and forget it.”

Ashley was so deeply immersed in his thoughts that it took a moment for his friend's words to register on his consciousness. He turned his head and looked at him rather blankly.

“What?” he said. “You would buy Penshurst, Rod?”

The major looked rather embarrassed. “I like it,” he said. “And I have been giving serious thought to selling out of the army and settling at home. You know I am a gamer. I have amassed a tidy fortune and would as soon buy land with it as lose it all again at the tables. I like Penshurst. And it has occurred to me that I could do myself a favor and do my closest friend a favor at the same time by purchasing it.”

Ashley's look was still rather blank. Roderick had come to Penshurst as his guest, and after a day he was offering to
buy
the place? “But it is not for sale,” he said.

The major shrugged. “I am rather impulsive,” he admitted. “I ought not to have said anything, Ash. Certainly not yet. But I will not change my mind. I am convinced of that. Think about it. And think about her.” He nodded in the direction of the window. “If you change your mind, we will talk business. I will make you a definite offer.”

Ashley laughed. “You are doing this purely out of friendship,” he said. “How extraordinary you are, Rod. You would regret it within a month—selling your commission, settling on an estate you do not know in a part of the country with which you are unfamiliar. And yet I know you would do it in a moment if I said yes. I value your friendship more highly than to say the word. Penshurst is not for sale.”

The major shrugged again. “I am going out riding,” he said. “I want to explore this countryside, which is, as you have said, unfamiliar to me. Would you care to join me?”

“If you will forgive me, no,” Ashley said. “Luke and Anna have taken the other children out.”

“And you would not leave the Lady Emily unguarded,” his friend said. He chuckled. “'Tis commendable in you.” He slapped a friendly hand on Ashley's shoulder and made for the door.

“Rod,” Ashley said before he reached it. “Thank you.”

He wondered how he would have coped with the tragedy and the guilt if Rod had not been there for him in India. He had always been the best of friends. He had seemed to value Ashley's friendship, had sought after it and cultivated it. And it seemed to Ashley now that his friend had always given more than he had received, and that he was continuing to do so. There could be no other explanation than friendship for his extraordinary offer to buy Penshurst.

It was a tempting offer.

He could not accept it, though. Not ever. Somehow, he felt, if salvation was to be had, it was to be had here. He could not explain the feeling to himself. He had not even fully realized he felt this way until Roderick had offered him a way out. But it was so, he was sure. And so he was even less sure about Emily.

He turned to the window to watch her with the children. But they were coming toward the house, the boys running on ahead, looking flushed and excited. She was smiling. Ah, Emmy, always sweetly serene. Or almost always. What had happened yesterday to take away the serenity? Was it something that might recur? He would have to be very careful to see that she was properly protected for the remainder of her stay at Penshurst—perhaps forever, if she would listen to what he knew he must again say to her.

•   •   •

She
was painting. It was not coming easily, but she persevered. It was a different scene from any she had ever tried before. Although she was on the hill and there were numerous trees to paint, she knew she could not paint any of them. Her spirit had always been uplifted by trees, but today the trees were strangely silent. It was the flat farmland below that called to her. But she did not know the message and for a long time her brush did not know how to express it.

But finally she was absorbed. So absorbed that she knew when she finally felt his presence that he had been there for some time. Leaning against a tree, his arms crossed over his chest. Far enough away not to intrude upon her privacy or her creative need to keep her work unobserved. He smiled at her when she turned her head to look at him.

She felt desire deep in her womb, though she knew it was not entirely a physical thing. It was love that put the slight unsteadiness in her legs. A love that had now manifested itself in every way. She had decided after leaving the boys in the nursery to play at highwaymen and heroes that she would no longer fight to keep her love suppressed. Not for what remained of her two weeks at least. She would accept this time as a gift. It had been a freeing decision.

“Hello, Emmy,” he said. He strolled a little closer. “May I see?” He was signing as well as speaking the words.

“No,” she told him aloud, looking briefly at her painting. And then, very daringly, “Naht yet.”

He grinned at her. “You have been learning words in my absence,” he said. “And learning them wrongly. O-o-o, not ah. Not.”

“O-o-o,” she said, obediently lifting her jaw a little higher. “Not yet.” She felt her throat quickly with one hand. Yes, the vibrations were there. It was not so difficult after all to produce sound. It was almost, she had thought when practicing before the mirror in her room, as if she remembered . . .

He sat on the grass a short distance from her easel, but in such a position that he could not see her painting. He reclined sideways on one elbow and plucked a blade of grass to set between his teeth.

She thought at first that she would not be able to concentrate with him sitting so close. She expected him to be restless, curious. But he was as he had been last night when they had stood together outside the summerhouse. He was still and relaxed. He was very like the soul partner she had always dreamed of having. After a minute or two she forgot about him again with her conscious thoughts and found that at last her brush was speaking the meaning that had been lodged deep within her.

He was gazing off down the hill when she looked at him again. He seemed peaceful. She stood gazing at him for a while, enjoying the luxury of watching unobserved.

“Now,” she said at last, forming the word carefully.

He did not correct her pronunciation this time. He merely looked up at her, smiled, and got to his feet, then looked at her painting for a long time in silence, his expression unreadable. She looked for ridicule or amusement or even simple puzzlement, but she saw none of them.

“Everything is horizontal this time,” he said, also signing with his hands—he was doing that more often, she noticed, making up new and easily interpreted signs, as if he had decided that it was unfair to expect her always to listen to and speak his language when visual communication was better attuned to the workings of her mind than verbal—“instead of vertical as in the other painting I saw. Everything stretches sideways rather than upward, with the colors of fields and sky intermingling. Not fields down here and sky up there, but all part of one another. Explain to me, Emmy. What have you seen that I have not? I envy your ability to see with an inner eye.”

She showed him with her hands and with her bare feet and with her expressive face that the earth was beneath them, the nurturing component of life. Soil and grass and crops. It was through the earth, she attempted to demonstrate, that one must learn all there was to learn about the mystery of life and growth and measureless time and patience. And love and peace too. It was not up there, as she had thought before and told him before. The meaning of it all was not up there, beyond one's grasp, always to be yearned for, never to be attained. It was all here and now, if one only recognized it and accepted it. Not in the future, but now. Not in the distance, but here, within one's grasp. She tried to tell him in words too because she knew she was not communicating quite clearly.

“Naht—not there,” she said, pointing upward. “Here. Now.”

“Emmy.” He took her busy hands in his finally and held them both against his heart as he closed his eyes tightly. “Emmy,” he said after a while, and she could see that there were tears in his eyes. “Is it true, then? Is peace not so very far away after all?”

“No,” she said.

They spoke to each other without words, without images. They spoke to each other in the silence. It was one of the most precious moments of her life.

He kissed her lips softly before releasing her hands and folding her easel while she cleaned her brush and tidied her paints and paper. Then they walked in silence back to the summerhouse. A silence that was both sweet and sad to Emily. She knew she was dear to him. She knew too that peace was still just beyond his grasp. She wondered if it could ever be possible to know peace after the person one had loved most in the world had died in circumstances that one might have prevented or at least shared.

She turned to him in the summerhouse after setting down her things. He was looking at her. It was the most natural thing in the world to take the couple of steps into his arms, to lift her mouth for his kiss, to set her own arms about his neck. She was not going to analyze. Not until she was away from Penshurst again. And she would not allow conscience or any notion of sin to intrude. Perhaps she was rationalizing, she thought. Perhaps this was what people did when they consciously committed one of life's great sins. But she could not yet feel that this affair she was sharing with Ashley was wrong.

He sat down on the sofa after they had caressed each other with lips and hands and had felt the need to be closer still, and she stood before him and watched as he unbuttoned the front flap of his breeches and then lifted her skirt and drew down her undergarments.

“Come,” he said, setting his hands on her hips and drawing her toward him.

She knelt astride him and watched his face as he first positioned her and then returned his hands to her hips and brought her firmly down onto him. He looked at her, his head against the back of the sofa, his eyes half closed.

“Emmy,” he said.

She had learned something the night before. Two things, perhaps. She had learned that physical love was intensely pleasurable. And she had learned that it really was love, that in the physical act, which could be called sin when performed outside marriage, as now, love bonded to love and was a thing of the heart and even of the soul as well as of the body. She loved him totally as he began the already familiar rhythmic dance of physical love and as she matched her movements to his—she loved him with her body and with every part of herself enclosed by her body.

She watched his face and saw that he was watching hers. Watching each other's pleasure. But seeing deeper than pleasure. Watching the essence of each other, deeply penetrating each other. Not just in the physical masculine-into-feminine sense, but in every way possible. Masculine, feminine; feminine, masculine—they did not matter. Each was both, and each was both giver and receiver.

He loved her during those minutes, she knew. During the intensely felt minutes of the act of love. Memory would come back to him afterward and set up the barrier again. But for now there was no barrier. Oh no, she would not fight this or see it as sin. Or ever regret it.

He drew her head down to his and set his mouth on hers, his tongue coming deep inside as his other hand held her firm and she felt the hot rush of his seed. She sighed out her own release and relaxed down onto him. It seemed so natural, so right to love him thus. She set her cheek against his shoulder and sank for a few minutes into sleep.

“E
MMY,”
he said. She had been sitting quietly beside him on the sofa, her head on his shoulder. But he could not talk to her thus. He sat forward slightly so that the weight of her head was transferred to the crook of his elbow and he could turn for her to see his face.

She looked back at him with smiling eyes and he caught his breath again at the expression in them, far deeper than the smile itself. It was the expression she had worn as he had loved her, deeper than the physical passion she had obviously felt. It was Emmy's usual look of serenity and peace. It was her usual look of deep affection. It was the look of a woman who had just received the seed of a man who loved her body. It was—ah, it was far more than any one of those, or even of the sum total of them. He would not verbalize even in his mind what her expression told him.

“Emmy.” He touched his lips very lightly and briefly to hers. “I am not going to say the obvious—not yet. We have been lovers, last night and today. We both know what that might mean and what it should mean. You may well be with child, and even apart from that possibility we should both now do what is right and proper. But I have learned from you since last time. I have learned that there is something far more important than what society tells us is proper.”

She touched her fingertips to his lips. He was not sure there was not a tinge of sadness in her smile.

“I want to tell you some things,” he said. “I want to burden you with knowledge that should be mine alone. I want you to know the man to whom you have opened your greatest treasure as a woman. The man who will offer himself to you for life some time soon—unless you indicate that under no circumstances can you accept me. You knew me once better than anyone has ever known me, I believe, little fawn. You no longer know me. You care for me. Perhaps you believe you care enough to marry me. But you do not know me, Emmy. And so I must tell you.”

“I know you,” she said, indicating with her hand that it was heart knowledge of which she spoke. But she said the words aloud.

It was still a shock to hear her speak, her words slowly and distinctly spoken, her voice low and toneless and yet strangely sweet.

“There are so many things about me you do not know,” he said. “There were seven years when you did not see me, Emmy. So many things.”

“No, no, no,” she said. She set one hand flat over his heart. “I know you, Ahshley.”

Why was it, he wondered, that he so often found himself fighting tears when he was with Emmy, even though she could also bring him closer to happiness than he had thought ever again possible? He had shed no tears after the death of his wife and her son.

Tell me, then.
She spoke now with her hands and her eyes.

“Not here.” He got to his feet and took her hand in his. He had to make this more real to her. She had to understand that he was not the man she had loved more compassionately than his own sister had ever loved him. It seemed that she must marry him now. But he needed her to understand how unlovable he was, how despicable. He could not even offer himself to her again with all the darkness shut up within. She had a right to know.

He did not talk to her as they descended the hill and approached the house from the side. They did not see anyone on the way, for which fact he was thankful, and the servants' stairs were deserted too. He paused for a moment outside the door of Alice's suite and took Emily's hand firmly in his own.

“These were her rooms,” he said when they had stepped into the dressing room and he had shut the door firmly behind them. “As she left them. No one cleared them out when she died because no order to do so was ever given. I have not given that order since my own arrival here, though I have wanted to and have been on the verge of doing so numerous times. These were her clothes.” He had released her hand in order to open the double doors of a large wardrobe. “You can breathe in her perfume if you take a deep breath.”

She did so, then stood very still. He opened the door into the bedchamber and she followed him inside.

“She was a very feminine woman,” he said. “As you can see, she loved pinks and lavenders—and frills and flounces and fussiness. She was very beautiful—small and dainty and seemingly fragile. She aroused all of a man's protective instincts. Men routinely fell in love with her.”

She touched the frilled satin bed hangings, a look of deep sadness in her eyes.

“Come,” he said, beckoning her toward the door leading into the small sitting room. “This is where she sat and wrote letters and sewed. It has all the daintiness one would expect of Alice's personal domain.”

He watched her run a hand over the inlaid wood pattern on top of the small escritoire. She slid open a desk drawer, something he had never been able to bring himself to do. She reached in after a few moments and drew out two oval picture frames, hinged together in the middle, then turned them over and stood looking down at the two pictures. He took a step toward her and drew in a slow breath as he looked over her shoulder.

“Alice,” he said, though she did not look up to see him speak. Alice, looking as lovely and as vital as she had looked before they married, when she had nursed him, when he had been weak and in need.

Emily looked up at him. She was pointing to the other portrait. She pointed at him and then back at the picture.
Like you,
she was telling him.

He was a young man, dark like Alice, blue-eyed. He must be her brother, Gregory Kersey, Ashley reasoned. And yes, he thought, there was perhaps a slight likeness.

“Gregory Kersey,” he said. “Alice's brother.”

She set the portraits back inside the drawer as she had found them and closed it carefully. She looked up at him.

“I hated her, Emmy,” he said.

She gazed at him, her face without expression.

“We fell in love in great haste,” he said. “She was my nurse when I was very sick. I was her patient when she was grieving and adjusting to life in a new country. We married before we really knew each other. I repulsed her. She would—make no attempt to like me. She was repeatedly unfaithful to me. I suppose I was much to blame. Rarely is the fault all on one side in a failed marriage. I grew to hate her. A hundred times I must have wished her dead.”

“No,” she said aloud.

“My mind shied away from the wish,” he said. “But 'twas there. I longed to be free of her, to be free of the endless nightmare of being bound to her for life.”

Her eyes were wide with shock.

“Thomas was not mine,” he said. “I would tell no one else this, Emmy. I would defend the honor of his memory with my life if anyone were to challenge his legitimacy. I acknowledged him as mine. He had my name. He was an innocent child whom I loved.”

She frowned.

“Emmy,” he said, “the ‘business meeting' that kept me from home the night of the fire was no such thing. I spent the night in the bed of a married woman.” He wondered suddenly if she had understood his torrent of words. He had not even tried to sign any of the meaning to her. But it appeared she had understood.

She closed her eyes and tipped back her head. He waited for her to look at him again. When she did so, her eyes were filled with pain. Pain for herself? Pain for him? Knowing Emmy as he did, he did not doubt there was plenty of the latter.

“There was nothing between Alice and me after our wedding night,” he said. “The night of the fire was my first adultery, though I do not suppose it would have been my last. 'Tis no excuse anyway: Adultery is adultery. My wife and the child I loved died while I was committing it.”

Her face had lost all vestiges of color. He wondered if she would faint. But he would not step forward to support her. He kept himself rigidly apart from her.

“Now tell me,” he said quietly, “that you know me, Emmy.”

She closed her eyes again and swayed on her feet. But after several moments she took a few hurried steps toward him, wrapped her arms tightly about his waist, and pressed her forehead to his cravat.

“I know you,” she said in words.

Why did her words feel like absolution? Like forgiveness? She did not have the power to forgive him. No one had that power. Perhaps not even God, whom he had never asked. There was no forgiveness.

He set his arms like iron bars about her, buried his face against her hair, and wept. Wept with deep, painful, racking sobs. For a long time he could do nothing to bring them under control. For a long time he touched the very bottom of despair. But he held on tightly to Emily, who leaned warmly and softly into him. And he knew that he was clinging to the only hope he might ever have of pardon and peace.

•   •   •

It
was a damp and misty morning. The grass was wet and chilly beneath her bare feet. But she walked up onto the hill anyway, not even trying to see down into the valley or ahead of herself into the trees. She walked to draw tranquillity from the morning.

He was far more troubled than she had ever realized. The burden of his guilt was far heavier than he had indicated. And yet she could not feel totally dejected this morning. He had not loved Alice. It was a selfish thought to delight in, but she could not help repeating the thought over and over in her mind. He had not loved Alice. His terrible suffering had not been caused by grief over a lost love.

She remembered the look in his eyes as he had made love to her the afternoon before. And his determination that she know all before he offered her marriage again. He had not tried to excuse his own guilt. He had tried to show himself to her as he saw himself—evil and unforgivable. She remembered how he had cried in her arms as if his heart would break, perhaps because she had tried to tell him that he was still Ashley, that he was no different now than he had been seven years before. Only more wounded. Deeply wounded.

There was hope this morning. Hope for him. Hope for herself. She knew that when he asked again, she would say yes. Happiness was by no means assured them. But unhappiness was certain if they parted—for both of them, she believed. He needed her as she needed him. It was the dependency of love. Neither needed the other as any sort of crutch. They needed each other because they cared for each other, because the world was a more meaningful place when the other was close.

He had seemed quite genuinely cheerful last evening when they had all attended a soiree at a neighbor's house. It was true that he had avoided being in close company with Sir Henry Verney, though the two of them had been civil to each other. But he had treated Miss Verney and everyone else with his old amiability. Perhaps in time this new home and this new neighborhood, despite the fact that Alice had lived here, would bring stability and peace to his life. Perhaps she would be able to help. She breathed in the clean, damp smell of the air. This morning she was beginning to believe that this would be her home for the rest of her life. And the thought was deeply pleasing to her. She was no longer haunted by Alice's ghost.

She had even lost her fear of Major Cunningham. Not her dislike, it was true; she doubted she would ever grow to like him. But perhaps that was unfair. He had contrived to speak privately with her last evening. He had sat beside her a little apart from most of the other guests, who were grouped about the pianoforte listening to the musical offerings of several of their number.

“Lady Emily,” he had said, a look of frank apology on his face, “will you ever be able to forgive me?”

She had not known quite how to react. A swift glance had shown that both Ashley and Luke were not far away.

“My behavior was unpardonable,” he had said. “Even if you had been what I mistook you for, 'twould have been unpardonable. I will not even try to justify what I said and what I suggested. I can only ask humbly for your pardon, without any expectation that it is my right to receive it. Will you forgive me?”

It had been a handsome apology and she had been able to see nothing but shame and sincerity in his eyes. She had nodded her head quickly.

“My sincerest thanks,” he had said. “And my sincerest good wishes. Ashley is my dearest friend, but it does not take the intuition of friendship to see that he has conceived a deep affection for you. May I hope for his sake that you return it?”

She would not answer that. It was none of his concern.

“I ask only,” he had said, “because 'tis my dearest wish to see him happy again, and I believe you are the lady to make him happy. But not here—at Penshurst, I mean. Always here the memory of his late wife would come between you, Lady Emily. Pardon me for speaking so frankly about what seems not to concern me. But friends must always wish the best for each other. I have offered to purchase Penshurst. I like it. So I am somewhat partial, you see.” He had smiled. “Persuade Ashley to accept my offer. 'Twill be for your happiness and his.” He had looked apologetic again. “And mine.”

It had not been easy to understand every word; he was undoubtedly unaccustomed to talking to a deaf person. But she had understood the main message, she believed.