Tangled (30 page)

But in reality he came less than a minute after the doctor's departure. He closed the door quietly behind his back and stayed where he was, looking rather fearful, Rebecca thought. She felt a rush of emotion, seeing him standing there. Her husband. The father of her son. A rush of deep tenderness and contentment. Almost of love.

"David," she said, "we have a son."

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"A son." He looked dazed. "No one would tell me. They said you should be the one to do that.''

"Don't you want to see him?" she asked.

She watched his eyes move to the bundle in her arms. She watched him swallow and finally leave the sanctuary of the door to cross the room toward the bed.

"He is rather pink and patchy," she said anxiously. "It will be a few days before his head takes its proper shape." The child was still gazing through the slits of his eyes.

She so wanted David to be pleased. Pleased with her. Pleased with his son. She looked up into his face when he said nothing. He was crying, his eyes brimming with tears, some trickling down his cheeks.

"He is beautiful," he said. "Our son." He reached out a hand toward the baby but dropped it to his side again. "Our son, Rebecca."

"Touch him," she said. "Hold him."

But he took one step backward.

"Hold him, David." She picked up the little bundle.

He took it from her gingerly, the look of terror on his face giving way gradually to wonder. "Our son," he said, his eyes softening. "You had better be good to your mama, young lad. She has suffered for you."

The young lad listened quietly.

Rebecca watched her husband talking nonsense to their son. He was David, she told herself. The David she had known most of her life. The David she had still disliked just a year ago. A year ago he had not even returned from the Crimea. A year ago she could not have pictured this scene even in her most bizarre dreams.

It was hard now to cast herself back to see him and think of him as she had done then. And as she had done the day of his return, when she had resented so much the fact that he had returned while Julian had not. And the days after his return, when he had taken her so much by surprise by asking her to marry him. It was hard to remember her indignation, her revulsion at the very idea. And her wedding day and the fear that she was doing quite the wrong thing.

Now she could see him only as David, the man with whom she had lived for almost nine months. The man

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with whom she had grown familiar and comfortable. And more than that. The man of whom she had grown fond. Even that sounded tame. She felt a warm tenderness for him. He was holding the son he had begotten in her on their wedding night or the night after or the night after that, the son she had been delivered of less than an hour before.

It was a strong bond that was between them. As strong as love.

"You must be tired," he said, setting the baby back down in the crook of her arm. "Was it bad?"

"Dreadful," she said. "But it might have been very much worse according to all I have heard. It was very short in comparison to many labors. And our son was worth every moment. What are we going to call him?"

"Do you have any ideas?" He looked wary, even tense suddenly.

"Charles?" she said. "He has been Charles to me for several months—or Charlotte. Unless you would prefer to have him named David. Or William."

"Charles William," he said, "is going to sleep, I think.''

She smiled.

"Which is where you should be going too," he said. "You look tired. The doctor warned me you would be. I'll leave you to rest."

She realized for the first time just how tired she did feel.

"Rebecca," he said before turning to leave, "thank you. Thank you for my son."

Charles lay snug and warm—and awake—in his father's place beside his mother after she had fallen asleep, a smile on her face and tears on her cheeks. On the whole his new surroundings did not seem nearly as bad as they had at first. The slits of his eyes gradually closed and stayed closed.

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The bells of the village church rang for a whole hour on the day an heir was born at Stedwell. They rang again on the day of his christening, when the viscount had declared a holiday for his laborers and most of his tenants too had taken the day off. All had been invited to enjoy

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the gardens of Stedwell after the church service and to make free with the long tables of food and drink set out on the terrace. All the families of higher social standing had been invited to the house for the celebrations. The Earl and Countess of Hartington had come for the occasion with their new daughter, born three months before her nephew.

Everything was very good, David decided in the two months following the birth of their son. He had come home to England a little less than a year before buoyed by hopes and oppressed by dread.

He had hoped to forget, to find healing, to begin a new and meaningful life. He had dreaded having to face Rebecca, to see the signs of the suffering he had caused. He had dreaded having to face her, knowing that he had killed her husband, her beloved Julian. And then when he had faced her, he had felt all the weight of his responsibility toward her and had dreamed up his scheme of offering her a future.

It seemed hard to believe that that had all been less than a year ago.

Everything had worked out remarkably well—with a few notable exceptions. His house still looked rather down-at-heel, though even it looked more splendid now that it had had a thorough clean and new draperies—and now that it looked and felt unmistakably lived in.

There were still all those barriers between himself and Rebecca, and always would be. A marriage, he had realized, could never hope to thrive when one of the partners must keep a dark secret from the other. And there was always the fear—yes, he was afraid—that Sir George Scherer would show up again with his strange hatreds and sly insinuations. And of course there were the dreams, rarely now the one of the shooting, almost always the one in which Julian stood at the foot of the bed.

Oh, yes, there were imperfections that could cloud his happiness when he stopped to brood on them, as he did more often than he liked. But there was happiness too. His first year at home had brought far greater contentment and peace than he would have dreamed possible during his voyage back to England.

Rebecca, he believed, had recovered from the worst of her grief and was almost happy with her new life. It was

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never possible to know for sure with Rebecca. The quietness, the discipline, the obedience could mask either happiness or unhappiness.

But he had lived with her for almost a year. He could sense contentment.

She had resumed her duties about the house and many of those beyond it. She went to the school two afternoons a week. She attended committee meetings. She was beginning to organize a grand picnic, dinner, and ball for some time during the summer—involving everyone of both the upper and lower classes, just as they had done for Charles's christening. She had brought a dressmaker down from London on the understanding that she would set up in the village and employ three or perhaps even four of the local girls and train them.

Rebecca was convinced that there were enough customers in the neighborhood to keep a really good seamstress and several assistants busy. And three or four more girls would be saved from having to move into one of the industrial cities.

Most of all she was contented with her new motherhood. Wholly absorbed in her love of Charles. If he had done nothing else for her, David thought, he had done that. He had given her a child of her own. He had given her a sense of completion as a woman. He had given her someone on whom to lavish all the love that had lain dormant for more than two years.

He knew that she was embarrassed the first time he went into the nursery to find her nursing the baby, singing softly to him as she propelled a rocking chair gently with one foot. But he stood and watched anyway, a silent spectator, a little apart, not quite within the circle of love, but warmed by it anyway because he had caused it. He had given her that. He had put that child in her arms.

He came back often until she became accustomed to his presence and relaxed. He liked to watch his son sucking greedily at her breast, his curled fist pressed into the soft warm flesh. He liked to watch her cradling arms, her eyes heavy with love.

He liked to watch his whole world there in the rocking chair. The peace he had craved. His wife. And his son.

She did not try to shut him out. Part of him had feared that she would. Since she did not love him anyway, he 220
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had feared that he would become quite unimportant to her once her baby was born. But it did not happen. And of course it would not. Not with Rebecca. Rebecca would always do what was correct.

He was her husband and head of her family. She would always include him. But he liked to think that it was not just duty that motivated her.

She often handed him the child when he was sleeping, sated with his meal. She set herself back to rights, her eyes lowered.

It was always a joy quite beyond words to describe to hold his son.

He would have kept coming to the nursery just for that. He kept coming for another reason too. They were a family there, the three of them. The world could somehow be held at bay there. The world that threatened him. Because it held a secret that would shatter everything if it was ever revealed to her.

"He is going to have your hair," he said to her once when he was holding the baby, "if he ever decides to grow any."

"My lovely golden-haired boy," she said, smoothing her hand over the fine, almost invisible down on the baby's head. "With beautiful blue eyes like his father's."

He could almost imagine that her tone of tenderness was meant for the father as well as the son.

After two months she would have recovered from the birth. He still shared a bed with her. He had not made love to her for almost a year.

During three nights he had made love to her, six times in all. He did not know what was going to happen at the end of the two months.

He longed for her and dreaded the time of decision. And the decision would be his to make, he knew. She would do her duty. But as passively and as stoically as she had done it on their wedding night and the nights after?

He could expect no more of her.

It was all he had asked of their marriage.

Fool that he had been!

Sometimes he remembered unwillingly what his father had said to him on the day he and Rebecca had announced their betrothal.
You
will not be happy with Rebecca. You need more than she can give.
He did not want

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to remember. Everything was going well. He was almost happy.

She was almost happy.

But he did not know what was going to happen at the end of the two months.

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They were outside together, standing in the middle of the rose arbor—or what would be the rose arbor next year. This year there was a young hedge and a trellised arched entry way with no roses, a fountain with no water, and rose bushes with no blooms.

But next year the roses would bloom.

Next year . . .

It was pleasant, Rebecca thought, so pleasant to be able to look forward. Next year Charles would be toddling around, doubtless getting under everyone's feet and into every imaginable mischief. She did not think she would be able to have him confined to the nursery with a nurse. She wanted to spend every possible moment of his upbringing with her miracle child. Perhaps her only child.

"Well," David said, "what do you think? A little dreary?"

"Oh, no," she said. "Just think of what was here when we arrived here late last summer. Overgrown trees that were cutting light from the windows. And now we have the beginnings of an arbor. I am so glad you decided to employ those boys again this year, David. They would not enjoy town life."

"When the roses bloom," he said, "it will be quite beautiful here.

Your own special corner of the garden, Rebecca.''

"When the roses bloom ..." she said. "You said that last year too.

Remember?"

When the roses bloom again,
he had said,
you could be mistress of your
own home, Rebecca. You could have a new and meaningful life. You
could have something to replace the grief and the emptiness.

"Yes," he said. "They have not literally bloomed here—yet. But they will—next year. I promised you a new life and new meaning, didn't I? Have you found them?'' His voice sounded rather stiff.

"There has been so much to do here," she said, "and

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still is. I think we have made a little difference in some people's lives, David. And as you promised, I no longer have that feeling of not quite belonging or of not having any meaningful function in life.

And I have Charles."

"You are happy?" he said. "Contented?"

Contented, yes. Happy? Was she happy? Sometimes, when she did not really think about it, she felt that she was. But perhaps not. She had told herself after Julian's death that she could never be happy again. And there was too much that she had to hold beyond her conscious mind. She could never relax into total happiness. There were Flora and Richard—she had seen them both at Katie's christening and had been pleased to find that her brother's new tenant was showing some interest in Flora. There was Lady Scherer and all the mystery surrounding that missing part of David's life—and Julian's. If there was a mystery. She had decided to let it go, not to think about it.

"Yes, David," she said quietly, fully aware that she had not made it clear which question she was answering. And not really knowing herself.