“More than you might expect, you young scapegrace. And if I had known sooner what the two of you had done, I would have traveled to Brussels and dragged you both back by the scruff of your neck,” the duchess said curtly.
“You know? She told you?” Dev looked shocked.
“We keep few secrets in this family, Thornwood. If you are to be one of us, you will have to accept that.”
Thorne shook his head. “How could you have me, after the deception I played on you? First I let your granddaughter accept a hole-in-the-wall wedding on the eve of war, then I was gone for all those months.”
A faint smile played around the duchess’s mouth. “It hardly matters what I think, only what India thinks. Hadn’t you better ask her?”
Devlyn’s eyes widened. He caught up a bunch of roses from the duchess’s basket. “You don’t mind, do you?” he called, already dashing toward the house.
“Be gone with you,” the duchess said huskily. “You’ll find her in the attic, I believe. She often goes there. Her thinking place, she calls it.”
~ ~ ~
The attic at Swallow Hill was a cavernous place with eaves on two sides that let in the streaming Norfolk sun. India had come here since she was a child whenever she needed a place to escape from her unruly brothers or simply time to dream her wild, adventurous dreams.
And she came to the old attic now, trying to sort through her conflicting emotions. As if in a dream she moved past the huge four-poster bed where Charles II was said to have slept, past the priceless Gobelin tapestries and the huge antique oak trestle table where some of her family whispered that the Magna Carta had been signed.
But today India did not look to right or left. Her eyes were fixed on the great, brass-bound chest angled beneath a dormer window.
Her hands trembled as she slid open the heavy lid. The clean scent of lavender filled her lungs. She looked down at layers of neat white cambric, carefully wrapped in fine paper.
She did not move. A tear eased from her eye and dropped onto the top piece of fabric, an exquisite length of linen, hand embroidered and tucked with bits of lace and ribbon. It was a child’s christening robe.
The robe that her infant son had worn in the village ceremony in Brussels, a week before his death.
India’s fingers trembled as she brought the fragrant linen to her face, inhaling its crisp scent, remembering the last time she had seen the child she had called Devlyn Ryan Carlisle.
His dark curls had been shining and his eyes were bright as he played with the simple wooden rattle her landlady’s husband had carved for him. His laughter had filled her days with joy.
But tragedy had struck without warning. Whether it had been one of the dozens of diseases that had swept over Brussels in the aftermath of battle, India had never found out. The child had simply sickened, growing weaker by the hour, his little body listless and wan.
Up to the end, he had never cried once.
Frantic, India had done everything the Belgian doctor could suggest, but bathing and herbal tisanes had been of no use. It was almost as if the child had lost his will to live. He had seemed to regain his strength just before dawn on the fifth night. He had blinked, his little fingers locked on India’s palm.
And then he had closed his eyes and breathed his last, while India clutched him to her heart.
The loss had been crushing to India, who had already been dealt the news of Dev’s death in battle. For three weeks she had not gone out of her rooms, only sat looking out the window at the muddy fields and the new grave in the churchyard with the little stone cherubs on its headstone.
India had thought she might die then — she had even thought she wanted to die. But a strange thing had happened. A sudden rainstorm had brought gusts hammering from the east, knocking away all the flowers she had laid on Ryan’s fresh grave. With the wind had come torrential rain, digging up soil and grass in deep furrows.
That storm had tested India’s very sanity. She had run across the churchyard and flung herself on her knees, trying to hold back the rich earth, fighting to keep the water from tearing away the neat flowers and soft grass she had been so careful to tend through the first bleak days of spring.
But all of her desperate clawing was to no avail. Nature moved in its courses, implacable and relentless. Beneath her hands the mud slid free, the grass tore asunder, no matter how hard she tried to hold them in place. As she knelt in the dirt, arms dark to the elbow, her face white with anger, she began to cry for the very first time since losing her beautiful, beloved child.
No one had bothered her. She was simply the strange Englishwoman who haunted the churchyard and she was left alone to grieve in peace.
When she had finally come to her feet, trembling and exhausted, three hours later, for the first time some measure of peace had filled the jagged hole in her heart.
Her child was gone. She accepted that now.
Her husband was lost. That, too, India had come to accept.
And she knew that there was nothing for her to do but go home, back to the family who loved her.
There in Norfolk she would try to make some kind of life for herself.
Now as India stood before Swallow Hill’s high dormer window, reliving those sad days in Europe, a bar of sunlight slanted through the glass and glistened over the tears scattered across the baby clothes her husband had never seen and her son had never had a chance to wear.
In her reverie, she did not hear the light step behind her, nor the check of indrawn breath.
Two hands settled at her shoulders. “India, what are you doing up here? Your grandmother said…” Thorne’s voice trailed away as he heard her shuddering breath. “India, are you crying?”
“No.”
She spun away, putting the high lid between them. “I-I just need to be alone.”
“Why? There’s nothing you can’t tell me. Besides,” Thorne said harshly, “I have some serious explaining of my own to do.”
“Maybe it’s too late for explanations, Dev. Maybe what we had last night, all that fire and passion, is the most we can ever have.” India’s face was a pale oval of uncertainty. “Maybe that’s the lesson Brussels was supposed to teach us.”
“Damn it, India, don’t turn away from me!” He caught her waist and pulled her back to face him. “What happened last night was wonderful, but it was only part of what I feel for you. I love your spirit and your innocence. I love your determination and your honesty. I even love your recklessness, though it frightens me half to death sometimes.” He ran his hand over her moist cheek. “What I’m trying to say is that I love all that you are, India Delamere. And I always will.”
“Will you?” Her voice was a trembling whisper. “Sometimes the past seems so far away that it might as well be a dream. And other times it all feels like yesterday, the pain still bleeding like a raw wound.”
“What are you saying, India? Damn it, what are you trying to tell me?”
She looked down without thinking, her eyes pools of sadness. Thorne followed her gaze to the tears glinting like jewels on the white fabric.
On the neat layers of pristine baby clothing.
Suddenly his fingers tightened. “My — my God.” His voice was strangled. “You didn’t tell me. I never knew — never even suspected—”
A shudder went through him, a great wrenching of muscle and tendon and cartilage that felt as if a giant hand had reached into his chest and torn everything inside out. “Is it true?
Was
there a child?” he asked hoarsely.
India did not answer. Her hand simply continued to stroke the fine white linen.
Devlyn pulled her back against him fiercely. His voice broke. “What happened, India? Dear God, I have to know the truth.”
India felt something hot fall on her shoulder and knew it was Devlyn’s tears. She knew, too, that it was time for her husband to taste the grief that she had carried so long in silence. “He was … a beautiful little boy, with eyes as wise as his father’s. He was the joy of my life for the short time I had him. And I don’t regret anything, not even one second of time I had with him, do you hear? Even though I lost his so — so suddenly.”
“He died so young. I never even had a chance to see him.” Devlyn’s lips locked in a tight line. “And I left you alone in a strange city. With a child, my child…” He looked away, his voice ragged. “What kind of a monster was I?” He shook his head. “Why didn’t I wait? Why didn’t I have the control to hold back until I’d come home from battle? My blindness meant the loss of my son.
Our
son.” His fingers clenched.
“Don’t, Dev. I don’t regret
anything
about Brussels,” India said fiercely. “It was only luck that you came back to me. Don’t try to carry the weight of those choices on your shoulders.”
“How can you look at me without hating me when I missed so bloody much? Everything of any importance.” His hand fell to her slender waist. “I missed the sight of you full with my child. I missed the sight of your joy and radiance, as you bloomed every day. And I missed the sight of a boy with wise eyes, smiling; as you held him in your arms. And all for what?” He laughed bitterly. “For an empty notion of honor and a country that cares less for heroes than it does for gold guineas and noisy parades,” he growled.
“You had your duty, and I had mine. You can’t go back and change that.”
“If only I could!” Dev looked down at the neat layers of clothes. He held up a tiny shirt, his eyes glistening. When he turned, the sun was slanting golden through India’s hair, glinting over the tears on her cheek. The sight made him catch a ragged breath. “I want another chance, India. I want you. I want
this.”
He rested the fragrant linen against his cheek. “I want a house full of laughter and children spilling everywhere. Even if I am terrified whether I can be any fit sort of father.” He smiled crookedly. “It’s not as if I had a normal childhood. My father was an inveterate gamester and my mother was…” He cleared his throat. “Perhaps I’d better not give her a name.”
“You won’t be like that.”
“No?” Dev laughed bitterly. “I’m damnably afraid I’ll never be able to put down roots. What if I find I’m no good as a father or a husband? What if I cut line and run, like the worst kind of coward?”
“Then we’ll all run away with you. I
do
know most of Turkestan, after all. And there is still that Bedouin leader who would be only too happy to—”