Loving Rose: The Redemption of Malcolm Sinclair (Casebook of Barnaby Adair) (3 page)

The priory was Benedictine, and somewhat to his surprise he found himself falling into the pattern of monastic hours; there was comfort in the regimen. Roland remained his closest associate, although he also spent many hours with Geoffrey. Both men had minds that, if not the equal of his, were at least close enough to foster mutual appreciation.

Slowly, his body healed. His face would never be the same again, and he would carry his many scars for the rest of his life, but one by one the various braces and strappings Roland had devised to realign Thomas’s bones and support his wrenched joints were permanently retired. Two years after Roland had found him washed up on the nearby shore, he could walk fully upright, with only a single cane for support.

Despite his ordeal, his health, previously unassailably rude, hadn’t deserted him; as the months rolled on, he spent his afternoons away from the library, helping in the gardens, stables, and workshops, wherever an extra hand was needed. And his strength grew, and his abilities increased. The latter he viewed with a somewhat cynical pleasure; in his previous life, he had never had the chance to lay his hands on an adze, much less a mattock. As for his strength . . . if he had been spared in order to fulfill some function, perform some deed, then, he reasoned, he would need sufficient strength to accomplish it.

Three years after he’d arrived at the priory, Geoffrey died. Thomas was somewhat surprised to feel sorrow, grief, and regret at the old man’s passing. Those weren’t emotions he’d experienced before, not for an acquaintance; he took their existence as a sign that he was, indeed, learning the ways of connecting with others.

After Geoffrey was buried with all due ceremony, the remaining brothers met and elected the next prior. Thomas wasn’t surprised that the brothers’ unanimous choice was Roland.

“To you, Prior Roland.” Leaning back in the armchair to one side of the hearth in the prior’s study, Thomas raised his goblet to Roland, seated in the chair opposite, in which Geoffrey had used to sit.

Roland’s lips twisted, half smile, half grimace. “I wish I could say I’m thrilled, but I would much rather Geoffrey was still here with us.”

For once, Thomas could understand. He inclined his head. “Indeed.”

For a moment, both were silent, then Roland raised his goblet. “To absent friends.”

“To Geoffrey.” Thomas drank, as did Roland.

Then Roland sat back and eyed Thomas. “And, in some ways, to you—it’s you I, and my colleagues, have to thank for the priory being in such robust financial health that we will, it seems, never have to worry about our continued existence.”

Thomas waved the thanks aside. “I was here, bored—and it was appropriate that I repay you and the house for this.” Another wave indicated his healed body. “Incidentally, can I expect any further improvement, or is this as nimble as I’m going to get?”

Roland’s lips quirked. “You will get stronger—I’ve seen that in you over the last months. But you’ll find that your strength will be in different areas. For instance, your hands grip harder because they so often must support your weight, and your arms and shoulders will be stronger than they were, but your legs will always be weaker than before. As for nimbleness”—Roland’s tone gentled—“you will always walk with a hitching limp . . . I couldn’t fix that. And you will almost certainly always need a cane, but other than that, as you’ve already discovered, you can ride, and, in time, you’ll be able to walk much further than you presently can.”

His gaze on his weak left leg, Thomas nodded.

“But,” Roland continued, his voice strengthening, “to return to the point I was intending to make before you so glibly deflected me.”

Thomas smiled wryly.

Roland nodded. “Indeed. To return to that point, I have clearly found my place, my path leading on into the future. Like Geoffrey, I will be prior here until I die. I actively sought that path—I worked and put myself into a position from where, if my colleagues so chose, I could become prior and attain my life’s goal. As Geoffrey did before me. But what of you, Thomas? You’ve been biding time since I brought you here, but you are not the sort of man to live life by default. You’re like Geoffrey, like me, in that regard. So what is your goal?”

Thomas sighed. Raising his head, he rested it against the well-padded leather. After a moment, he met Roland’s gaze. “I expected to die. But I didn’t. If I accept yours, Geoffrey’s, and, indeed, this house’s thesis, then I’ve been spared for some reason, presumably to fulfill some purpose—one I am uniquely qualified to carry out.” He spread his hands. “So here I am, waiting for Fate, or God, or whatever force determines these things to find me and set their ordained task before me.” He paused, then, knowing Roland was waiting for the rest, continued, “I intended, and still see my death—the true and final death of the man I was—as an inescapable payment for my sins, for the sins I committed as that man. In that context, that I’ve been spared to perform a task that only I can accomplish . . . fits, in a way.” Thomas paused, then drained his goblet. Lowering it, he murmured, “I feel like I’m on a journey of penance—almost dying, yet not being allowed to get off so easily, my consequent convalescence, and, presumably, eventually, my task to complete. The way I now view it, only once that task is done will I be allowed to know peace, to finally finish paying my full penance for my past deeds.”

Roland regarded him in silence. A minute ticked past, then Roland said, “I can see that you believe that, and I can mount no argument against your logic. Your view is much as mine would be were I in your place. However, to return to the aspect of your situation that remains to be addressed, you are well enough now to actively seek your path—the one along which your task to complete lies. Yet to my mind, you’re still waiting—still passive, not actively seeking.”

Thomas frowned. After several moments, he said, “I had thought—assumed—that Fate, or the Deity, would find me when they were ready . . . when they felt I was ready. I assumed that all I needed to do was wait here, and my task would find me.”

Roland’s lips twisted. “That might be so, but the priory is a highly circumscribed world. Your task may well lie beyond our walls, and you might not find it unless you actively seek it.”

Thomas said nothing, simply stared, unseeing, at his feet.

Roland waited several minutes, then murmured, “Just open your mind to the question. Clarity will come to you in time.”

T
hat night, Thomas tossed and turned on his narrow cot in the last cell of the infirmary. Roland’s words, their implication—that to complete his penance and find true peace he would need to leave the confines of the priory, and the safety its walls afforded, and seek his ordained task in the wider world—and the ramifications of that churned through his mind.

He knew he was the sort of character who liked to be in charge, and in control of his own destiny, most of all. And he was manipulative, more or less instinctively. Was staying here, supposedly waiting, simply another way of him trying to exert some control?

Trying to force Fate, or God, to play by his rules?

One thing he knew beyond question, beyond doubt—he hated stepping into unknown situations. He always had.

And he still had no clue, no inkling at all, of what his ordained task might be.

To accept the risk and simply set out, and trust that his task would find him, that by seeking, he would find it . . .

Having faith in anything but himself had never come easily.

“I
t’s time I left the priory.” Using his cane for support, Thomas let himself down into the armchair beside the hearth in Roland’s study.

Sinking into the armchair opposite, Roland studied him, then nodded. “You’ve achieved all that you set out to achieve here.”

Rather grimly, Thomas nodded back. “I made a pact with myself—if, by the time I amassed sufficient funds for the priory and the abbey to undertake the building works you and the abbot have set your hearts upon, my fated task had yet to find me, then I would accept that verdict and go forth and actively search for it. As of this morning, that time is upon me—as I’m aware you’ve always thought, my task is clearly not fated to find me within these walls.”

Head tipping, Roland searched Thomas’s face. “I’ve never understood your reluctance to go back into the world. It’s not as if it and its ways are unknown to you.”

“No. And to be perfectly candid, I’m not sure I understand my . . . antipathy toward it, either.” Thomas paused, then continued, self-deprecation clear in his tone, “I can only surmise that some deep-seated self-preservatory instinct would prefer I remain in relative comfort here, rather than expose myself to the vagaries of life in a world where many have every reason to loathe, if not hang, me.”

Roland’s gaze remained steady; Thomas could feel its weight—a weight that had grown over the last two years as Roland had matured into his priorship.

“There’s one thing,” Roland eventually said, “that you often seem to forget.”

When Roland didn’t immediately continue, Thomas met his gaze and arched his brows inquiringly.

“You are not the man that the world knew. Trust me, your death, as you call it, and your years here have ineradicably changed you.”

Thomas inclined his head. “Perhaps so, and perhaps that, in part, is what’s behind my reluctance to leave, to chance my hand in the wider world.”

Roland blinked. “I don’t follow.”

“Put simply, I don’t know who Thomas Glendower now is, and I don’t know how he’ll fare outside these walls.”

Roland’s lips curved in wry understanding. “That’s the challenge, isn’t it?”

Thomas arched his brows. “A part of it, I suppose. But I think you and I can be reasonably certain that amassing the fortitude to quit this place will be merely a prelude to my fated task.” A moment passed, then, more pensively, he concluded, “But to address that task, it’s now abundantly clear that I need to go forth and seek it, or, more likely, to allow it to find me.”

Chapter

1

March 1838

Lilstock Priory, Somerset

T
homas rode out through the gates with the sun glistening on the frosted grass and sparkling in the dewdrops decorating the still bare branches.

His horse was a pale gray he’d bought some months previously, when traveling with Roland on one of his visits to the abbey. Their route had taken them through Bridgewater, and he’d found the dappled gray there. The gelding was mature, strong, very much up to his weight, but also steady, a necessity given Thomas’s physical limitations; he could no longer be certain of applying sufficient force with his knees to manage the horse in stressful situations.

Silver—the novices had named him—was beyond getting stressed. If he didn’t like something, he simply stopped, which, in the circumstances, was entirely acceptable to Thomas, who harbored no wish whatever to be thrown.

His bones already had enough fractures for five lifetimes.

As Thomas rode down the road toward Bridgewater, he instinctively assessed his aches and pains. He would always have them, but, in general, they had sunk to a level he could ignore. That, or his senses had grown dulled, his nerves inured to the constant abrading.

He’d ridden daily over the last month in preparation for this journey, building up his strength and reassuring himself that he could, indeed, ride for the four or five days required to reach his destination.

The first crest in the road drew near, and a sense of leaving something precious behind tugged. Insistently.

Drawing rein on the rise, he wheeled Silver and looked back.

The priory sat, gray stone walls sunk into the green of the headland grasses, with the blue sky and the pewter of the Channel beyond. He looked, and remembered all the hours he’d spent, with Roland, with Geoffrey, with all the other monks who had accepted him without question or judgment.

They, more than he, had given him this chance—to go forth and complete his penance, and so find ultimate peace.

Courtesy of Drayton, he had money in his pocket, and in his saddlebags he had everything he would need to reach his chosen abode and settle in.

He was finally doing it, taking the first step along the road to find his fate.

In effect, surrendering himself to Fate, freely giving himself up to whatever lay in wait.

Thomas stared at the walls of the priory for a moment more, then, turning Silver, he rode on.

H
is way lay via Taunton, a place of memories, and of people who might, despite the disfigurement of his injuries, recognize him; he rode straight through and on, spending the night at the small village of Waterloo Cross before rising with the sun and continuing west.

Late in the afternoon on the fourth day after he’d ridden out from the priory, he arrived at Breage Manor. He’d ridden through Helston and out along the road to Penzance, then had turned south along the lane that led toward the cliffs. The entrance to the drive was unremarkable; a simple gravel avenue, it wended between stunted trees, then across a short stretch of rising open ground to end before the front door.

He’d bought the property years ago, entirely on a whim. It had appealed to him, and for once in his life he’d given into impulse and purchased it—a simple, but sound, gentleman’s residence in the depths of Cornwall. In all his forty-two years, it was the only house he’d personally owned, the only place he could imagine calling home.

A solid but unimaginative rectangular block constructed of local bricks in muted shades of red, ochre, and yellow, the house consisted of two stories plus dormers beneath a lead roof. The windows of the main rooms looked south, over the cliffs, to the sea.

As he walked Silver up the drive, Thomas scanned the house and found it the same as his memories had painted it. He hadn’t been back in years—many more than the five years he’d spent in the priory. The Gattings, the couple he’d installed as caretaker and housekeeper, had clearly continued to look after the house as if it were their own. The glass in the windows gleamed, the front steps were swept, and even from a distance the brass knocker gleamed.

Thomas halted Silver at the point where the track to the stable met the drive, but then, in deference to the old couple who he hadn’t informed of his impending arrival, he urged Silver nearer to the front steps and dismounted. Despite the damage to the left side of his face and his other injuries, the Gattings would recognize him, but he didn’t need to shock them by walking unheralded through the back door.

Or clomping, as the case would be.

Retrieving his cane from the saddle holder that the stable master at the priory had fashioned for it, then releasing Silver’s reins, Thomas watched as the big gray ambled a few steps off the drive and bent his head to crop the rough grass. Satisfied the horse wouldn’t stray much further, Thomas headed for the front door.

Gaining the small front porch, he was aware of tiredness dragging at his limbs—hardly surprising, given the distance he’d ridden, combined with the additional physical effort of having to cope with his injuries. But he was finally there—the only place he considered home—and now he could rest, at least until Fate found him.

The bell chain hung beside the door; grasping it, he tugged.

Deep in the house, he heard the bell jangling. Straightening, stiffening his spine, adjusting his grip on the silver handle of his cane, he prepared to meet Gatting again.

Footsteps approached the door, swift and light. Before he had time to do more than register the oddity, the door opened.

A woman stood in the doorway; she regarded him steadily. “Yes? Can I help you?”

He’d never seen her before. Thomas blinked, then frowned. “Who are you?”
Who the devil are you
were the words that had leapt to his tongue, but his years in the priory had taught him to watch his words.

Her chin lifted a notch. She was tallish for a woman, only half a head shorter than he, and she definitely wasn’t young enough—or demure enough—to be any sort of maid. “I rather think that’s my question.”

“Actually, no—it’s mine. I’m Thomas Glendower, and I own this house.”

She blinked at him. Her gaze didn’t waver, but her grip on the edge of the door tightened. After several seconds of utter silence, she cleared her throat, then said, “As I’m afraid I don’t know you, I will need to see some proof of your identity before I allow you into the house.”

He hadn’t stopped frowning. He tried to look past her, into the shadows of the front hall. “Where are the Gattings? The couple I left here as caretakers?”

“They retired—two years ago now. I’d been assisting them for two years before that, so I took over when they left.” Suspicion—which, he realized, had been there from the outset—deepened in her eyes. “If you really were Mr. Glendower, you would know that. It was all arranged properly with . . . your agent in London—he would have informed you of the change.”

She’d been smart enough not to give him the name. As she started to edge the door shut, he replied, with more than a touch of acerbity, “If you mean Drayton, he would not have thought the change of sufficient importance to bother me with.” With a brief wave, he indicated his damaged self. “For the last five years, I’ve been otherwise occupied.”

At least that served to stop her from shutting the door in his face. Instead, she studied him, a frown blooming in her eyes; her lips—quite nice lips, as it happened—slowly firmed into a thin line. “I’m afraid, sir, that, regardless, I will need some proof of your identity before I can allow you into this house.”

Try to see things from the other person’s point of view.
He was still having a hard enough time doing that with men; she was a woman—he wasn’t going to succeed. Thomas stared at her—and she stared back. She wasn’t going to budge. So . . . he set his mind to the task, and it solved it easily enough. “Do you dust in the library?”

She blinked. “Yes.”

“The desk in there—it sits before a window that faces the side garden.”

“It does, but anyone could have looked in and seen that.”

“True, but if you dust the desk, you will know that the center drawer is locked.” He held up a hand to stop her from telling him that that was often the case with such desks. “If you go to the desk and put your back to that drawer, then look to your right, you will see a set of bookshelves, and on the shelf at”—he ran his gaze measuringly over her—“about your chin height, on the nearer corner you will see a carriage clock. In the front face of the base of that clock is a small rectangular panel. Press on it lightly and it will spring open. Inside the hidden space, you will find the key to the center drawer of the desk. Open the drawer, and you will see a black-leather-covered notebook. Inside, on the first leaf, you will find my name, along with the date—1816. On the following pages are figures that represent the monthly ore tonnages cleared from the two local mining leases I then owned.” He paused, then cocked a brow at her. “Will that satisfy you as identification?”

Lips tight, she held his gaze steadily, then, with commendable calm, replied, “If you will wait here, I’ll put your identification to the test.”

With that, she shut the door.

Thomas sighed, then he heard a bolt slide home and felt affronted.

What did she think? That he might force his way in?

As if to confirm his incapacity, his left leg started to ache; he needed to get his weight off it for at least a few minutes or the ache would convert to a throb. Going back down the three shallow steps, he let himself down to sit on the porch, then stretched his legs out and leaned his cane against his left knee.

He hadn’t even learned her name, yet he still felt insulted that she might imagine he was any threat to her. How could she think so? He couldn’t even chase her. Even if he tried, all she would have to do would be to toss something in his path and he would trip and fall on his face.

Some people found disfigurement hard to look upon, but although she’d seen his scars, she’d hardly seemed to notice—she certainly hadn’t allowed him any leeway because of his injuries. And, in truth, he didn’t look that bad. The left side of his face had been battered, leaving his eyelid drooping, his cheekbone slightly depressed, and a bad scar across his jaw on that side, but the right side of his face had survived with only a few minor scars; that was why he’d been so sure the Gattings would know him on sight.

The rest of his body was a similar patchwork of badly scarred areas and those relatively unscathed, but all that was concealed by his clothes. His hands had survived well enough, at least after Roland had finished with them, to pass in all normal circumstances. The only obvious outward signs of his injuries were his left leg, stiff from the hip down, and the cane he needed to ensure he kept his balance.

He was trying to see himself through her eyes, and, admittedly, he was still capable sexually, but, really, how could she possibly see him as a threat?

He’d reached that point in his fruitless cogitations when he realized he was the object of someone’s gaze. Glancing to the right, he saw two children—a boy of about ten and a girl several years younger—staring at him from around the corner of the house.

As they didn’t duck back when he saw them, he deduced that they had a right to be there . . . and that they might well be the reason for his new housekeeper’s caution.

The little girl continued to unabashedly study him, but the boy’s gaze shifted to Silver.

Even from this distance and angle, Thomas saw the longing in the boy’s face. “You can pat him if you like. He’s oldish and used to people. He won’t bite or fuss.”

The boy looked at Thomas; his eyes, his whole face, lit with pleasure. “Thank you.” He stepped out from the house and walked calmly toward Silver, who saw him, but, as Thomas had predicted, the horse made no fuss and allowed the boy to stroke his long neck, which the lad did with all due reverence.

Thomas watched the pair, for, of course, the girl trailed after her brother; from their features, Thomas was fairly certain they were siblings, and related to his new housekeeper. He’d also noticed the clarity of the boy’s diction, and realized that it, too, matched that of the woman who had opened the door. Whoever they were, wherever they had come from, it wasn’t from around here.

“Nor,” Thomas murmured, “from any simple cottage.”

There could, of course, be many reasons for that. The role of housekeeper to a gentleman of Mr. Thomas Glendower’s standing would be an acceptable post for a lady from a gentry family fallen on hard times.

Hearing footsteps approaching on the other side of the door, rather more slowly this time, Thomas picked up his cane and levered himself back onto his feet. He turned to the door as the woman opened it. She held his black notebook in her hand, opened to the front page.

Rose looked out at the man who had told her what date she would find in the black-leather-covered notebook in her absent employer’s locked desk drawer—a drawer she knew had not been opened during all the years she’d been in the house. Hiding her inward sigh, she shut the book and used it to wave him in as she pulled the door wide. “Welcome home, Mr. Glendower.”