Romance: Detective Romance: A Vicious Affair (Victorian Regency Intrigue 19th England Romance) (Historical Mystery Detective Romance) (51 page)

“I will be dead soon, sister,” Isaac said. “I will be dead and there will be nothing for you. Nothing.”

Isaac had walked into the library, looked at the ruined chair, bent down and brushed away the debris, and then sat upon it. Miles sat opposite, where he had sat when Lilla left. Lilla couldn’t sit. She was too full of energy, too full of pain and shock and a hundred other emotions which she couldn’t identify. She paced up and down, from shelf to shelf, gripping her hands together.

“You know as well as I do that Father left us with very little,” Isaac went on. “What you perhaps do not know is that my physician bills have almost completely exhausted the rest of our income. We are on the brink of destitution, Lilla. When I die, you will be left with nothing. You will be alone and lost.”

“Why would you even want this, Miles?” Lilla snapped. “You ran away from me, if you do not remember. You fled through the crowd like you were fleeing a leper.”

She couldn’t stop pacing. She felt like a woman about to run a race. She wished she could tear this cumbersome, heavy dress asunder and walk freely. The library was so small, the walls so close, the dress so constricting. All of it combined made her feel as though she was in a cage.

“I love you, Lilla.”

He said it matter-of-factly, like it was obvious and she shouldn’t even have needed to ask the question. But it wasn’t obvious, not to her. The only thing that was obvious to her was that he had run away.

“Please,” Isaac said. “Let him explain.”

He coughed again, leaning forward, his throat sounding like razorblades were being pulled out of him.

“There is nothing to explain—”

“Please!” Isaac wheezed. “Just—please.”

Lilla sighed and walked around to the side of the table. With an effort, she forced her fists to unclench. The manic energy was still in her body, but she forced her limbs to be still. Her lip trembled and she thought she might shout or cry. Only Isaac’s pitiful appearance stopped her. Her dying brother had asked something of her.
What sort of woman would I be if I denied that?

“Fine,” she said. “Fine. Explain.”

There was a pause in which the three of them regarded each other, three actors in this private drama, only yards away from an elite party. Then Miles’ forehead creased. She had to resist the old urge to smooth the crease with her thumb, as she had done when they were lovers. Images flitted through her mind: her hands in his hair; his naked body standing at the window, the muscles in his legs and back taut and tense; his lips upon her gloveless hand. She forced the images away. She could not feel tenderness for this man. She
would
not. She knew where that led.

“I went to war, Lilly—Lilla.”

Lilly
. Every time he said it she felt a stab of recollection. It was like smelling a flower one associated with a particular poignant childhood memory. Every time one smelt the flower, one invariably conjured up the memory. Lilly was her flower, and Miles was her memory. But she did not want it.
Liar
, a voice whispered. She pushed the voice and the memory away. She was angry, she told herself. That was all.

“I was planning on going over to fight Napoleon in the last month of our courtship. I couldn’t bring myself to tell you. I was so in love and we were so young and everything was happening so fast. No, please, let me finish.”

Lilla’s fingers tapped the desk. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and then nodded. “Go on, then,” she said.

He interlocked his fingers. It was an old gesture, one she recognized intimately. He was as full of emotion as her, that gesture told her. “I kept hearing stories about the war,” he said. “Horrible stories of men being slaughtered. You know how it was back then. Boys younger than I was then were going over there and being slaughtered. I desperately needed to go. I felt it in my soul. But I could not leave you. I was torn, and soon, I knew, I would be ripped apart by my indecision. And then that fire came. Do you remember? Of course you do. Yes, of course you do. It was like a sign from god.

“I went up the stairs and saved the boy. And then I returned to the room we had shared. When I got there you were bleeding from the mouth, and you were unconscious. I threw you over my shoulder and carried you from the inn. I left you with some women to tend you. And I fled. Yes, I fled. I fled because I knew if I waited for you to wake up, I would never join the war. The day after the fire, I left for France. I returned two weeks ago.”

Lilla didn’t want to believe this story. She wanted to push it aside, to name it as lies. She wanted to tell herself that it was a vicious trick. Hating him would have been easier then. Justifying her anger would have been easier. Tolerating this rage was difficult when Miles looked at her with such open, honest eyes, when his reasoning was something with which she could empathize. She did believe it, though. Everything he said was something the Miles she had known four years ago would have done. Isaac’s somber face and his slight nod when she looked to him confirmed it. He was telling the truth.

“You could have written to me,” she said. “You say you could not tell me, that it would have caused you to stay. Fine. I have my problems with that but fine. But what stopped you from writing me after?”

“War,” Miles said. “Just war.Blood and pain and death.I was in no state to write to anybody. I was consumed with day-to-day survival.”

The pain of memory in his voice called out to something deep within Lilla. She felt the old urge to wrap her arms around him when he was sad, to make everything better with the warmth of her body, to lift his spirits with a well-placed kiss. All of these old urges rose within her. The mad energy within her quieted, and she no longer the need to drum her fingers
upon
the desk.

But she couldn’t forgive him. The realization rose as though from a mist, and then struck her. She understood him, she empathized with him, but she couldn’t forgive him. Perhaps it was selfish, but the pain she had felt was too stark in her memory. It was knife-sharp, and cut her every time she thought about it.

“I cannot marry you,” she said.

“Lilla, think what you say,” Isaac said. “We are poor. Yes, we are. I am not asking you to love him again. But you know him. And he knows you. He loved you, even if you don’t—”
The cough
cut him short. His body shivered and blood and mucus sprayed the handkerchief. He inspected the dirty piece of cloth with dreadful eyes. “I will be dead soon,” he muttered. “The physicians have told me as much. I cannot force you, Lilla. But please, make the right choice.”

“We are both scarred, Lilla,” Miles said.

“I do not see a scar,” Lilla replied, pointing at his face. For a moment her hand was inches from him. To reach out, to touch his cheek, to run her thumb along his lower lip as she had done countless times before, in what seemed like a different life . . . But no. The pain of desertion was stronger within her than the happiness of reunion.

“I have my fair share,” he said. “On my back and my belly. But that is not what I meant. I am scarred in here.” He touched the place on his jacket under which his heart beat. She had rested her head on that chest and listened to that heartbeat before. She had fallen asleep to that heartbeat.

“Let me think
on
it,” Lilla said. “Give me that, at least.”

“Of course.”

The three of them rose. “Write to me, as soon as you have made your decision,” Miles said. His gait had changed from before the war. He carried himself like a soldier now. She had not noticed before because he had been sitting and then standing still, but he walked with the measured steps of an officer. He stopped at the door and turned. “Lilly, please say yes. I can win your love again. I know I can.”

Lilla didn’t say anything. He waited for her to speak, his eyebrows raised, but she only looked down at the floor. With a sigh he left. Lilla slumped into the chair he had been sitting in. It was still warm from his body, and for a moment she felt close to him. The closeness filled her with warmth even as it filled her with shard-like memories: memories that sliced.

“He is your best chance,” Isaac said.

“My best chance of what, brother?” Lilla asked, unable to keep the exhaustion from her voice. For four years she had been like a windmill, trundling along but feeling nothing. Now the emotion had exploded with her, and it exhausted her.

“Your best chance of making it,” Isaac answered.

Part Two – The Marriage

1

Four months later.

Lady Lilla Sawley sat at the window of the library and watched as November snow blanketed the garden. Her mind was in the past today, in the crypts of pain and love and fear that haunted her dreams. She remembered Isaac, only three months ago, ill but alive. And then the cough had taken him. He had moved into The Sawley estate with Lilla and Miles. A maidservant had told them. Lilla had received the news with odd numbness. She loved her brother, but she had expected it. Everybody had expected it. At the funeral, she hadn’t wept. Only when in her bedroom, with the doors bolted, had she given herself to tears.

The wedding had been quick and formal. The vicar had muttered his words, and then they were leaving, man and wife. Lilla had wanted to flee the church as soon as she entered it, but common sense had prevailed. Miles, at least, was not a brute. He would not hurt her. He would see that she was cared for. He was also the man that had broken her heart and deserted her all those years ago. That was the trade she made.

She and her husband were not close. As the months waned, Lilla found it more and more difficult to start anew, to wipe clean the memory of his retreating body, eager to desert her, desperate to get away from her. When she studied herself in the looking glass, it was difficult to feel anything but anger and betrayal when she regarded the crescent-shaped scar. Life had tossed her up, battered her, thrown her about. And she had landed as the wife or Lord Miles Sawley, her old lover. Sometimes, she would wake in the early morning, and for a breath of a moment she would not believe it. And then she would remember, and the anger would surface. It would have been simple if anger was all she felt. But there was something else under the anger, cushioning it. It was not happiness. It was more subtle, less warm, but still there. It was the potential for happiness.

She sighed and rose from the chair. The book she had been reading lay face down on the desk. Her body ached from sitting so long. She stretched her arms and wiggled her legs.

She turned swiftly when he cleared his throat.

“Lilly,” he said.

She flinched. He had been calling her by her lover’s name ever since they were married. She resented it even as she adored it. A potent brew of conflicted emotions bubbled up within her every time he said the name. It brought hundreds of memories, each of them tinged with pain even as they filled her transient pleasure.

“Miles,” she muttered. “How long have you been watching me?”

“I just arrived,” he said. A small smile touched his lips. It was the smile he had given her after their first kiss. Everything about him reminded her of the past. That would have been lovely, if it had not also included the fire. “I didn’t expect to see you stretching, however.”

Lilla blushed. The implication hung in the air. How many times had she stretched with him, but in different, heated circumstances? How many times had her body writhed under him, or atop him? She had given her honor to this man. The thought caused remembered pleasure to move through her for a moment.

Then the fire, bright, painful, forced away the pleasure.

“What do you want, my lord?” she said.

“I want you to walk with me in the gardens, Lilly.”

“And why would I do that?”

“Because we are husband and wife, and we never spend time together.”

His voice was strong, but there was a note of desperation in it. He was trying to hide it, but it was there. Lilla felt for him, even as she tried to discard the feeling. She wanted to make him happy, she realized. She wanted to make them both happy. But it wasn’t as easy as that.

She sighed. “I can’t make myself into who I was back then, Miles,” she said, using his Christian name because
my lord
made him flinch as though she struck her. It was too distant, and he wanted the two of them to be close again. “I wish I could reverse time and make it so we were who we were, but I cannot.”

“Just walk with me,” he said. “That is all I ask. Please.”

Lilla sighed again. The atmosphere between them had shifted these past months. Before, it had been one of combat, of war. She had wanted to tear his eyes out every time she saw him. She couldn’t look
upon
him without seeing his retreating figure, without feeling the sting of abandonment. But that had waned as he had persisted, and had demonstrated to her that he would not leave her again. Even when she avoided him, he sought her out. He was trying. Now the atmosphere was that of a man carrying a heavy burden, trying manfully to pull it up a hill. Lilla was self-aware to know that she was the burden which troubled her husband. He was trying to pull her forward with him, to soothe that which had burnt for the past four years.

She interlocked her fingers, drummed her forefinger onto the back of the opposite hand. His sky-blue eyes were open and loving. They pulled Lilla in. She sighed a third time. “Okay, I will walk with you. But do not think that I have forgiven you.” The last words came out harshly, with a bite in them.

Miles nodded slowly. “Will you ever forgive me, do you think?”

Lilla shrugged. “I honestly cannot say.”

It was the truth. She could feel the emotions within her with naked brilliancy, but judging whether or not they would still exist at some nebulous time in the future was more difficult. All she knew was the pain and the confused affection and the regret and the timid love that she felt now and had felt for years. It was not an easy thing to make sense of so much turmoil.

“I will still try,” Miles said. “I will never stop trying to make you love me again.”

Part of me still does love you,
she thought but did not say.