Now it was time to dress for dinner, and he still hadn’t appeared. Was something wrong?
He’d handled Kerenza with admirable aplomb. And he’d seemed happy to have his daughter to himself afterward. But had Morwenna overestimated his strength? He’d been so keyed up when he arrived. For Kerenza’s sake, he’d hidden his uncertainty. But that didn’t mean he’d taken everything in his stride.
Disquiet mounting, she went downstairs and checked the gardens and the stables—although he’d always been the least horsey of the Nashes, and without Kerenza’s company, she couldn’t imagine he’d linger there.
No Robert.
She came in through the kitchens where a tearful Mrs. Ballard poured out her pleasure at Robert’s return. Morwenna escaped at last, once she’d promised to bring Robert down to see her after dinner.
Which would be a fine arrangement, if only she could find him.
Evening turned into night, and she asked Mrs. Ballard to hold back dinner. Morwenna was becoming seriously worried, although common sense insisted her husband had just gone for a walk and mistaken the time.
Except she’d endured five years without him. It was too soon to trust a kind fate to leave him safely in her care.
Since he’d come back, she’d struggled not to weep and fawn and swoon over him. But by the time she climbed to the sprawling house’s attics, she felt hysterics might be justified.
It was pitch black under the roof, and her candle seemed to make the shadows loom blacker. Ballard ran the house like an admiral ran a ship, but even so, up here there was dust and the debris from generations of Nash occupation.
Morwenna sneezed, and looked around out of watering eyes. She’d been in this part of the house a couple of times, hunting out costumes for amateur theatricals. There were chests packed with extravagant gowns from last century. While the huge skirts struck her as bizarre, she’d sighed over the exquisite silks.
It was unlikely she’d discover Robert lurking up here. She’d only ventured up those narrow stairs as a last resort, because she couldn’t find him anywhere else.
The further she explored under the rafters, the darker it go
t. Clearly she was on a wild goose chase. Her husband was probably happily ensconced in Silas’s library, drinking Silas’s brandy and wondering where the devil his wife had got to.
“Well, you’re clearly not here,” she muttered in frustration to the absent Robert, when she bruised her shin on a wooden chest jutting out from the wall.
With a huff of irritation, she turned to leave. She was annoyed because she was frightened. Over the last two days, Robert had felt less and less like a stranger. But now with him out of her sight for so long, she couldn’t help remembering the half-mad vagabond who had barged into her engagement party.
Who knew what that man might do?
Then, as she took another step, something made her pause. Perhaps a barely audible catch of breath. Or a feeling that she wasn’t as alone as she’d thought.
Or perhaps that bone-deep awareness that lovers develop of each other’s presence.
“Robert?”
Was she losing her mind? Because surely he’d say something if he heard her approach. And given her clattering progress through the jumble, people in Liverpool would have heard her.
Anyway, what in the name of heaven would he be doing up here, all alone in the dark?
She raised her candle, sure she was imagining his presence. And revealed her husband sitting on a tin chest under a descending corner of the roof.
She was about to ask him what the devil he was playing at, until the light fell on his face.
“Oh, my dear...” she said on an escaping breath, while all her fragile hopes shriveled to nothing. Despair crashed down on her, turning her heart to lead.
What a naïve fool she was to imagine that he was on the road to recovery. After all he’d been through, a couple of days couldn’t possibly heal his wounds.
Especially a couple of days full of the shocks that these had contained. Her engagement. The spreading scandal. Negotiating with the Admiralty. News of a child. Meeting that child.
Even a man who hadn’t verged on breaking point would reel under such a barrage.
He leveled glassy black eyes on her. She wasn’t sure he saw her. His face was bone white, so the scar stood out like a raw brand. Between his elegant hands, he turned a toy wooden ship over and over.
She’d wondered at first if perhaps he was weeping for everything he’d suffered, everything he’d lost, everything he’d missed. But when she looked more closely, the fact that his eyes were dry made his desolation somehow worse.