“I should go back to the house,” she said, her smile fading, “and leave you here in peace.”
It was what he wanted, surely. It was what he had come in search of. He certainly had not come here looking for her. And yet…
“Shall we stroll together for a while?” he suggested.
He realized suddenly what it was he had most admired about her last evening-and she was doing it again today. She was looking directly into his face. Most people, he had observed, either did not look quite at him at all or else focused their eyes on his left ear or his left shoulder. With most people he felt the urge to turn his head slightly to the side so that they would not have to be repulsed quite so badly. He did not feel that urge with her, though she had run from him at first.
She might be repulsed by him, he thought-and how could she not be?-but she was displaying unusual courtesy in her dealings with him. He was grateful to her.
“Yes.” Her gaze dropped to his top boots and she smiled again. “Shall I come onto the dry sand?”
But he walked deliberately onto the wet sand and fell into step beside her.
They strolled in silence for a while. He watched the sun sparkle off the water and felt the light breeze against his left cheek. He breathed in the salt warmth of the air and had the feeling that had assaulted him more and more of late-the feeling of home. He had come here to this particular corner of Wales five years ago because Kit’s return home from the wars and marriage to Lauren had made it impossible for him to remain at Alvesley, a mere younger son clinging to his family because he was too broken to step out into the world on his own account. He had come here as Bewcastle’s steward and had concentrated all his energies upon doing the job twice as well as a two-armed man might have done it. He had felt like an alien, though. And he had been treated for some time as something of an outcast. He had known that people found it hard to be in company with him, to look at him.
But he had persevered. And sometime during the past year or two he had come to understand that a force beyond himself had had a hand in bringing him here-in bringing him home. Fate, perhaps.
He had not yet broached the subject of Ty Gwyn with Bewcastle. But he would. He must. He needed his own home here.
His awareness of the woman beside him was almost a pleasant thing. She had not been forced to walk beside him. She might easily have said no.
“Do you ever feel lonely?” she asked him suddenly and abruptly. And then, as he turned his head to look down at her in some surprise, she looked at him in apparent dismay. “I am so sorry. Sometimes I think aloud.”
Because he was maimed and ugly and lived in what she must see as a remote corner of civilization? His first reaction was anger. She really was no different from anyone else after all. Why had he imagined that perhaps she was?
“Do you?” He threw the question back at her.
She looked away from him again. She had dropped the hem of her dress, he noticed. She held her shoes and her bonnet with both hands behind her back.
“I live at a girls’ school,” she said. “I scarcely have a minute to myself. I have my son to fill every spare moment while he is awake. And I have dear friends among the teachers, particularly Miss Martin herself and Susanna Osbourne, who is also resident at the school. I correspond frequently with another friend who used to teach there. She is now the Countess of Edgecombe. How could I be lonely?”
“But are you?” he asked her.
He knew suddenly that she was, that she had asked her question, not out of morbid curiosity, but out of her own loneliness. Perhaps she had recognized in him a kindred spirit. And perhaps he had recognized the same in her. He knew she was lonely, incredible as it seemed. How could such a beautiful woman be lonely? But she was an unwed mother.
“I am not even sure what loneliness is,” she said. “If it is not literally being solitary, is it the fear of solitude, of being alone with oneself? I feel no such fear. I like being alone.”
“What do you fear, then?” he asked her.
She glanced briefly at him and smiled, a fragile expression that spoke for itself even before she found words.
“Never finding myself again,” she said after a minute or two of silence, during which he thought that perhaps she would not answer at all.
“Have you lost yourself, then?” he asked softly.
“I am not sure,” she said. “I have tried to be the best mother I can possibly be. I have tried somehow to be both mother and father to David. If he grows up to be happy and productive, I will be happy too. But what will I discover about myself when he leaves me as he inevitably must, first to go to school and then to live his own adult life? Will I discover an empty black hole that is seventeen or eighteen years wide and deep? And what on earth am I talking about? I have never said these things to anyone else. I have not even allowed myself to think them.”
“Sometimes,” he said, “it is easier to confide in a sympathetic stranger than in a friend or relative.”
“Is that what you are?” She glanced at him again and he noticed that her face had caught the sun and would be unfashionably bronzed for a while.
“A sympathetic stranger?” he said. “Yes. And have you noticed that people will admit to almost any vice or shortcoming before they will admit to loneliness? It is as if there were something rather shameful in the condition.”
“I am lonely,” she said quickly and rather breathlessly. “Terribly lonely. And yes, it does seem shameful. It also seems ungrateful. I have my son.”
“Who is busy forging his own life in company with other children,” he said.
“A dreadful thing just happened,” she said in a rush. “It is why I was walking here alone. Everyone was leaving the beach, and without thinking I held out my hand to take David’s-I sometimes forget he is no longer an infant. He said, ‘Oh, Mama!’ and dashed off to walk with Joshua, who ruffled his hair and set a hand on his shoulder and talked to him even though his own son was riding on his shoulders. Neither of them meant to be cruel-Joshua had not even seen what had happened. It was ridiculous of me to feel hurt. There were any number of other children and other adults to whom I might have attached myself for the walk back to the house. But I felt very alone and very frightened. How can I compete for my son’s affections with other children and men who are willing to give him their attention? And why would I want to? I am glad for him. And I hate my own pettiness.”
Ah, yes, Sydnam thought, he had been very wrong about her. Her beauty counted for nothing in the life that had been mapped out for her and that was slowly and inexorably changing as her son grew older. He wondered briefly about the man who had fathered her child. What had happened to him? Why had she not married him? More to the point, perhaps, why had he not married her?
“No one,” he said decisively, “can or ever will be able to compete with you, Miss Jewell. You are the boy’s mother. He relies upon you for love and comfort and support and security and approval. And in some ways he always will. No one could ever replace my own mother in my heart for the things I look for from her. But a mother-son relationship is not a coequal one, is it? He is lonely with only you just as you are lonely with only him.”
“But I have my friends,” she protested.
“I do too,” he told her. “I have been here for five years and have made friends, some of them quite close, on whom I can call at any time and with whom I can talk comfortably on any subject under the sun. I have a family in Hampshire-mother, father, brother, sister-in-law-who love me dearly and would do anything in the world for me.”
She had not mentioned family of her own, he noticed-except her son.
“But you are lonely?”
“But I am lonely,” he admitted, turning his head so that he could see the sun shining on the cliff face, making it more silver than gray, and on the deep blue sky above.
He did not believe he had ever said those words aloud before-even to himself. But they were, of course, starkly true.
“Thank you,” she said unexpectedly. She drew breath as if to say something else, but she did not speak.
Thank you? And yet he felt a certain gratitude to her too. She had asked if he was lonely and then admitted her own loneliness and given him a glimpse into the insecurities of her life. She had bound them in the common human experience of pain and uncertainty, as if there were nothing peculiar and pathetic about his own.
So many people saw him as an object of pity that it had always taken more than usual fortitude not to pity himself-and he had not always been successful, especially at the beginning. He did not pity himself in his loneliness. It was just a fact of his life to which he had adjusted-if one ever adjusted to loneliness.
“I had better go back,” she said. “After I have been away from David for an hour or two, my heart yearns for him-and what a foolish way of expressing myself. Thank you for walking with me, Mr. Butler. This has been a pleasant half hour.”
“Perhaps,” he said, “if your son is well occupied with the other children and you feel somewhat uncomfortable with being a houseguest here, you would care to walk with me again some other time, Miss Jewell. Perhaps…Well, never mind.” He felt suddenly, horribly embarrassed.
“I would,” she said quickly.
“Would you?” He stopped and turned to look at her, deliberately presenting her with a full-face view of himself. “Tomorrow, perhaps? At the same time? Do you know where I live? The cottage?”
“The pretty thatched one close to the gates?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he said. “Will you walk that way tomorrow?”
“Yes,” she said.
They looked at each other, and he noticed her teeth sinking into her lower lip.