‘You said this morning that you hoped only for friendship. But you might have said that just to win me round. So that we have no misunderstanding, I must make it clear that I cannot love you.’
‘How many marriages insist on love?’ He poured himself more wine. ‘I might, in time, aspire to your affection. Does that terrify you? As for the rest…’ He nodded over his shoulder at the bed. ‘I’ve put all that behind me.’
Their eyes met briefly. She sighed.
‘I want you to be certain,’ he said.
‘I do have one other condition.’
Wentworth looked at her sharply, then raised his eyebrows in good-humoured question.
‘I know I have no right to impose any conditions at all…’
‘It has never been your unassuming meekness for which I admired you.’
She blinked at the idea that he had admired her at all, then plunged onwards. ‘I must know who you are.’
The good humour vanished. His face set into thin, tight lines. ‘I said I used to be a soldier. Is that not enough?’
‘No. I need to know if Philip Wentworth is your true name. Will I truly be Mistress Wentworth, or should my name be something else? What sort of adventurer were you? Why did you bury yourself here?’
He shook his head.
‘I beg the truth from you as a wedding gift.’
‘I can’t give it.’
‘I swear that nothing you tell me will change my mind about the marriage, but you must see that I need to know more of the man I will be living with.’
‘Live with the man I am now. That other one has nothing to do with you.’
‘It was only the promise of making his acquaintance that got me down from the roof.’
Wentworth closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead.
‘Can’t you see that the more you refuse, the more necessary it becomes for you to tell me?’ She stood up and handed him her empty glass. ‘Otherwise I retract my acceptance. How can I pledge myself, even in friendship, to a man so vile that he can’t confess what he has done even to his own wife? If you can’t tell me more, then you should never have confessed anything at all!’
Philip Wentworth shook his head again, but this time with wry humour. ‘Caught in my own snare.’ He crossed the room to set their glasses on his worktable, where he stood for several moments with his back to her. ‘Is your condition absolute?’ he asked without turning around. ‘Will you really retract if I don’t agree? Think what that means and take your time in answering.’ He leaned his weight onto his clenched fists and waited.
‘Would you still help me to die, as you first promised?’
‘Yes.’
She shut her eyes. After a long while, she said, ‘It is absolute.’ Watery knees tipped her back into her chair.
‘I was merely a soldier, as I said. Nothing more. But it’s not a world a man wants to share with women.’
‘Master Wentworth,’ she begged, ‘please understand! All my life, the things I did not know and could not expect have always brought me the greatest grief.’
‘You have nothing to fear from me.’
‘That may be, but I have learned to fear ignorance more than I fear death. I can’t bear knowing that I don’t know and waiting for something to happen that I can’t see coming. I can’t bear what I imagine. And that’s the truth.’ She blew out a deep breath. ‘Reasonable or not.’
He turned and studied her with a slightly chilly expression. She saw no trace in either his eyes or bearing of the genial old hermit who had proposed marriage.
How far we have already moved, she thought, even from where we were on the riverbank.
‘I can’t go on living on any other terms.’ She looked at him pleadingly.
‘What if I said that I was lying, up there on the roof? That I had nothing to confess? No other life than the one you see?’
‘I would know that you are lying now.’
This answer seemed to please rather than anger him. He eyed her a moment longer. ‘Concedo,’ he said at last. He held his arms out to the side like a defeated swordsman exposing his front to his foe. ‘I accept your terms. You shall have your gift of truth, on our wedding night.’
Scalding relief told her how much she had wanted him to agree.
‘But in return I have one condition of my own.’ He crossed back to the fire. ‘Stand up again so I can see your face in the firelight.’ He took her hand to help her rise. ‘I, for my part, cannot live with uncertainty. You must lay down the sword you have just threatened me with and swear that so long as I live and you are married to me, you will never again threaten to take your own life.’ He held both hands now. ‘Look at me and swear.’
She nodded. ‘Why would I want to?’
‘Swear,’ he repeated.
‘I swear.’
‘So we’re agreed at last?’
Zeal could now only nod wordlessly. The relative simplicity of the choice between life and death was reshaping itself into something more subtle and infinitely more complex.
I should tell him about the seven years, she thought. And that John will be sending for me.
But those complications were beyond her at this moment.
‘I shall speak to Doctor Bowler tomorrow,’ Wentworth said. ‘And seek Sir Richard’s advice on how best to obtain a special licence. I see no need to delay by posting banns if we can avoid it, do you? The sooner we can wed, the better for the babe.’
Rather than make the long walk back to High House at that hour, she made herself a nest among the ledgers and piles of salvage in the Hawkridge Estate office. Then she curled up under a smoky quilt on a feather bed that smelt of wet hen, still trying to comprehend what had just happened.
She did not have to kill herself, after all. She was to be married again. The Hawkridge Hermit had agreed to open himself to her like a gift. For the first time since his proposal that morning, it occurred to her that the balance of power between them might not tilt entirely in his favour. That thought made her like him even better. Nothing he might tell her would make her dislike him now.
She turned onto her side and wrapped her arms tenderly around her belly. John sat at his table in the office – the table she now used – his face serious and intent, acorn-coloured hair falling over one dark, fierce eyebrow. One foot was tucked back under the stool. The other was stretched under the table, showing the long elegant line of his thigh. She lay fondly watching his ghost. For such a gentle, schooled man, he looked deceptively like a pirate. He glanced up and smiled, then bent his head again.
Our child can live, after all, she told him. I no longer have to pretend it isn’t there.
She no longer needed to keep the door of her heart locked against it.
When she looked at the table again, John had gone. But she still felt him in the air around her. In the child.
We shall manage somehow.
She drifted, saw herself waking on a summer morning in bed with John, their babe kicking its feet, as warm and fragrant as a kitten between them. Though of course the child would be older by then. In her dream, Philip Wentworth was the child’s grandfather.
She woke the next morning with a sense of startled well-being. It was all still true. She did not have to die. She was to marry Master Wentworth instead. Soon