She didn’t wish to share her exact destination with him. He supposed it hardly mattered where she went. He could have reached out and touched her pretty face, but there was already an insurmountable distance between them. Bewildering, how one could lie entwined, skin to skin, breathing each other’s breaths, only to become strangers again.
“Turas math dhut,” he said. “Safe travels.”
An emotion flickered in her eyes. Disappointment? But she graciously inclined her head. “Come, dear.” Lady Lucinda clasped her elbow, and Harriet made to follow her.
It tugged inside his chest, as though his heart was still leashed to hers. “Harriet.”
She turned back. “Yes?”
He took off his hat. “I am sorry.”
She bade her friend to wait. Now four pairs of eyes were staring at him. He only really saw one of them; he sank his own gaze into Harriet’s as if intent to reach her very soul.
“I am sorry,” he repeated. “And I’m sorry for not saying it out loud any sooner. I suppose voicing it would have meant admitting to some fault. To the injustice. And I wanted to keep you.”
Behind Harriet’s shoulder, Lady Lucinda snarled.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, “sorry that I kept you when I didn’t know how to care for you. The truth is, loving you took me by surprise. The way love feels ambushed me. It feels brutal. Like an unstoppable force. It demands to be accommodated, against reason, regardless of all that might have been before, and I had too little practice to master it well. I suppose I thought I could remain who I was, and still begin anew with you, but that was wrong. You did right, asking me to let go of Rutland. But I had lived with rage for so many years I saw it no longer; it was part of me, and had I let it go—well, you might as well have asked me to let go of my heart, or some other vital part, perhaps the legs I stand on.”
When he had reflected on whether he had anything to tell her before they would part, he had thought about his rage—the force that had given him so much: his wealth, the strength to persist when the odds were against him. It had occurred to him then that the emotion driving him hadn’t simply been rage—some of it had been hope, too. And perhaps much of it had been grief. Rage had been simpler, an emotion he knew and could name. Grief … grief would have implied that he was suffering. Vulnerable. An accursed feeling, like showing a pink underbelly to a world that was waiting to rip its claws across anything soft. And yet, much as his instinct was to protect and control what he loved, he had concluded that love itself demanded vulnerability. He never loved his wife more, or felt more able to express his love for her, than when she was under him, naked and soft, trustingly opening her most sensitive places to him. And she had looked at him with great tenderness when he had finally stepped back and let her go. He let her go. She was leaving. This, here, now, might be the last he’d see of her in years.
“I wanted to choose you,” he said hoarsely. “And I wish I could turn back time. Forgive me.”
She blinked, and tears fell from her lashes. “Lucian.”
Lady Lucinda tugged at Harriet’s arm.
“Hattie,” he said in a low murmur.
She shook off the commanding hand. She closed the distance to Lucian and rose to her toes. Vanilla scent brushed his nose, then her lips moved against his cold ear. “I have forgiven you,” she breathed. “And I do love you. Please remember that.”
She did not look back when descending the stairs on her friend’s arm, while he stood on the same spot long after her carriage had pulled away from the pavement and vanished in the London fray.
Chapter 36
April 1881, Southern France
Spring days in the Camargue had the same warm, treacle-slow feel as August afternoons in England. The classroom’s sheer linen curtains billowed lazily whenever the salt-infused breeze blew across the plain through the open windows. Summer here at Mytilene Ville would be sweltering hot.
She turned her attention back to her class. Fifteen expectant pairs of eyes were on her, an eclectic group of young and older women hailing from all corners of Europe was waiting for her next instruction.
She pointed at the blackboard. “Take a few minutes to copy the formula, please, then we shall have a discussion about the process.”
As fifteen pens scratched onward, her attention, almost habitually now, strayed to the nearest window again. The brown dirt road winding its way through the marshland was empty. It always was. The sun was high in the sky and the ponds below glittered like mirrors. Yes, sweltering. She would stay until the lavender fields were in bloom, then she’d move on to Paris, or perhaps Italy. Or perhaps, Scotland.