Yet he had never wanted to come back here.
'What was Albert like?' she asked.
'The perfect son,' he said. 'He learned all there was to learn from my uncle and helped him with estate business whenever he was allowed. He adored his mother and was attentive to his sisters. He excelled at his studies in school and at university. He was an active member of the church and contributed to every charity that arose. He frequently intervened with his mother on my behalf.'
'I would have hated him,' Freyja said fervently.
He laughed softly. 'Yes,' he agreed, 'I believe you would.'
'And yet,' she said, 'you were always quarreling with him? You told us so at Lindsey Hall.'
'Of course,' he said. 'Badness usually does not appreciate goodness, Free. I was very, very bad. And Albert was very, very good. He frequently lectured me on goodness, and I just as frequently told him what he could do with his lectures.'
His voice was full of his usual careless laughter. It was a mask behind which he hid all the darker shadows of his life, Freyja realized. She had wondered before if the mask hid nothing at all or something. She knew the answer now, though she had not yet penetrated those shadows. She did not want to either. She wanted to be able to remember Josh as a light flirt who during one memorable night had become more to her. She did not want to feel any regrets, any pull of darker memories of a person who might have been worth knowing.
They had walked around another bend in the path. The hillside rose above them here in an almost sheer cliff, and they were again sheltered from the wind. They stopped walking, and Joshua leaned over to rest his elbows on the wall and gaze downward. The moonlight lit his profile. He was smiling.
'If you hated life so much here,' she asked him, 'why did you stay so long? You left here five years ago. You must already have been-what? Two or three and twenty?'
'Three,' he said. 'I left Penhallow when I was eighteen. I went to live in Lydmere.' He nodded his head in the direction of the village. 'I apprenticed myself to a carpenter and learned the trade. I was good at it too. I would have made a decent living from it. I was happy enough, and would have continued to be, I believe.'
It was a strange thought that Lady Freyja Bedwyn would never have met Joshua Moore, carpenter, from the Cornish village of Lydmere and would have been unaware of his existence even if their paths had somehow crossed. They would have been from different worlds.
'But then Albert died and you became the heir to all this,' she said, 'and everything changed.'
'Yes.' He turned his head to look at her, a strangely mocking smile on his lips. 'And then I became Hallmere and could aspire to the hand of a duke's daughter even if only in a fake betrothal. Life is strange, would you not agree?'
But he still had not explained why he had left.
Freyja remembered something then, something she had not particularly noticed at the time. He could no longer remember what he and Albert had quarreled about in the boat on the night Albert died, Joshua had told her family back at Lindsey Hall. How could he not remember? Considering how that night had turned out, surely every last detail must be etched on his memory.
But she would not ask. She really did not want to know-though that was becoming rather a thin argument even in the privacy of her own thoughts.
'Did you not come to Penhallow at all during the years when you were living in the village?' she asked.
'I came once every week on my half-day off from work,' he said. 'I came to see Prue.'
'Poor girl,' Freyja said. 'Her mother is not at all fond of her, is she?'
'One need never use the word poor to describe Prue,' he said. 'We tend to view those with physical and mental abilities different from the norm as pitiful creatures with handicaps or disabilities. We talk about cripples and idiots. We view them from our own limited perspective. I once knew a blind person whose sense of wonder at the world put my own limited perceptions to shame. Prue is happy and bubbling over with love-both attributes that many of us allow to lapse with our childhoods. In what sense is she disabled? Or handicapped? Or poor?'
He spoke with an intensity that made him seem unfamiliar to her for a moment. He had been kind and patient with the girl all afternoon as well as during dinner, with no sense of martyrdom or boredom or condescension. Prue had not been the only one brimming over with love. Joshua had reminded her rather strongly of Eve, whom Aidan fondly described as a woman with a bleeding heart and a fondness for lame ducks. Their house was filled with servants whom no one else would employ for one reason or another, including a truly ferocious ex-convict of a housekeeper who would cheerfully die for Eve and whom Freyja admired enormously.
'Perhaps now you have returned,' she said, 'you will decide to stay-once this nonsense your aunt has been hatching has been cleared up, that is. You would have to have her move elsewhere, of course, but she cannot have been left destitute.'
'She has not been,' he said. 'But she will continue to live here. I will not.'
And yet if she were in his place, Freyja thought, she would have to have the satisfaction of ousting the marchioness from Penhallow, of stripping from her all that was not rightfully hers. Even if she did not choose to live here herself, she would not allow the other woman to do so instead. She would enjoy the satisfaction of wreaking some revenge.
But it was none of her business what Joshua did or did not do. He was none of her business.
'A quiet hillside on a starry night,' he said, 'with the moonlight dancing on the surface of the sea. And a gorgeous woman at my side. Whatever am I about, holding a polite conversation with her and simply admiring the view? I must be losing my touch-and would quickly lose my reputation too if anyone could see me at it.' He straightened up from the wall and turned to grin at her.
'You may imagine, if you will,' she said, 'that my maid is standing a few feet off.'
He chuckled softly. 'But Aidan said you did not need a chaperone,' he reminded her.
'Because Aidan trusted you,' she said, 'and because he thinks we are betrothed.'
