had his life been like during those five years? They had moved about a great deal from place to place, he had also told her. But had he found a measure of contentment, even happiness? Had she? He had said she had fallen into a depression after Tobias's birth. Had it been endless? Or just occasional?
How difficult her moods must have made his life!
Had her death devastated him? Or had there been some sense of release?
But she had been his son's /mother/. She had died only four months or so ago – very recently. Perhaps he was still grief-stricken.
She could not ask him about those years. Not yet. Perhaps never. She did not believe she would ever be ready to talk with him about Crispin. Some things belonged to one's own heart. 'But I /am/ coming home again, after all,' he said. 'You are right, it seems, Maggie. There always is something beyond the darkness.' 'When will your son arrive?' she asked him. 'Tomorrow,' he said, 'if there are no unexpected delays.' She turned one of her hands beneath his and clasped it. 'There is the prospect of plenty more light to come, then,' she said. 'Yes.' She had not told her family about the child. She had noticed that he did not mention him to his mother or grandfather either, though she had been present when he explained to them exactly why he had run off with Mrs.
Turner the night before his wedding to the present Mrs. Pennethorne.
His mother had hugged him hard and shed copious tears. She had assured him that she would not say a word to anyone since Graham was seated beside her now and therefore already knew – although it was going to be /extremely/ difficult not to give Randolph Turner a very large piece of her mind the next time she saw him and not to say a thing or two to Caroline Pennethorne the next time she saw /her/.
His grandfather, when they had called upon him later, had frowned fiercely and pursed his lips and harrumphed and told Duncan he was a damned fool. But Margaret had not been deceived for one moment. His eyes beneath the shaggy white brows had been suspiciously bright. 'The village,' Duncan said quietly now from beside her – his hand had tightened about hers.
She could see through the window on his side that the road curved around a wide bend, following the line of a river, and that around the bend there was a cluster of red-brick cottages and a church spire rising from among them. Trees had been planted on either side of the river.
And then the carriage followed the curve, and they lost sight of the buildings for a few minutes until they were among the cottages and approaching a village green. They drove along one side of it.
They passed the church and, next to it, a thatched and whitewashed public house and inn. The publican, wearing a long white apron, was standing outside brushing off the step with a broom. He raised a hand in greeting after peering curiously into the carriage and seeing who was within. Three children at play on the green stopped to gawk and then went streaking off in three different directions, presumably to tell their mothers that a grand carriage was passing through the village.
And then the carriage turned between two high wrought-iron gates, which stood open, and onto a tree- shaded driveway. Almost immediately the wheels rumbled over a bridge as it crossed the river.
Margaret turned to look at Duncan.
He was looking back, his eyes dark, his face inscrutable.
He had not been here for six years. When he had planned during the past four months to return here, he had not intended to bring a wife. But he was not the only one whose plans had gone awry during the past three weeks.
Oh, goodness, three weeks ago they had not even met each other. Three weeks ago she had been planning to accept an offer from the Marquess of Allingham. 'Take comfort,' she said, 'from the thought that it took Odysseus something like twenty-eight years to get home to Ithaca after the Trojan War.' 'A sobering thought,' he said. And there was that smile lurking deep in his eyes as it had on a few previous occasions. 'Look out /your/ window.' At first there were only the tall trunks of ancient trees to look at and thick undergrowth between. And then, as the carriage moved out of the woods, she saw a wide, tree-dotted lawn sloping upward to a house on the crest of the hill – a large mansion of mellow red stone and long windows and a gabled roof with a pillared portico and what looked like marble steps leading up to double doors. And a stable block to one side, a little farther down the slope, and a flower garden at the other side – a riot of color flowing down the slope to the river, which looped around behind the hill and the house.
It was, Margaret thought, one of the prettiest houses and parks she had ever seen.
And it was home. /She/ was home. /They/ were.
Duncan's clasp on her hand was almost painful.
Neither of them spoke.
If he had come alone, as he had intended, Duncan thought, he would have prowled about the house, looking for what was familiar, what was not, trying to recapture the presence of his father in the library, of his mother in the morning room and drawing room, standing at the window of his old bedchamber, looking down the steep slope behind the house to the river and across it to the wide, straight, laburnum-shaded grass avenue, which ended with the summer house and views of fields and meadows and woods in every direction. He would perhaps have strolled along the portrait gallery, viewing the old family portraits through adult eyes.
He would have spent the evening slouched in a chair, perhaps in the drawing room, more probably in the library, reading a book.
Reveling in the feeling of being home where he belonged.
At last.
It had been a long, weary exile – much of it self-imposed. He had gone away to sow some wild oats, and he had stayed away because he had stepped past the invisible but nonetheless real boundary between wild oats and that barren land that stretched beyond the pale. For five years he had yearned to be here with a gnawing ache of longing.
Oh, he might have paid a visit now and then, he supposed. But there had been no leaving Laura, even with the Harrises, whom she knew and trusted. A few times he had gone away for a night or two just because he had needed some time to himself, some semblance of a life of his own.
But each time he had been sorry when he returned. Not that she had railed at him. She had never done that. She had always … loved him. Yes, that /was/ the correct word, though it had not, of course, been a romantic love. And she had needed him. Oh, how she had needed him!
It should have felt good to be needed.
It had not.
Poor Laura.
He had loved her too. /Not/ with a romantic or sexual love.
He had not come here alone now, alas. He had brought a wife with him.
He showed her the house after their arrival and marveled at how little it had changed in six years. Why had he expected that it would have done? Any orders for change would have had to come from him – or from his grandfather.
He could not dislike Maggie, he found, even though he had half expected to. She was sensitive and compassionate. Good Lord, she had insisted upon having Toby in their home as if he were a legitimate son of the house. It was not just that, though.
It was … Well, he did not know what it was. 'You have not seen the gallery yet,' he told her as they sat together at a late dinner, one at the head and one at the foot of the dining room table, from which the butler had had the forethought to remove all the extra leaves so that they were not a great distance apart. 'It is best seen in the daylight. I will show it to you tomorrow, if you wish.' 'Are all your family portraits there?' she asked. 'It is an interesting gallery,' he said. 'All the main family portraits are at Wychen Abbey, my grandfather's country home. But all the marquesses for the past seven generations grew up here, just as I did, and so the portraits of them as children and young men are here, as well as portraits of all their other family members, of course. It is a cheerful place. I was an only child and did not always have the company of other children, though my cousins were forever coming for extended stays. I spent a great deal of time in the gallery, especially in wet weather. My pictured ancestors were my playmates. I weaved stories about them and me.' She was smiling. 'It must be lovely,' she said, 'to have an ancestral home, to have that connection with your own roots and with those who went before you.' 'It is,' he said. 'There is a wonderful portrait of my grandfather when he was fifteen or sixteen, astride a horse and bending down to scoop up a shaggy little dog. And another of him as a young man with my grandmother, my father an infant on her knee.' She smiled along the length of the table at him. 'I shall so enjoy
