Simply Love

behavior, and mourned whatever it was that had destroyed his beauty.

But she had recoiled from him, run away in fright and revulsion. How had he felt? Was this how other people treated him too? Poor man. At least all her hurts were inner ones. People-especially men who had looked on her with admiration and interest-sometimes shrank from her when they knew her for what she was, an unwed mother, but at least she could walk along a street, or along a cliff path without causing anyone to turn in horror and run.

How could she have done it? How could she? And now she had been suitably punished for her cowardice in running away from the house. She had been discourteous-worse!-to a fellow human being who had in no way offended or hurt her.

Perhaps, she thought as she made her way back toward the house again, he was a stranger passing through and had just wandered by chance onto the duke’s land. Perhaps she would never see him again.

She despised herself for hoping that was so.

It was suitable punishment, she thought as she drew near to the house and her stomach rumbled with emptiness, that she must go hungry to bed.

She could not get the maimed man out of her mind all night. She kept waking and thinking of him.

Poor man. What must it be like to carry one’s pain and one’s deformities like that, for all to see? Ah, the loneliness of it!

Poor man.

But such beauty! Such physical perfection to have been so cruelly destroyed!

Sydnam watched her go. For a moment he considered going after her, but he would only increase her panic by doing that.

Besides, he did not feel at all kindly disposed toward her.

Who the devil was she? Lady Alleyne Bedwyn perhaps? She was the only one of the Bedwyn wives he had not met. But what had she been doing out here alone? Why was Alleyne not with her? And had no one warned her about the monster who was Bewcastle’s steward?

He had been in another world. Or rather, he had been in this world, but he had been deeply immersed in the final, breathtaking moments of a dying day, with the sun just dropped behind the western horizon but the night not yet quite descended. It was a scene of grays and silvers and majesty. His right hand had itched to grasp his paintbrush more tightly so that he could reproduce the scene both as he saw it and as he felt it, but he had resisted the urge to flex the fingers of that hand, knowing that as soon as he did so he would have to admit to himself, yet again, that it was a phantom hand he carried at his side, that both it and his right arm were no longer there just as his right eye was no longer there. And there was no paintbrush. He would have had to admit to himself that his vision of the scene was distorted, the depth and the perspective as well as the breadth of vision no longer feeding accurate information to his artist’s soul.

But he had still not come to the moment of that admission. He had still been transported by beauty. He had still been immersed in the illusion of happiness.

And then something-a flutter at the corner of his eye, a footfall, perhaps-had brought awareness crashing back and he had sensed that he was no longer alone.

And when he had turned, there she was.

Or perhaps the crash back to awareness had come a moment after he turned to look.

For that moment before it happened the woman standing on the path had seemed a part of the beauty of the evening. She had looked tall and willowy slender, her cloak flapping in the breeze and revealing a dress of lighter color beneath. She had not been wearing a bonnet. Her hair was fair, perhaps even blond, her face oval and blue- eyed and lovely, though truth to tell he had seen it one-eyed from twenty feet away in the dusk and could not be sure he had observed accurately, especially as far as the color of her eyes was concerned.

She had looked like beauty personified. For one moment he had thought…

Ah, what was it he had thought?

That she had walked out of the night into his dreams?

It was embarrassing even to consider that that was perhaps what he had thought before he had come jolting back to reality.

But certainly he had taken a step toward her without speaking a word. And she had stood there, apparently waiting for him.

And then he had seen the horror in her eyes. And then she had turned and fled in panic.

What had he expected? That she would smile and open her arms to him?

He gazed after her and was again Sydnam Butler, grotesquely ugly, with his right eye gone and the purple scars of the old burns down the side of his face, paralyzing most of the nerves there, and all along his armless side to his knee.

He was Sydnam Butler, who would never paint again, and for whom no woman would ever walk beautiful out of the night.

But he had left self-pity behind long ago, and resented moments such as this when his defenses had been lowered and it crept back in like a persistent and unwelcome guest to torment him. He knew that it would take him days to recover his equilibrium, to remind himself that he was now Sydnam Butler, the best and most efficient steward of the several Bewcastle employed to run his various estates-and that was the duke’s assessment, not his own.

He was Sydnam Butler, who had learned to live alone.

Without a paintbrush in his nonexistent right hand.

Without a woman for his bed or his heart.

He did not linger on the promontory. The magic was gone. The silver had gone from the sea to be replaced by a heaving gray, soon to be black. The sky no longer held even the memory of sunset. The breeze had turned chilly. It was time to go home.

He headed off along the path, in the direction from which the woman had come. After a few steps he realized that he was limping again and made a determined effort not to.

He was more glad than ever that he had moved out of the house and into the cottage. He liked it there. He might even stay after Bewcastle and all the others had returned home. A cottage, with a cook, a housekeeper, and a valet, was all a single man needed for his comfort.

Belatedly it struck him that there had been nothing grand about either the woman’s cloak or the dress beneath it, and her hair had not been dressed elaborately. She must be just one of the servants who had come with the visitors. She must be. If she were indeed Lady Alleyne, she would be at dinner now or in the drawing room with the rest of the family.

It was a relief to realize that she was only a servant. There was less of a chance that he would see her again. Whenever she had any free time from now on, he did not doubt that she would stay far away from the cliffs and the beach, where she might encounter the monster of Glandwr again.

He hoped he would never see her again, never have to look into that lovely face and see the revulsion there.

For an unguarded moment he had yearned toward her with his whole body and soul.

He thought resentfully that she would probably haunt his dreams for several nights to come.

If only he knew exactly how long Bewcastle intended to stay, he thought as he let himself in to the cottage and closed the door gratefully behind him, he could begin counting down the days, like a child waiting for some longed- for treat.

“She simply disappeared off the face of the earth,” Joshua explained. “She was not in her room, she was not in the nursery, and she certainly was not in either the drawing room or the dining room.”

“I daresay,” Gervase, Earl of Rosthorn, Morgan’s husband, said as he cut into his bacon, “she is intimidated by us-or by all you Bedwyns anyway,” he added with a chuckle.

“Oh, but she need not be,” Eve, Lady Aidan Bedwyn, said. “We are really quite ordinary people. But you may be right, Gervase. I can remember a time when I was intimidated.”