Chapter 20

20

F ive thousand or so books? Orin could hardly take it in. The number exceeded Wedderburn's renowned library, quite a feat.

"You're sure?" he asked, searching her face for the slightest hint of indecision.

He found only a quiet joy. Suddenly even books were passe. Here he sat weighing whether to broach the subject of their prior romantic arrangement. Rather, a marriage contract. Yet Everard had reminded him a duchess was now out of his reach entirely. But not her books. He felt gutted and elated all at once.

"I'm happy to have found a home for them," she said, looking down at her gloved hands. "No one else would appreciate them like you."

He reached out and plucked a Damask rose. Making sure it was free of thorns, he extended it. "I owe you a great debt of gratitude."

She took the blossom and breathed in the heady fragrance. "If anyone owes anyone anything I owe you an explanation about your letters."

He paused, surprised. "That's all in the past, is it not?"

What's past is prologue , Shakespeare said. Truly, everything at present seems to hinge upon it. He waited on tenterhooks for her answer. She seemed overwhelmed again, weighing her words.

"Perhaps we'll both feel better if I tell you the truth of what happened." Vulnerability softened her lovely features. "You see, Grandfather didn't tell me you'd written after Herschel's death. In fact, he hid all your letters in a locked compartment of his desk, likely thinking I'd never find them. But I did find them recently, after his passing, which makes me wonder why. Now I'm questioning everything, including his doing so."

He listened to her torrent of words, sensing a torrent of tears behind them. Suddenly their situation had become even more complicated. "So, you thought I'd not written at all, never inquired about you or wondered where you'd gone."

She nodded and looked to her lap. "It seemed so unlike you, so contrary to our friendship."

Friendship, nay.

"What I felt for you was far from friendship," he said without thought, though speaking in the past tense helped remove them from the fraught present. "But I'm sure you gathered that from the letters. Six of them, if I remember rightly."

"Six, yes. I've read them all. More than once."

"Yet your silence at the time seemed to signify an ending of sorts."

He well remembered waiting and how agonizingly grey the days were without word from her. He wasn't a man given to excessive emotion, at least outwardly, but he'd felt a slow death when his hopes weren't realized and he never heard.

"But I did write." Her earnestness removed all doubt. "At first, I was too injured to pen but a few lines but in time I sent quite a few letters. Are we now to believe Grandfather withheld mine to you, too? If so, I do wonder what he did with them."

He focused on the slot in the garden wall that gaped empty, mirroring the still-empty part of himself that never seemed to recover. Physical wounds were bad enough. Mayhap those of the heart were worse.

"Does it make you angry?" he asked.

"More hurt." She bit her lip. "Bewildered. I still can't believe that Grandfather, a man of equal parts nobility and common sense, would have done such a thing."

"I had great respect for your grandfather but we'll never ken his actions. We can't undo what's been done. We just … let go. Go on."

"And so we have. Looking back, it seems we were little more than children then. Untried. Unchallenged. Unaccustomed to heartache. We've become different people. Taken different paths. Five years seems an age."

He regretted the grudging acceptance in her tone, as if she was trying to explain away what they'd had, like so much dust under the rug. "What did you make of my letters?"

Her smile was wistful. "Pure poetry, some of them. And the one about the birds … " Her voice faltered and she fastened on the fountain as it splashed water onto the mossy stones at its base. "I've committed every line to heart. It reminded me of this place with its uncaged songbird."

"I had that in mind when I wrote it." He, too, had memorized every line.

"Enough sentimentality." She got up so quickly the rose she'd been holding fell to her feet. She didn't retrieve it. "As you said, we let go. Go on."

He stood but she was at the garden gate before he caught up with her. Suddenly he felt as much at sea as a man half his age. And utterly gutted at her going. Much like he'd been when he'd never received her letters. To ground himself, he focused on her one-horse chaise, a fine equipage she somehow managed despite her injury.

Bidding her farewell, he helped her up then stood back and tried to reconcile himself to all they'd said.

And what they hadn't.

Maryn rode away with a sinking inside her mingled with confusion and an odd hope. What if she found those letters? If Grandfather had hidden Orin's, where might he have hidden hers? As the chaise turned onto the main road, leaving Wedderburn's gatehouse behind, she tried to recall those first weeks following the accident.

Grandfather, bless him, had secured the best medical care to be had in Edinburgh and London. Several doctors attended her, some from the medical school. The smell of camphor and her horror of bloodletting would never leave her. Nicola had been by her side night and day at first. She had a hazy memory of asking her sister to bring her ink and pounce and paper. In the beginning, it had taken all her strength to write a few sentences so her letters to Orin were stitched together over several days. Shattered, heartfelt letters that made her wince recalling them. They'd been written in the delirium of recovery before she'd known the full extent of her injuries.

Where had those impassioned pennings gone?

And why had she poured out herself to him? Aside from his letters, he'd never once, till today, told her his feelings were far from friendship. Nor had he ever kissed her. Back then she'd been unsure of his affection till the marriage settlement was broached between Grandfather and the laird. Only then had she an inkling Orin regarded her as something more.

Lately he seemed to seek her out because of courtesy and then business. Not only that, she still had the woman who'd gone riding with him firmly in mind. Though he never spoke of her, she continued to wonder.

Who was she?