Elizabeth averted her gaze. “I want to be like her, filled with grace and compassion, but I make such a blunder of things.” She swiped at her face.
He had no idea what was bringing the tears to her eyes. He only knew that he wanted to wipe those tears away, and that was dangerous thinking. “You’re very much like her. You have grace and compassion.”
“But not peace,” she said with a hint of desperation. “Never peace.”
“God grants peace.”
“Does He? That is not my experience.”
Rourke had suffered his own shortage of peace lately. Did that mean he’d strayed? Surely bringing a slave to freedom counted as righteous in God’s estimation. Yet with Elizabeth standing before him fragile as a newly opened bloom, he recognized why peace evaded him. Desire. For all his plans to do what was right, he still wanted to love her, to hold her, to make her his wife. He would throw away every ounce of righteousness for that one taste of desire. Yet that was wrong. Love considers first the beloved. No wonder he knew no peace.
Elizabeth gazed at the chapel’s rude altar, perhaps unaware that the poor, the sick, and the enslaved worshiped here. “I know little peace of late.”
She had echoed the words of his heart and unwittingly confirmed what he must do. Love cannot live in tainted soil.
She stared ahead, not at him. “Why would she get yellow fever after all these years? Newcomers catch it. They’re the ones who die. Not someone who has lived here for years. Not my mother.”
Her anguish knifed through Rourke. “It can afflict anyone.”
Instead of consoling, his words brought tears. She pressed her sleeve against her eyes. Though she sobbed in silence, the shudder of her shoulders betrayed her heartache. He could not sit at a piano when the woman he adored suffered.
The jasmine scent grew stronger the nearer he came.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, but words were inadequate.
She shook her head.
“She was a fine woman,” he tried again, blundering badly. He stood within reach, longing to touch her, yet fearing the repercussions if he did. “She loved the Lord and is with Him now.”
“How do you know?” She lifted a tearstained face torn with anguish. “How can you be certain?”
He couldn’t, of course. None but God knew a person’s heart. Yet he’d seen signs. “She helped the less fortunate. She visited the sick at the hospital.”
Her coral lips curved into a perfect oval. “Is that enough?”
It wasn’t. Only faith in Jesus Christ could guarantee salvation. “Our Lord is enough.”
She collapsed again into wracking sobs, and this time he could not restrain himself. He wrapped his arms around her. She fell against him, the jasmine enveloping him so completely that he lost all sense of time. He wanted to stand there forever. He held her, rubbing her back gently as if she were a child. In some ways she was.
“It will get better with time.” At least it had for him. Occasionally the aching loss still rolled over him, but it struck less frequently now. Perhaps the time had finally come to share the pain of that loss. “I still miss my father, but I don’t think of him every day anymore.”
“Your father?” The candlelight flickered in her eyes. “I didn’t know he passed on.”
“Last year.” His throat constricted. He couldn’t say the rest, not even to Elizabeth. “It was a difficult year, but it gets better.”
“I hope you’re right.” She wrapped her arms around his neck, and the shock of her touch nearly cost the last of his control.
Drawn from painful memories to the much more pleasurable present, he traced a finger down her temple and around her ear. “It will.”
Her head lifted from his shoulder, and a pocket of cold came between them. “In time and with effort and dedication.”
She will obey her father’s wishes.
The thought startled him. This Elizabeth was not the carefree girl of four years ago. This Elizabeth clung to the strictures of society. He had waited for her for four years. Would she wait a year for him? His heart hoped she would, but his head—and all the evidence he’d seen thus far—said she wouldn’t.
The moon had transited enough to now stream through the doorway, turning her to marble. Cold, hard stone.
He removed her hands from his neck and stepped away.
She reached for him like a child to a parent. “Don’t let go.”
“I must.” He could not trust himself to explain further.
“But don’t you understand? I-I-I care for you. Don’t you . . . ?”
Her desperation broke his heart. She could not know the emotions that warred inside him, how much he wanted to confirm her dearest hopes. He had waited four years to do so, but Anabelle’s life was in his hands. He could not promise Elizabeth anything, nor could he tell her why.
“I must leave.” He backed away.