Rory gummed a jammy biscuit happily, but the sight of the raspberry jam on his puckered lips was enough to put me off raspberries for the rest of my life. I helped myself to a watercress sandwich instead and left the repulsive biscuits for the others.
Charlotte refused the cup of tea Kit offered to her, and instead of sitting in the chair he’d drawn up for her, she stood at the foot of Rory’s bed. When Kit had resumed his seat and we’d all finished eating, she rested her hands on the foot railing and smiled down at Kit and me.
“I saw you leave Aldercot Hall this morning,” she informed us, “and after speaking with Mrs. Harcourt, I learned that you were coming here, to Rory’s cottage. I followed you, intending to apologize for my intemperate outburst the other day, but as I approached the front door, a few words drifted through the open window that stopped me in my tracks.”
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She ducked her head, and a pink fl ush rose in her fair cheeks.
“I don’t eavesdrop, as a rule,” she said, “but I simply couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t keep myself from listening to the story drifting through the open window.” She raised her head and gazed incredulously at the gamekeeper. “Rory, you old fool. Why didn’t you tell me the truth long ago?”
“I didn’t see what good it’d do,” he said. “You’d only think worse of your parents if you knew how we tricked you, and Leo wasn’t ever coming back, so I figured, let sleeping dogs—” He broke off as someone knocked on the front door.
Kit and I exchanged perplexed looks.
“Henrietta,” I guessed. “With quail’s eggs and chilled duck in aspic.”
“I’ll get it this time,” he said, and went to the front door.
I heard only a murmur of muted voices coming from the corridor, but Charlotte must have heard something else, because her hands tightened on the footrail, her lips parted, and her entire face seemed to glow with an inner light as she stared expectantly at the parlor door. When it opened, she drew in a shuddering breath.
“Leo,” she said.
I turned my head and saw the expression on Leo’s face when he heard her speak his name. He looked like a man uncertain of his welcome.
“Oh, Leo,” Charlotte said, and crossed the room to rest her head upon his chest.
Leo put his arms around her, closed his eyes, and laid his weathered cheek against her white hair. He held her to his heart, breathing in her fragrance, and she released a tremulous sigh, as if she’d reached the end of a long journey. In one suspended moment, the past became the present, and the intervening years faded away, as if they’d never been. The decades Charlotte and Leo had lost meant nothing to them, because true love exists outside of time.
Kit stood behind them, beaming like a priest at a wedding.
218 Nancy Atherton
“Kit,” I whispered loudly, waving to get his attention as I stood.
“I think maybe you and I should leave.”
“I’m not leaving,” growled Rory. “It’s my house. If those two want to canoodle, they can go somewhere else.”
Charlotte and Leo broke apart, and Leo shook a fist at the old gamekeeper.
“You’re skating on thin ice, mate,” he said. “I wouldn’t push it if I were you.”
“No one’s leaving,” Charlotte added. “Leo, may I pour you a cup of tea?”
“That’d be lovely,” said Leo.
He didn’t have to tell her how he liked his tea. She remembered.
A short time later, we were seated in a semicircle at Rory’s bedside. Kit had already brought Leo up to speed in the corridor, so Leo was explaining to the rest of us why he’d come to the gamekeeper’s cottage.
“It was the way Kit looked at me last night, after I told him about the shooting,” he said. “He looked at me as if I couldn’t possibly have killed a man, not even when I was a young idiot, not even when I was whiskey-drunk. As if I didn’t have it in me”—he tapped his chest—“to do something as bad as that. It got me to thinking. And today I decided to look Rory up and talk over old times with him.”
“I’m sorry for what I did, Miss Charlotte,” Rory said, staring down at his fingerless gloves. “And I’m sorry for what I did to you, too, Leo.”
“Never mind,” said Charlotte, leaning forward to put a hand on the old man’s brow. “It all happened a very long time ago.”
“And you did keep Maurice from blowing my brains out,” Leo added. “So I guess I can forgive you for everything else.”
Charlotte sat back in her chair, laughing. “I’ve made a pilgrimage every year to look down on Anscombe Manor and curse your name,”
she said to Leo. “I should have known this year’s would be the last.”
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“Why’s that, love?” asked Leo.