He was on his knees in front of her then, she realized, his hands on the bench on either side of her.
“Imogen,” he said, “I tremble at my presumption in trying to win your love for myself when you have loved such a man. But I do not expect to take his place. No one can ever take anyone else’s place. Everyone must carve out his own. I want you to love me for my sorry self, which I will try very hard for the rest of my life to make worthy of you—and worthy of me. I can do it. We can always do anything as long as we are alive. We can always change, grow, evolve into a far better version of ourselves. It is surely what life is for. Give me a chance. Let me love you. Let yourself love me. I will give you time if you need it. Just give me hope. If you can. And if you cannot, then so be it. I will leave you in peace. But please—try to give me a definite maybe if you possibly can.”
She lowered the handkerchief after drying her eyes. He looked like a poor, anxious schoolboy, hoping at least to avoid a caning. She reached out and cupped his face with her hands.
“I do not want to drain all your light, Percy,” she said.
Something sparked in his eyes.
“But there is never an end to light, Imogen,” he told her, “or to love. I’ll fill you so full of light that you will glow in the dark, and then when I want to love you in a very physical way I will be able to find you.”
Oh, absurd, absurd Percy. Yet so pale and anxious despite his ridiculous words.
“Do I dare?” she asked, but more of herself than of him.
He did not answer her. But someone else did, deep inside her in a voice she recognized—Courage. And for the first time in more than eight years her mind listened to the tone in which that silent word had been spoken. It was one of deep peace.
He had welcomed death—at her hands. It had released him from intolerable pain and the certain knowledge that there would be more of it before he died. And it had released her from the horrors of rape—he had believed that as he died, and he had been right, though not quite in the way he had expected.
He had been at peace when he died. She had been the instrument of his death, or of his release, depending upon how one looked at it.
She could live again. Surely she could. She owed it to him, and perhaps to herself. And perhaps to Percy. Oh, she could live again.
“I will wrap myself from head to toe in a thick blanket,” she said, “and you will have to search for me. It will be more sporting and more fun that way.”
She watched the smile grow in his eyes and gradually light up his whole tired face. And his arms closed about her like iron bands, and his forehead came to rest on her shoulder, and he wept.
*
It was the second week of May before Percy’s wedding day finally dawned. He thought it was the same calendar year as that in which he had become betrothed to Imogen, but it could easily be anything up to five years after. It seemed like forever.
He had wanted to get up from his knees there in the conservatory at Penderris and dash off in pursuit of the nearest special license, dash her back to Hardford Hall, and then dash her off to the church in Porthmare for the nuptials—all within one day if it had been humanly possible.
Alas, sanity had prevailed, though not necessarily his own.
Those friends of hers had all assured her that if she must leave their reunion early, then they quite understood and would be delighted for her—or words to that effect. The wives had assented too with hugs and kisses and sentimental tears. But they had all somehow managed to look collectively forlorn at the same time, and it was Percy himself who had declared that there was no way on this earth he was going to come between his newly betrothed and the dear friends he hoped would also be his dearest friends in the future—or foolish words to that effect.
He had stayed for a few days, during which time he almost lost the affections of Hector to a one-year-old toddler who chased him and mauled him and giggled over him and fell asleep on his doggie stomach and generally enslaved him.
Percy had written a whole library of letters—perish the memory—while Imogen did the same beside him in Stanbrook’s library, and sent them off. And then he had returned to London, where he saw to putting notices in the morning papers and arranging for banns to be read and—soon enough—being caught up in a ferocious tornado of wedding plans as his family gathered about him in force and his mother arrived from Derbyshire—I came to London from Cornwall via the scenic route through Derbyshire had become her joke of the moment.
Then the Penderris contingent had arrived in force, bringing Imogen with them—she was staying at Stanford House with the duke and had been joined there by her mother and the mother’s sister, who were somehow related to Stanbrook.