“What do you call it, then?” she asked, annoyed. Could he not take a hint and talk about the weather again?
“Surviving,” he said. “Barely. Living is not merely a matter of staying alive, is it? It is what you do with your life and the fact of your survival that counts.”
“Spoken by an authority?” she asked him.
But she thought unwillingly of her fellow Survivors who had done a great deal with their lives and their survival in the years since Penderris. Ben, though he still struggled to walk, had acquired a great deal of mobility since taking to a wheeled chair and was the very busy manager of prosperous coal mines and ironworks in Wales. He was also happily married. Vincent, despite his blindness, walked and rode and exercised, even boxed, and composed children’s stories with his wife, stories that she then illustrated before they were published. They had a son. Flavian, Hugo, Ralph—they were all married too and living active, presumably happy lives. Yet she could remember them all when they were so broken that even drawing in another lungful of air had been a burden. Ralph in particular had been suicidal for a long time.
But none of them carried her particular burden. Just as she carried none of theirs. What if she could not see the first snowdrop, not this year or ever? What if she could never stride along the cliff path or the beach below?
He had not answered her question. He was chewing the last mouthful of his first biscuit.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Oh, confession is a two-way business, Lord Hardford,” she said sharply. “Unless one is a priest, perhaps. You also have stories you would rather not tell.”
The progress of his second biscuit was arrested two inches from his mouth. “But one would not wish to scandalize a lady,” he said, lowering it, “or scorch her ears with unsavory stories.”
She tutted. “You are terrified of the sea,” she said, “and of the cliffs. I daresay it was only your pride because I, a mere woman, was there that got you down the path onto the beach a few days ago.”
He set the biscuit back in his saucer.
“Are we bartering here, Cousin Imogen?” he asked. “Your story for mine?”
Oh.
Oh. No.
She ought to have thought before she spoke. She ought not to have started any of this.
“Shall I go first?” he asked.
10
He did not wait for her answer.
“I was ten or eleven,” he said. “I was at that obnoxious age, which all boys go through and perhaps girls too, when I knew nothing and thought I knew everything. We were spending a few weeks by the sea. I have no memory of quite where, though it was somewhere on the east coast. There were golden beaches, high, rugged cliffs, a jetty and boats, the sea to splash around in and foaming waves to hurl myself beneath. A boy’s paradise, in fact. But—the blight of a boy’s existence—there was an army of adults with me, united in its determination to see that I did not enjoy a single moment of my time there—my parents, one of my tutors, various servants, even my old nurse. The sea was dangerous and drowned little boys; the boats were dangerous and tipped little boys into the water before drowning them; the cliffs were dangerous and dashed little boys to their death on jagged rocks below—everything was dangerous. The only thing that could keep me safe was constant adult supervision, preferably of the hold-my-hand-don’t-do-that variety. I resented every little that was uttered and every hand that was held out for mine.”
“I suppose,” Imogen said, “you found a way to come to grief.”
“In a spectacular way,” he agreed. “I escaped one evening, Lord knows how, and went down onto the beach alone. It was deserted. The sea was calm, the boats were bobbing invitingly by the jetty, and I decided to try my hand at the oars of one of them, something I had not been allowed to do despite my pleas that I knew how to use them. I did too. I even discovered the art of holding a course parallel to the beach rather than one that would take me across it in the general direction of Denmark. After a while I spotted a cove that looked like a perfect pirates’ lair and decided to land and play awhile. I dragged the boat up onto the beach and became a pirate king. I climbed the cliff until I came to a flat ledge that made a perfect lookout and continued with my game until I noticed several things all at once. I believe the first was that I was a bit chilly. I was chilly because the sun had gone down and dusk was coming on. Then, in quick succession, I noticed that while I had been searching the horizon for treasure ships to plunder, the tide had come in and claimed almost all the beach below me, that the boat had been lifted from its resting place and had floated away, and that the cliffs behind me and to either side of me were all very high and very sheer and very menacing.”