Robert blinked. “What?”
“Your happiness is out of reach because you’ve given up. What would Constable Whitley say? He never gives up, even when he’s fumbling around with no idea of what to do.”
Robert blinked harder, if that was possible. “What?”
“Constable Whitley…you wrote him, did you not? Maybe you should take your own advice.”
“How did you know?”
“I know everything,” she said serenely. “I’m omnipotent.” At his stunned look, she sighed. “I’m observant, Robert. You should try it sometime.”
And then, without further ado, she went to the bookshelves, grabbed a volume, and left. Robert was staring at the doorway, still a little stunned, when Hale entered the library. He was gripping a candelabra so tightly his knuckles were white, and he didn’t even seem to notice Robert. For a moment, he stood by the bookshelves, staring off into space, looking rather despondent.
Well, look at that, they did have something in common. They were both utterly miserable. If that wasn’t a solid basis for a friendship, Robert didn’t know what was.
“Hale,” he called out.
The younger man startled.
“Would you like some whisky?”
Hale hesitated, and then nodded. There was another bottle in the sideboard. Robert poured him some. Then he poured himself a glass of crisp, clear water from a Highland spring—Georgina was right; he could only wallow in alcohol for so long before he started to feel bad about himself—and then took everything to the low table in front of the settee.
He lifted his water glass. “Slàinte mhath,” he muttered, a Gaelic toast to good health.
Hale sat at the other end of the settee and sipped at his glass, coughing a little. Robert didn’t comment.
“Whisky reminds me of the Highlands,” Robert said. By which he meant it reminded him of Ian. The stars and the cool night air and the taste of fire and peat smoke on his tongue.
Hale just looked at him, eyes watering. “I feel like I’ve just consumed living flame.”
Robert had nearly forgotten about Hale’s dramatic turns of phrase. “That’s how it’s supposed to feel.”
“I think I prefer wine.”
Robert had to resist the urge to snatch the glass away from him. Why should he waste good whisky on someone who didn’t like it? Ian wouldn’t have preferred wine.
He took a deep breath.
Ian was not here.
Ian was not here.
For a while they sat in complete silence, except for the crackle of embers from the fire. But at some point the whisky must have given Hale some courage, because he leaned forward intently.
“Have you ever been in love?”
“Yes,” Robert said, not elaborating.
“How do you know?”
Robert blinked. “How do I know what?”
“That you’re in love?”
“I’m not sure, exactly. I think one just knows,” he said.
Hale looked supremely distressed by this answer. “But in the poems it’s all sweeping gestures and bold declarations, and fire and despair and elation—”
“It’s not like the poems.”
“Then what’s it like?”
“It’s quieter. Calmer. More enduring. There can be despair and elation, but it’s so much more than that. It’s all the little moments, together. It’s…laughing with each other, about the stupidest of things. It’s being able to talk to them, about anything, late into the night. It’s sitting side by side and not minding the silence. It’s the way you feel when they look at you. Simple things. Little things. That together, somehow, mean everything.”
Hale was silent for a while, contemplating this. He poured some more whisky. “But how do you know that you will not lose it?”
“You don’t.”
Hale jolted and nearly spilled his whisky. “Then what is the point?” he cried.
“Love is a risk. It is always a risk. No one knows what’s going to happen. But you take your chances, you make your bets, you roll the dice, because that person and all those little moments with them are worth the risk. Because having them, even for a short while, is better than never having them at all.”
“I don’t know if I’m strong enough for that,” Hale whispered.
“Then it becomes a certainty—you’ll lose them,” Robert said. He tilted his head against the back of the settee and looked up at the ceiling contemplatively. “But the thing about the heart, Hale, is that it’s resilient. It can be bruised and battered and broken, and it survives. It can carry you through, if you let it.”
“You are very wise.”
Robert started to laugh, and it was a bitter, harsh-edged thing. “I’m only a few years older than you. And I’m just as lost as anyone.”
“Maybe you should roll the dice again,” Hale suggested.
Robert lifted his head. He was thinking about what Georgina had said about giving up, and he was thinking about how Ian must have felt when he’d realized Robert had agreed to marry Miss Worthington. He hadn’t even heard it from Robert, because Robert had been too much of a coward to tell him—he’d simply been working on his cottage, looked up, and there they were, strolling along like the almost-married couple they were.
Ian, who’d already been abandoned once.
Ian, who probably expected to be abandoned again.
Ian, Ian, Ian.
God, what an idiot Robert had been.
“Hale,” he said suddenly.
“Yes?”
“It’s not too late. To say the things you should have said. To do what you should have done. It’s not too late. Not yet.”
The settee creaked, and Hale set his glass down with a clank. “Thank you, Mr. Townsend.”
After Hale retired, Robert returned the whisky and glasses to the sideboard. He was walking down the corridor toward his bedchamber when he caught sight of a small shadow, slinking along the wall. A black cat slowly took shape, approaching Robert warily.
“Oh, thank God,” Robert said. “I thought I was going to have to tell Annabel that I lost you.”
Willoughby, in a display of affection that Robert had never seen him give anyone except Annabel, and, on occasion, Ian, bumped his head against Robert’s leg.
“I’m sorry I scared you,” he muttered. Robert leaned down to pet the cat and received a half-hearted warning hiss in response, so he stopped. He thought of Ian’s fondness for cats and laughed. The sound didn’t contain much joy, but it wasn’t hollow, either.
He didn’t know if Hale would finally work up the courage to tell Alice how he felt. He didn’t know if Ian, who was so good at pushing people away, would pull Robert back, even if that happened.
He didn’t know.
But he did know that he had to try.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ian went to the outbuilding. The night was cloudy, but eventually the shadows broke and stars began to emerge. He found the constellations, those guideposts in the sky, those friends from when he’d had nothing, and he shaped their names with his mouth.
But peace didn’t come. The quiet didn’t come.
No matter how long he sat, no matter how many stars he named, his heart was still restless.
It had never happened to him before. The stars had never rejected him. They’d never failed to give him the constancy he longed for.
Until this moment.
Which was when Ian wondered if he’d made the worst mistake of his life when he’d walked away from Robert Townsend.
When he saw the man in question from a distance the next day, at the stables, his chest hurt so badly that he thought he might be dying, and he wondered again.
And then he had a dream—he was in the Highlands, farther north, with Robert beside him as they approached his family’s cottage. He passed the bend in the road, looked up. The cottage was gone. Nothing was left. No one. It was as if his family had never existed.
“You waited too long,” Robert said in a far-off voice. “These things don’t get any easier, you know. They only grow worse.”
“I didna mean to. I didna—” But he broke off suddenly. The silence was so loud that it hurt his ears. It was like a great white nothingness, a yawning chasm, and he knew. He knew before he turned that Robert was gone.
He turned anyway.
He was alone. No one else, nothing, for miles.