My jaw froze shut. With me. He means to continue the family line with me.
But when we stepped into the strong sunlight of a small clearing and he turned to me, I saw only weariness in his face. His skin seemed thin as parchment, his cheekbones prominent beneath. He sat on the fallen trunk of an old tree and put his forearms on his knees, his thin wrists dangling. He looked up at me, squinting a little. “It really is nice to meet you, Cousin Jo,” he said quietly. “I’ve always wanted to meet the girl Alex married. I’m glad you were here when I returned after all this time. Franny died while I was away, you see, and I thought I’d be here alone.”
I swallowed past the shards of glass in my throat. Say it, Jo. Just say it. “I cannot marry you,” I blurted into the still air. “I simply cannot.” In the pause that followed, I managed to add, “I’m sorry.”
Martin sat very still, looking at me. I could see clearly in the bright light that he was ill—not just a case of postwar nerves, as Dottie would have it, but something much worse. He was a man who had looked death in the face, and recently. He kept his wrists on his knees and regarded me with a pensive expression as a lark flew high overhead, crying.
“Thank God,” he said evenly. “I can’t marry you, either.”
I blinked, and some of my surprise and relief must have shown on my face because he smiled.
“Please don’t take it the wrong way, Cousin Jo,” he said. “You are very beautiful, as I’m sure you know. And I know you have a good character, because Alex would only marry a right sort. But the fact remains that I cannot marry Alex’s wife.”
I felt the sudden sting of tears behind my eyes. “I loved him very much,” I said.
“So did I.” Martin pulled his gaze from me and looked out into the trees. “Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say I adored him.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, the memory dragging on him. “Worship was so easy with Alex.”
“I know,” I said.
“I joined the army because of him. Did you know that?” Martin said. “Signed up because he did. Thought I’d be RAF, but I never made it. It didn’t matter—I was on the same fighting ground as him, fighting the same war. That was all that mattered to me. I thought we’d both come home war heroes.” He shrugged, as if he’d given up trying to figure it out. “And now here we are—I look like this, and he never came home at all. War is a funny thing.”
“When did you last see him?” I asked, my throat thick.
“He came to see me in the hospital in 1917. Franny was dead by then, and we talked about it. It put him in a dark mood, I thought.”
“He was upset over it?” I recalled the careless words Alex had written to me. She has died, poor thing.
“I wasn’t well—that’s putting it mildly—so perhaps I’m misremembering,” Martin replied. “But he didn’t seem himself. It was odd—Alex had always treated Franny nicely, but he hadn’t seen her in years. Yet he was shaken up. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said to me, ‘and now I don’t think I ever will.’ Isn’t that a strange thing to say?” He shook his head. “I asked him what he was going to do next—you know, he’d flown so many RAF missions, I thought he must be due for a promotion, anything he wanted. But all he said was ‘I don’t have a bloody clue.’ You know Alex—always so ambitious, striving for the highest thing, making the rest of us run to keep up with him. It wasn’t like him at all.”
I stared at him, numb. Ambitious? Alex had finished Oxford, then traveled, doing nothing. An aimless fellow with a great deal of education and not much to do, he’d described himself that first night. He was intelligent, of course, and good at everything—but he’d never shown himself as ambitious to me.
But then, Dottie’s voice said, you weren’t together all that long.
“I’m sorry,” Martin said to me, looking at my face. “I’ve gone on and on. The point is that we can’t marry, no matter what Mother may want.”
That shook me out of my thoughts. “Do you honestly think your mother means for us to marry?”
“Oh, yes.” He smiled a little, the corner of his mouth crooking. A breeze, smelling of leaves and rain, tousled his longish hair. “You caught my little message yesterday, did you? I was trying to warn you, in case you didn’t know. I know Mother well. I need a wife, and Alex left one; it would seem practical to her, as long as she approved of you.”
“I’m not sure she does,” I said.
“Of course she approves of you.” Martin patted the pockets of his jacket absently. “If she didn’t, she would have dismissed you long ago.”