Finally, as they rode through a glade so utterly different from the grim little village that it seemed like another world, she could bear it no longer. ‘What is it? Why aren’t you relieved?’
‘I am,’ he said bleakly. ‘Relieved and feeling damnably guilty. How the hell can I apologise enough to my uncle and to Ralph without telling them what I believed for so long? And I can’t tell them and yet I cannot let go of the feeling that I should confess the whole damnable mess.’
‘Of course you must not tell them,’ Sophie said crisply. ‘You hurt them enough by leaving, you can’t salve your own conscience by confessing what you suspected – they would never recover from it. What you thought was understandable, given all the evidence and the fact that you were in no position to investigate further. You can feel regret that you were forced into the position of suspecting them, but wallowing in guilt is self-indulgent. And confessing would make everyone unhappy.’
‘Ouch. You can hit hard when you want to, Sophie. Have you been talking to Jared?’
‘To Hunt? No, why should I? I am not at all sure I like the man, although I believe he is utterly loyal to you.’
‘He thinks I am too prone to feeling guilty. I was stupid enough, in my cups, to wallow – as you so painfully put it – over my feelings for Madeleine and got a rollicking from him on the subject of misplaced guilt.’
‘What – Cal, what were your feelings for her if they made you feel so guilty?’
‘I could not love her. I tried, although I did not know what I was supposed to feel, what she expected of me. But she loved me. I thought at first she had trapped me because she wanted an English gentleman, thought I would take her to London, that I had grand connections and lots of money. And there might have been that at first – her father was certainly mercenary enough. But she managed to fall in love with me.
‘You were right, that first night when I overheard you up in the gallery with Sir Toby. Love is an illusion, a snare. It is never equal, never balanced. It leads to jealousies and misery and misunderstanding. Look what we have, Sophie – desire and friendship. That’s strong, that will last, a good basis for a marriage.’ He dropped his hands and let the horse walk on, then reined back when Sophie didn’t follow.
‘You do not think love might grow, after marriage?’
‘Why would you want it? What does it add? Heartache when it ends, that is all.’
Sophie felt ill again. Out of her own mouth she had condemned this marriage. ‘Cal, what was your parents’ marriage like? Were they in love?’
‘How did you guess?’
Sophie shrugged. ‘That was not the norm for aristocratic marriages in those days, even less than it is now.’
‘They caused a scandal. She was betrothed to someone else, my father saw her, fell in love with her, fought a duel with the discarded lover who shot himself a week later. It ruined my mother’s reputation, almost made my father an outcast, but they seemed oblivious to all that because they had each other. No-one else mattered.’
And not you, from the bitterness in your voice, she guessed, her heart aching for the child on the outside of that intensity.
‘When she died he was a broken man.’
And so you promised yourself you would never do anything so foolish as to fall in love. Then you marry a woman who loves you and you see how unhappy that made her… so you add guilt to a mixture of emotions as toxic as that spring water. And I love you.
‘I am so sorry,’ she managed to say.
Cal shrugged. ‘It was tragic for them, a lesson for me. When I heard you that evening at the ball I could hardly believe my good fortune. You are beautiful, intelligent – and we are totally in accord on what makes a good marriage.’ He leaned across from the saddle and dropped a kiss on her lips.
He did not appear to find it strange that she was silent as they rode on. Perhaps he assumed she had been shaken by what they had found, or was tired after the horrors of the morning or was happily digesting the good news that he felt himself incapable of love and saw it as a positive handicap to a marriage.
‘There they are.’ Cal raised a hand in greeting as Hunt and Flynn appeared around a bend in the road.
The others turned back as their route had been the shorter, and Sophie sat and thought while Cal told them about the mining village and the diverted stream and the polluted water.
She came to awareness of her surroundings when they began to discuss plans for the watch on the spring.
‘We cannot cover it with the three of us, or even four, with the addition of Prescott. Not for two days and nights without being missed,’ Hunt said.
‘We will tell Hooper. I would trust him with any secret. He’s been the stable master here for years, and he is grandfather to Ben, my tiger.’