Page 64 of My Darling Mr. Darling

“I woke days later, but I suffered a terrible fever. I was weak as a kitten, but still I knew—I knew it would be the last time. I knew I couldn’t bear it again. Not ever. Not after that.” She gave a little shudder, snuggling closer into the circle of his arm. “They had put me in the infirmary,” she said. “Because in the night, when I was insensible, I screamed loud enough to wake the dead, and disturbed the other girls. They thought I was too weak yet to be moved, and I—I let them keep thinking it. And at the first opportunity—the moment my legs could support me—I fled. I fled in the dead of night. Opened the window of the infirmary and climbed out and walked until dawn.” Those tears spilled over her cheeks. “I was such a coward,” she whispered.

“No. No, Vi, you were so brave—”

“I wasn’t!” She swiped at her cheeks. “You don’t know,” she rasped. “You weren’t there. You couldn’t possibly understand.”

“Thenmakeme understand,” he said, clasping her hand tight to his chest. “I know so much about you, Vi. And there is nothing I have learned that would induce me to name you cowardly. Resourceful, yes,” he said. “Strong. Determined. Clever. Butcowardly? Never. Not in this lifetime. So tell me something—tell meanything. Make me understand.” His other hand tangled in her hair, massaged the tight muscles at the nape of her neck, his arm flat against her spine. “Tell me everything Idon’tknow—because I’ve come to learn that the things Idoknow are the least part of you. Tell me the things that all my years of investigation never could. Tell me what you are thinking, what you are feeling. Tell me…tell me what you’ve been searching for in my office. Help me to helpyou.” The secret that she had guarded so closely, so carefully—if she could only bring herself to reveal that, if she could only trust him enough to share it, then he would truly understand her at last.

Her eyes searched his, and they were filled with so great a weight, he didn’t know how she could bear it. “I want the same thing as you,” she said at last, in a tense whisper. “To understand.”

Chapter Twenty Four

Violet wrenched herself away, struggling to master her conflicted emotions. It had been simple enough before, in private, to pull the fractured splinters of herself back into some shape mimicking the semblance of the whole that had shattered—but it proved itself impossible with John’s arm at her back, his chest so inviting, as if just waiting for the press of her cheek.

She didn’t know how she was meant to contend with his sympathy, his concern. She couldn’t bear the compassion scrawled across his face, couldn’t avail herself of the comfort his arms offered, couldn’t pretend she deserved any of it.

“Vi,” he said, reaching out to her, though his fingers fell shy of her shoulder when she flinched. His hand landed upon the covers scrunched between them instead, flattening over the bunched material. “When first Wentworth told me you had broken in, I thought perhaps you were looking for something that would give you an advantage over me—a codicil in your father’s will, perhaps, or some other sort of leverage. Something you could use to take back what you had lost to me.” He heaved a sigh. “I was happy to let you search, because I knew you would find no such thing—and, honestly, I liked you coming around. But that was never it, was it? You had gone years without all of it, and by the time you began your nighttime excursions, you were safe, secure. So you must have been looking for something else entirely.”

Violet pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes and squared her shoulders. “I have to knowwhy,” she said. “Papa loved me. I know he did. He would have wanted me to be happy, so why did he—” She broke off, her shoulders slumping once more, swallowing down the lump that choked her voice.

“Why did he give you to me?” John prompted.

She nodded miserably, burying her face in her hands. “I just need to know. It’s all I’ve thought about. Every day, for years. Ineedto know.” Her breath burned in her lungs and broke through her fingers, in a sharp, aching puff of air. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you; not really. I only…hoped he had leftsomething. Some sort of document—a diary; a letter.”

“I’m not offended.” His weight shifted on the mattress as he moved for the edge of the bed. “I only wish I had known sooner. It should have occurred to me before now.” Naked, he padded across the room toward the mound of his clothing cast carelessly atop the dresser. The candlelight licked across his skin as he sorted through the discarded items, a play of shadow and light dancing over muscles that bunched and flexed. He lifted his coat from the pile, turned it, and slid his hand within an interior pocket to remove a folded bit of paper.

He cradled it in his hands as if it were some priceless treasure; fragile, precious. His face inscrutable, he returned to the bed, sliding close to her, the tangled sheets thrown over his lap. His thumb rubbed across the paper, which was so worn, so delicate that she could see the bleed of ink through it—though she could not decipher the writing contained within.

“Did you know,” he said slowly, “that I saw your father a few days before his death?”

Inhaling sharply, Violet shook her head. “No,” she said. “No, I—I had no idea.” Still, the thought hurt. As his illness had progressed, Papa had secluded himself away from everyone. Including her. He hadn’t wanted her to see him like that, he’d said. He’d had to witness her mother die, and he hadn’t wanted that for her.

“I was running the business more or less by myself at that point,” he said. “Because someone needed to, and your father—he simply no longer had the energy. I had been running it for some time. Months, perhaps, by the time he realized that the end was nearing. So he called me to the Kent estate, and I came. He looked—withered. A shell of who he once had been.”

Violet reached out to touch his knee, obscured beneath the covers; a small gesture of comfort. Because John had admired her father, too. Because she had not been the only one who had grieved, who had mourned.

“He told me he knew that he was soon to leave the world. That his solicitor would shortly be in contact with me regarding the contents of his will.” He lifted the hand that held the paper aloft. “And he gave me this. To be read only after his death.”

“He didn’t leave me anything,” Violet said. It was amazing how something so simple—a sheet of paper, a letter—could shred her heart with jealousy. “He didn’t leave me anything at all.”

John’s shoulder nudged hers. “Do you think,” he offered, “that a lifetime of love could have been reduced to the contents of a letter? Could simple words have conveyed the depths of his love for you?”

Violet swallowed hard, her throat aching with it. No—of course it could not have done such a thing. She had had so much better than a sheet of paper containing the last words scrawled in Papa’s trembling hand. Perhaps they would have been more burden than gift, knowing that he had expended so much of his precious strength to tell her things she had already known; that aside from her mother, she had been the great love of his life.

“He gave me this,” John said again of the letter in his hand, “and with respect to his wishes, I set it aside and did not read it. And when he passed some days later, I was too angry to consider anything further. I let this letter sit, unacknowledged, in my desk drawer for months. When finally Ididread it—well, that was the day I wrote to Mrs. Selkirk, to bring you home. I have carried it with me ever since.” He touched his chest—an unconscious action that she had seen him perform numerous times before—laying the palm of his hand directly over where the letter, in its interior pocket within his coat, would have rested.

“Why?” she asked, with a shallow nod at the letter.

“Because it reminds me. Of how I failed him. Of how I failed you. He relied upon me, and I—I denied him his last request; his final, most cherished wish.” And he extended the letter to her.

The paper was thin and fragile in her hands. Years of reading and re-reading had rendered it soft and malleable; almost flimsy. She unfolded it, her heart giving a vicious beat in her chest as she recognized both her father’s handwriting—and the careful, painful scrawl that it had become in the end stages of his illness.

Dear John,

I hope someday that you can find it within yourself to forgive me. I made promises to you that I have regrettably become unable to keep. At the time that I made them, I was yet whole—of sound mind; in good health.

It is my most fervent desire that in time you shall know that I have given you something much more precious than that which I promised to you. You are yet a young man, John, and so I do not expect this realization to come swiftly. But now, more so than ever, I can tell you in all honesty—for that is all that is left to me—that no man reaches the end of his life wishing he had spent more of his time at his desk. If I had my life to do over again, I would have let the running of my company to someone else, and spent more time with my wife and daughter.

My time grows short. I cannot bear for my Violet to see me in such condition as I am. It has been only she and I, John, for so many years. Shortly, she will be alone—too young, still, to bear the burden of her inheritance. Too young to navigate the fortune hunters that will undoubtedly pursue her.