Page 37 of The Lady Who Left (The Flower Sisters #4)
“ A lright, you little brat, you’re done.” Archie pushed the sheep, now substantially slimmer without his wool, and leaned back on his hands in the thick grass. Perspiration soaked his skin, and he shoved a limp curl from his brow. He allowed himself the moment of rest before pushing to his feet, his muscles protesting every movement as he stalked towards the next fluffy lamb grazing in the sloping field adjacent to the farmhouse.
His conscious mind distantly registered he’d almost finished this task, one that had taken him most of the afternoon. Surely he’d run out of mindless endeavors before long, and then he’d be left alone with his thoughts. An unacceptable proposition.
His small flat above his office had become a prison, the memories of his lone night with Marigold driving him mad. So he’d fled, like the coward he was, the farm becoming his refuge from the reality of his circumstances .
He’d lost Marigold. He’d lost the chance to return to Chapin and Baines. After what he’d done, he couldn’t in good conscience accept any payment from her, much to Jasper’s chagrin. Before long, without any substantive income for the past two months, he’d lose his office and the practice itself. All that remained for him was the strain of his muscles, the knowledge he could provide for his mother and sisters in this way at least. Perhaps he’d stay, dedicate his pitiful life to keeping this farm profitable for as long as he could.
Only Archie would win the most important case of his life but lose everything of value.
“Are you planning to work yourself to death?”
His eyes shot up to see his mother picking her way across the field, stopping briefly to examine the precarious heap of shorn wool Archie had spent the past hours building.
He grabbed the shirt he’d discarded on a post of the shearing cart and pulled it over his head, wincing at the feel of the fabric sticking to his skin. “I’m almost finished.”
“Have you sheared Petunia yet?”
Archie’s head dropped. The mangy beast would be the death of him. “Haven’t seen her.”
“Then sit for a moment.” She pulled a bottle of lemonade from her apron pocket and gestured towards a towering elm bending over the edge of the field.
His mother didn’t wait for his response—he would be a fool to refuse her—and made her way to the shady spot while Archie trailed in her wake. When he’d arrived at her door a week prior, she had clocked his bloodshot eyes and sloped shoulders, then put him to work clearing a fallen tree. She knew her son, how the work and time to think would heal him, but after seven days of labor, he was no more ready to face what awaited him in York than the day he’d arrived.
She sat, smoothed her skirts around her ankles in a remarkably demure gesture for a woman who could wrestle a sheep to the ground, and patted the grass at her side before popping open the lemonade and handing it to Archie. “Are you ready to talk now?”
He sat with an undignified grunt and took the lemonade, tossing back half of it in one go. “Why do you think I need to talk?”
She chuckled low in her chest. “Oh my dear boy. You forget who you’re talking to. Is this about your marchioness?”
He scowled as a fresh slash of pain burst across his chest. “She never was mine.”
“I disagree, but I’m not arguing that point now. I know you won her divorce.”
“How?” He’d assumed his mother and younger sisters remained oblivious to the goings-on in London.
“Well, you’re here. If you’d lost, you’d be in a library or your office fighting it. You don’t like to quit.” She shrugged. “You got that from me.”
Damnation. “Yes, we won.”
“And you believed you’d be together after the case ended?”
The incredulity in her tone raised his hackles. “Was I an idiot for thinking we would be? ”
She patted his hand. “No, not a bit. But I suspect you overestimated her.”
He recoiled. “How did I do that?”
Her gaze softened as she watched the sheep, some fluffy and some shorn, frolic on the gently rippling grass. “What she went through… Well.” She huffed. “I don’t have to tell you what that does to a family.”
Archie stilled. In the decade since his father left, they’d never broached the topic, had let it float over them like a scowling, bruise-colored cloud. “She left. She’s away from him now.”
“The scars remain, Archie. Not just for her, but for her children. I know what it took from you. That’s why I told him to—”
She cut off with a caught breath, and Archie swung his attention to his mother. More lines fanned out from her eyes than he’d noticed the last time he’d been to the farm, perhaps because he’d been so caught up in Mari’s proximity. Something akin to anticipation crawled over his skin. A revelation perhaps, that poignant moment of breathless stillness before the ice shattered. “My father? What did you tell him to do?”
His mother leaned back on her hands. “I should have told you this years ago.”
“Mum,” he urged when she trailed off.
She huffed as though irritated with him. A common state, he had to admit. “I knew what he did to you, how you kept him from us. ”
A torturous silence fell between them. She’d known? All that time, when he was certain he’d kept her from harm, at least the worst of it.
When he didn’t speak—another rare occurrence—she continued. “I couldn’t leave without you and your sisters going to a workhouse, so I had to wait. I was saving the entire time. Taking what I could and putting it away until I had enough.” She swallowed, shook her head. “I sent your father away, Archie. One night, when he came after you and… I didn’t have the strength to stop him. I waited until you were asleep and gave him every penny I had, told him to leave, never come back. I didn’t think he would go, but—”
Her voice trembled, and she stopped, looked down at her wringing hands.
“He left us,” he managed. “You sent him away.”
“You were getting stronger, but I knew, eventually, he’d stop holding back.” She stretched her hand out and caught his. “I wouldn’t take the risk.”
His chuckle was dark. “Everything you’d saved… Gone to that bastard.”
“The best purchase I ever made.” A dimple popped in her cheek when she smiled. “I got to watch you and your sisters grow up in the place I did. And now my grandchildren get to play here, too.”
Archie blinked, his mind unable to manage this rearrangement of ideas. “You… Christ, Mum, you—”
“I don’t regret my choice, and I don’t regret staying here. I know you and your sisters think I’m going to fall to my death within those walls—” she nodded towards the farmhouse, “but I want to stay here. You never asked me what I wanted.”
He heard the bitterness in her tone and dropped his chin. “I didn’t. I’m sorry.”
She shushed him. “Don’t be. You meant no harm.”
“But I caused it.”
The weight on his chest shifted, dug a sharp edge into his ribs. “I did the same to Marigold, didn’t I? I never asked what she wanted, I just assumed I knew.”
His mother said nothing as she watched the sheep with an affection he didn’t understand but recognized, nonetheless.
“I shouldn’t have acted without talking to her first,” he said, his breath catching as the words fell from his lips, the knowledge scratching at heart like pernicious thorns.
His mother was watching him, her gaze hot on his profile. “I don’t know exactly what you did wrong, but yes, you should have.”
This knowledge sapped whatever strength remained in his spine, and he fell back against the cool grass, his chest and throat burning. “I’ve lost her.”
His mother leaned back as well, and he wanted to curl up against her, a child seeking refuge in a storm of his own making. “You might have. But I wouldn’t count yourself out yet.”
“Why is that?”
“She’s the one who left. You need to be the one who stays.”