Isabella had not seen Richard since the day of Mrs Tredinnick’s visit, but she had had a letter from his solicitor containing the deeds of the Summer House. It seemed Richard wanted no payment for the house and Isabella was puzzled. Perhaps he considered she owed him nothing, since her father had given him a considerable sum of Helena’s money on her marriage. But why had he so suddenly and completely appeared to relinquish any rights to her and the child? It was not in character and she asked Lisette what she thought.
Lisette, too, felt uneasy. ‘The only reason I can think of, Miss Isabella, is that Sir Richard hopes to turn you by kindness.’
Ownership of the Summer House made all the difference to Isabella. She no longer doubted that Tom would come or send word to her, and she now had peace and a place of her own in which to wait.
She began to wake early in the mornings. She threw the windows open and stretched in sunlight like a cat that scented the coming of spring. She felt almost herself once more, as if she had slept too long or had had some fever but was now recovered.
It was the time of the spring tides and the sea retreated towards the horizon leaving acres of pale sand. When it returned, sliding slyly back in a floodtide the colour of aquamarine, it formed a waveless lake as still as the one in her father’s garden.
The villagers left small baskets of presents in celebration of Thomas’s birth. Isabella felt suddenly weightless, for she had discovered that the fear of something was far more deadly than facing it.
Thomas already had a downy growth of blond hair as soft as feathers. With his striking dark tiger eyes he was beginning to grow beautiful. He had in a short time made slaves of Isabella, Lisette and Anna, who could not bear to hear him cry for more than a second and competed to rush to his crib at the slightest pretence.
Isabella did not want to miss a moment of him. She carried him round the garden, pointing out the emerging bulbs, shading his eyes from the sun and describing the vivid colours of the dying day to him. She rocked him in Lisette’s old rocker chair and they sleepily listened to the birds. She and Lisette bathed him by the fire, watching his tiny legs kick like a little frog in the water.
In the afternoons she rested and Lisette took Thomas down to Anna until Ben finished work. Ben pretended gruff indifference to the child he called, ‘A little Pasha, that’s what thou art, with thy strange dark eyes that seem to know a thing or two.’
Daniel Vyvyan arrived with Charlotte one morning and surprised Isabella in the garden as she rocked Thomas to sleep. Since the child Daniel had been a regular visitor to the Summer House. He, too, was enamoured of his grandchild. Isabella could not help wondering if her child had been a girl whether she would have commanded the same attention. Daniel had always longed for a boy.
Each time Daniel caught sight of Isabella he was struck to the heart; how as the years passed she grew more and more like Helena.
While he could not approve of her conduct, he ached for her vulnerability. She had put herself outside her own society now, but could not quite enter the carver’s. Over the last months he had seen something obsessive in Richard which was not healthy. It lacked dignity and had definitely affected his business judgements, for which Richard used to be renowned. Suddenly handing over the deeds of the Summer House, making it a gift, was not in character with the man of the last few months.
Daniel had heard a rumour and it had upset him greatly.
That day as he looked down upon the child something shifted within him, an instinctive protective emotion for his own blood. When the child opened his eyes and appeared to gaze at Daniel, he was swept by love and regret. If only he had cared more for his daughter instead of abandoning her to an older man so that she was Richard’s responsibility, not his own … What had he been thinking of? Why, she still looked almost a child … He had stolen her childhood. How could he ever undo this damage?
He took his leave of Isabella and his grandson, reflecting sadly on the fact that his grandson carried the shipwright’s name, not his. He said to Charlotte as they took the coastal path home, ‘I would take back the years if I could, Charlotte.’
‘You cannot take them back, my dear, but you can protect Isabella and her small son’s future, can you not?’
Daniel took her arm, thought about this. ‘I can,’ he said, brightening. ‘Indeed I can …’
He looked down upon his wife. ‘Charlotte, I know I have not been an easy man to live with … I resolve to be a better and a kinder man.’
Charlotte smiled. ‘All this … reflection, my dear, comes from looking down on small Thomas?’
‘Perhaps.’ He smiled back. ‘Or perhaps I grow an old and sentimental man.’
He stopped walking. ‘Am I wrong, Charlotte, to no longer wish to condemn my daughter for wronging a decent man? For no longer caring much that she has caused rumour and gossip and will bring up a boy who will not be quite a gentleman?’
‘I believe these things are secondary to your anxiety for your daughter’s future?’
‘Well said, my dear, it is exactly that. I want to believe Richard is behaving well in this gift of the house but, Charlotte, something is wrong. He is too much the gentleman of late. We speak only of business, but he is much preoccupied … It may be that my anxiety is misplaced and he hopes by leaving Isabella alone she will return … but …’
‘You wish her to return to Botallick House, to her husband?’
‘If you had asked me that a short time ago, I would have said, of course. But I have never seen my daughter so content or at peace.’
Charlotte smiled and said softly, ‘And you, my dear Daniel, have the disconcerting ability to shock and surprise. From a lifetime of rectitude and propriety, you have managed today to see only what makes your daughter happy; to suspend judgement and convention, and that is a considerable feat and I believe Helena would applaud you for it.’
‘I have had help,’ Daniel said, equally softly, ‘from a very patient and loving wife.’
‘You know it is freedom as well as her son that gives Isabella her peace?’
‘I do,’ Daniel said and thought: a freedom I denied her by bundling her off to my cold and socially obsessed sister, instead of letting her stay in her own home with Helena’s things around her. Then with my hastily engineered marriage to Magor, attractive only to Isabella because she could leave her aunt’s restrictive and shallow household. A man only three years my junior, who put her on a pedestal and worshipped her unhealthily to the amusement of his peers.
Charlotte was right, he could not undo those years, but he could make sure his daughter and grandson had a future in this changing world.
There was one thing he was sure of. If Tom Welland was anything like his father he would be one of life’s gentlemen. A man with a steady and a loyal heart.