Annabelle Graveson brought a large case of family letters and sketches of Evangeline when she came to Falder and the rather stiff woman who had given them dinner at Longacres all those weeks ago was completely changed. Today she held out her arms to Emerald and held her tightly, tears rolling down pale cheeks and sobs racking her body.
‘I have been wanting to do this from the first second of meeting you again, my love,’ she said when she had finally collected herself, her fingers entwined about Emerald’s as they sat down.
‘Again?’ She had no memory of this woman in her life at all.
Blowing her nose soundly, Annabelle made an effort to continue. ‘When you were five you came back to England and your mother and father brought you and your brother up to Knutsford to our house there.’
Emerald smiled. ‘I remember my mother gave me this locket. I remember a house high on a hill overlooking a river and a young boy…’
‘Simon. My oldest child. He died of the ague in the Christmas of that same year. And then Evangeline was taken from us the following Easter.’
‘She came home to England?’
‘She was ill, Emerald. Ill with the depression of spirit, and drink was the only thing that made everything bearable.’
‘Because she had killed my brother.’
Annabelle looked shocked. ‘Beau told you that?’
‘No. I remember it, though. James’s broken body and my mother drunk against a wall with blood on her face.’
‘He drowned, my dear. He wandered too near the sea and drowned. Evangeline jumped from the rocks into the water to try to save him and she never quite got over it when she could not. Your father sent her back to England to recover.’
‘But she did not take me with her.’
‘She could not take you. She hardly knew how to care for herself and Beau promised that he would bring you to England within the month. When the storms came early he had to wait and by then it was all too late. Your mother had gone back to her Maker and the first easy spoils of piracy had come Beau’s way. There was no going back after that. I often wondered, if she had lived, would things have been different, though. I think her death took the heart from him.’
Emerald sat still and sifted the information through her mind, trying to make some sort of sense of all the recollections. Not a mad drunk woman after all, but a soul-saddened mother who had lost a child. For the first time ever she saw the faint ghost of Evangeline, smiling, beckoning, loving. Evangeline. A woman who had been transplanted into the tropics where the humidity had eaten at both her soul and her sanity. A fragile English rose blighted in the wilder soils of the Caribbean.
Now forgiveness crept in over anger, and an unfamiliar peace chased hard on the heels of a softer acceptance.
James. Beau. Evangeline. A family again in the hereafter. There was a rightness about it that made sense.
The relief was all encompassing.
When Annabelle handed her a small image of her parents, she saw exactly where it was that she had come from. Red-blonde curls and laughing turquoise eyes and dimples. Her mother. Her. Her fingers tightened on the likeness and she was pleased when Annabelle said that she might keep it.
‘As family, you know that you would be most welcome to come to Longacres to live with me. With Miriam, of course and your little sister. Asher has told me she is a musical child?’
Emerald wanted to say yes, wanted to hold on to an offer that was both generous and unexpected. But she also knew that to be less than five miles from Falder would be a torture. To see Asher and not be with him, to watch from a distance the milestones in his life. A wife. Children. Grandchildren.
No, she knew absolutely and irrevocably that she could not do it.
‘I thank you sincerely for your invitation, but at the moment…’ She shook her head, finding it hard to convey in words the depth of her thanks.
‘I understand things may be difficult, but, if you should change your mind for any reason, my offer would still stand. You will always be welcome at Longacres.’
When Annabelle had gone Emerald walked across the fields of Falder and towards the water, the breeze on her face cooling and the distant ocean beckoning from afar, a silver thread of ribbon. She mulled over Annabelle’s offer and balanced it against the chancy hope of finding treasure. Perhaps she could take up the promise of a home for Miriam and Ruby…
She shook her head. Lord, to leave this place would be a wrench she could hardly bear the thinking of. Tucking her curls behind her ears, she pressed on towards the ocean. The tight squeeze of tears blurred her vision.
They met each other at the stream that bound the Wellingham land to the west before the road to Rochcliffe. Asher was on the same horse he always rode, a large black stallion with a streak of wildness in his blood. Like his owner, she thought, and waited as he dismounted. She knew he had returned to Falder very late in the night; she had heard the turn of wheels across the courtyard cobbles and heard the commotion the incoming vehicle had caused among the myriad servants.
This afternoon a quieter demeanour wreathed him as he said, ‘Annabelle told me that she had talked to you. She said that she had asked you to stay at Longacres with her, but that you had refused. She was at pains to understand why.’
‘I need to go home to my sister.’
I need to get as far away from you as possible. From your eyes laced with gold, from the responsibility that sits so measured on your shoulders, from the promise of love that could only turn to hate, from the memory of your hands on my body in the night.
A quick glance at him made her blush.
‘I want to show you something,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘It’s this way.’
The thought flicked through Emerald’s mind that perhaps he had followed her and had waited until she had come down into this valley. But why would he do that? He had made it plain that he did not want her company.
The thickness of trees evened out into farmland as they went, and ten minutes later a sharp outcrop of rock materialised above them.
‘Here.’ He beckoned and cut through a wedge of brambles. On the other side there was the mouth of a cave, hidden from view both by the hedges around it and by a large slice of rock that had sheared off from above.
She waited with him without talking for a moment by the entrance so that their eyes became accustomed to the dull light inside. And then she saw what it was that he wanted to show her. The walls on the far side were covered with figures, in red and ash and brown. Scenes of hunting and fighting and family, a thousand years of history hidden among the quiet hills of England.
‘Taris and I discovered this place when we were boys. I’ve never told another person of its existence.’
‘But you would tell me? Why?’ Nothing made sense.
‘When you were sick you told me your secrets. I felt it only fair to tell you some of mine.’
‘Do you come here often?’ She looked around, guessing the answer even before he gave it. A fur pelt lay on a raised platform constructed of wood in the middle of the room and a stool with a candle on top was beside it.
‘After I came home and found Melanie had died, I made a bed down here. It was the only place I could gain a little sleep and at first—’ he stopped ‘—at first it was the only place that I did not hear the voices.’
‘Voices?’
‘The voices in the compound at night when men were taken to…hell.’ She could not imagine that she had heard him right until she saw the gleam of moisture in his eyes.
‘Were you taken?’
‘Yes.’
Anger winded her and then pain, for him, for them, for the truth and lies, and for lives changed by the curious whims of circumstance.
He held his right hand up to the light. The hand that was missing two fingers. ‘It was a game to them, the mutilation of bodies, and some men lost a lot more than I did.’
‘It is why you do not sleep?’
‘Did not sleep. When you were in my bed I slept.’
The power of his words melted away restraint and she moved forward.
‘Sleep with me, then. Here.’ She did not waver, did not think, did not let the future take anything away from the sheer honesty of this moment, and when his thumb came up to trace the line of her jaw she closed her eyes and just felt.
Felt his hands on her bodice and her skirt. Felt the cold of air and then the warmth of fur. Felt the hard planes of his body and the hot thrust of his manhood. Close. Closer. Inside. Touching her heart. Taking her from the quiet dark confines of this place to heaven and back again and all under the watchful eyes of ancestors drawn in blood.
It was later, much later. Asher had lit a candle and pulled his jacket across them, the folds of wool warm in the chill of the early evening. Silence enveloped them, and timelessness, her cheek soft against the rise and fall of his chest.
‘I think I know why you refused Annabelle’s invitation when she offered you a home.’
She frowned and leaned back so that she could look at him.
‘It’s clairvoyancy you have the knack of, then?’ She tried to sit up, but he would not let her.
‘No, merely sense and reason. I think that you are afraid of staying here.’
His guess was so near the mark she was silent.
‘And you are afraid of staying here because you are so much more used to running, from your father, from the law, from your enemies. And the fact that in this little corner of England there could finally be a home for you is tempered with even more risk because you are Emerald Sandford, the pirate’s daughter, and you are not prepared to chance it turning sour.’
Restraint broke as she wriggled out from the circle of his arms. ‘That’s right. I am afraid to stand by and let you see just how hated my family name is, to know just how many people Beau stole from or hurt or killed, because then, in place of what I see in your eyes now, would come something else and I don’t want that something else. Not from you, Asher, not when I have had this.’ The cold air in the cave against her nakedness made her shiver.
‘Then fight them, damn it.’
‘No. Don’t you see? Don’t you know? When life disappointed both my parents, they dissolved into pieces.’ She was shouting so loud now that it hurt the soft tissue in the back of her throat. ‘Pieces that tore apart reason and left only chaos. I feel that chaos inside me, sometimes, and wonder if I am just the same. What if I stay and ruin you and your family and Annabelle and Miriam…?’
In reply he stood and lifted her up against him, facing her towards a mirror she had not noticed before.
‘What do you see?’ he asked.
She did not understand.
‘Small expressions, the line of your jaw, the colour of your eyes, the way your hair falls down just here, the mark of a knife on your brow.’ His finger swept up and pushed back her heavy fringe. ‘We are all the sum of what has come before us but we are also the beginning of what will come next. And in the middle stands choice, Emerald. The choice to be exactly who you want to become…here.’ His hand fell to the place above her heart and she could feel the beat of her body echoed in his.
‘You truly believe that?’
‘I do.’ The gold in his eyes was strong, intense. ‘And it was you who taught me to do so with your courage and conviction. Together we could weather anything.’
‘Together?’
‘I will come with you to Jamaica to fetch your sister if you will give me a promise.’
She nodded and waited to see what he would say next.
‘I want you to promise that you will return to Falder with me.’
‘Return?’
‘I won’t let you go, Emerald. Ever. No matter what.’
The tears in the back of her eyes welled up when he drew her back into the bed beside him for in her acceptance of his lovemaking she knew that she would stay here in England as his mistress. And she had never quite imagined herself in such a role.