The week that followed was surreal, a lost moment in time. Not just because of the nights she spent with Liam, when they lost themselves in each other. Nights, when not only their bodies met, but also their minds. When they spoke for hours of books, philosophy, politics...even sometimes the estate. She amused him with tales of her old masters, and he her with his boyhood pranks. In the firelight, in those short hours they spent together, they became friends, lovers and equals.
Though it did not escape her notice that neither seemed ready to fling open wide the doors to their souls again. To discuss things which truly mattered.
The house itself was quiet. A strange sort of normality resumed after Epiphany, a return to chores and work, albeit a slow return. Everyone was in high spirits, brought together by the celebrations. It was as if they’d come to accept that they were family, and that, for a time any social conventions which separated and dictated their lives, could be cast aside. Though they all knew, soon this extraordinary time would come to an end.
Rebecca was perhaps the most acutely aware of the impending return to life as it should be. Every night, as she left Liam’s room, she said a silent prayer, thanking whatever powers above for another day, another moment at Thornhallow.
That first night, standing in the cold darkness of the corridor, Rebecca had nearly been overwhelmed by a sudden awareness of what she’d just done. The dread, the fear of what might come next, had crept up on her as the sun had crept towards the horizon and she’d listened intently for any trace of the others.
But then, it had all seemed...inevitable. So perfectly right.
The realisation she’d come to in Liam’s embrace—that she had fallen in love with him—tormented her. Though it hadn’t prevented her from returning to him, however aware she was of dooming herself to more suffering.
By allowing herself to give in to temptation, she’d condemned herself to heartbreak, and a pale imitation of a life. There was no question that she’d never loved a man as she did Liam—no question she would never love again after they parted, which they inevitably would. Nothing could ever come close to what she felt; there was a calm certainty in her heart about that. Even though she wished she could believe otherwise, convince herself that it was only the pang of first love every girl must experience.
But she was not a girl. She was a woman who knew her heart and soul too well.
And tonight, as she lay prone on the pile of blankets and pillows they had made before the hearth, Liam beside her, staring into the flames, her soul told her something else.
This is your last night.
Liam took a lock of her hair, and let it flow through his fingers like water. Torn from her melancholy reverie, she turned and offered him a smile. She would miss him. Miss this. Not simply the comfort, the pleasure, even the laughter they shared. But this connection. It seemed so natural to lie here with him, naked. There was no shame, no discomfort, no fear.
No, when he looked at her as he did now, lazily and yet reverently, his head propped up on his hand as he lay on his side, twirling her hair, she felt nothing but... Peace.
‘What is this for?’ Liam asked softly, his fingers trailing over the roman numerals inked on her shoulder. ‘1822?’
‘The year I became a housekeeper. I’d worked so hard to make something of myself. And finally I had. I wanted to mark the occasion.’
‘Quite right,’ he agreed seriously. ‘So young...an extraordinary achievement.’
Slowly, Liam bent over and kissed the numbers, his breath seeping into her bones, marking her in a far more eternal way than any other caress. She shivered slightly as his fingers moved to skim over her ribs to the head of wheat inked there.
‘And this?’
‘For my father,’ she whispered, not missing the flash of sadness in his eyes. ‘He used to pluck one, and roll it between his hands, to see if it was ready. He would let me do it, too, not that I knew how to tell the difference. But it smelled of him.’
‘You loved him very much.’
‘Yes.’
Envy shone along with regret in his eyes as his lips covered every inch of the wheat. She understood. Her father had been everything to her, all she’d known, all that had been home for her. And his...
Had not.
‘What about this one?’ he asked with a small smile, drawing the lines of the robin between her shoulder blades.
‘The first man I...knew was called Robin. A sweet fellow, a footman in the second house I served. He was gentle, and never made me feel...less, for having been with him.’
‘Hmm.’
Rebecca laughed when she was granted a dark look from Liam, and the robin extra attention from his lips. Moving down her body, he found the rose on her hip, and raised a brow.
‘My mother,’ Rebecca said, surprised by the depth of emotion that filled her heart then. ‘She had a rose bush by the kitchen window. I think it was her most prized possession. It’s all I had of hers. Papa...he parted with all else but her ring. It was to be for my wedding. My uncle took it and sold it.’
Liam’s jaw clenched as he stroked the rose, and the display of anger on her behalf was heart-warming.
‘The roses here were my mother’s.’
‘Was she like Hal?’
Liam nodded. ‘I remember...her light. The warmth of her touch. Like the sun on a spring day. And I remember it dimming. Day by day, until she was gone. I was twelve when my father sent her to a sanatorium. He announced her death over breakfast two months later, as if it was the latest winner at the races.’
Tears pricked Rebecca’s eyes as Liam reverently kissed the rose, then lay down beside her, his mind clearly very far away.
‘How did you get this?’ she asked, trailing her fingers across the scar on his brow. If this was well and truly her last night with him, she wanted as much of him as he would give. To keep, to hold, to treasure.
Always.
The last thing Liam wanted to do was answer.
Beyond his confession of what had happened to Hal, they hadn’t indulged in any of this soul-bearing business, and he had been grateful for that. It was enough—too much, really—to share the nights with her, to be with her, without opening doors which had been long closed and would do better remaining so.
Wrong.
At every turn she had prised pieces of his soul from him, and he’d felt better for it.
So why not now?
Rather than answer his own question, he answered hers. ‘I got that the night I decided to sail across the sea,’ he sighed.
He felt her penetrative gaze studying him, waiting, giving him the space as always, to back down or give more. Give her everything.
‘After I left Thornhallow, I just kept...trying to get further away. I crossed to Amsterdam, made my way to Frankfurt, Rome, Lyon... Drinking, gambling away what money I made. I fought in prize fights. Worked in a vineyard near Bordeaux for a while, served as a night guard for a brothel in Milan. I wanted to forget. All of it. Myself. I did...things I am not proud of.’
He turned to face her, willing her to understand that though he might not be the monster others purported, neither was he some tragic hero.
‘I have marks on my soul.’
‘As do we all,’ she said.
Liam nodded, the weight he had been ignoring—that of her potential repudiation of his life and his actions—lifting from his heart.
‘I ended up blind drunk, beaten, in a gutter in Brest. Still unable to forget. The crew of a ship bound for Boston passed by, Angus among them. And he stopped. I asked him once, why, and he told me he’d recognised the look in my eyes. He’d had it when he lost his wife. He convinced me to take a place onboard, working for my passage, and luckily the captain agreed that, despite my state that day, I would be useful.’
‘Did you find any peace in Columbia?’
‘Yes, I suppose, for a while,’ he said, slightly taken aback at the question, as though it were somehow more personal than what he’d just revealed. ‘I found a measure of freedom, and in that, some peace. Life was harsh, and hard. But knowing your survival depended on yourself and those with you... Being so close to nature... It felt primal. Natural. But when I found Angus, and Peter, dead...’
Liam shook his head, hoping to chase away the images he could never erase from his mind.
‘What little peace I’d found, it shattered.’ The realisation he had never voiced, never acknowledged, became real in that moment. ‘I wanted my life as it was then to be my life always. I tried so hard to convince myself it was right, that it was everything I wanted... I refused to see the violence, the greed, the death and the suffering there. It was to be my utopia, where I became myself, with no expectations. When I found their bodies, it was as if a veil was lifted. I saw the world as it was, truly, and I saw myself as I was. Not a new man, but the same man who had run all those years ago. Still heartbroken, still...incomplete.’
‘Not even the other side of the world was enough?’
‘I remember standing at the edge of a lake one night,’ he breathed, the image as clear as ever in his mind. The words tumbled from him, as if, yet again, with her mere presence Rebecca coaxed them from him. ‘Some months after arriving in Columbia. The water was black ice, surrounded by pines, and there were the tallest mountains you can imagine, capped with snow that seemed like beacons in the darkness. And the stars... There were more stars than sky. It felt like if you reached up, you could touch them. It was the most awesome sight I’d ever witnessed. And yet...I couldn’t help but think of Thornhallow. Of the way the sunrise turns the heather pink, and the twilight erases the boundary between Heaven and Earth.’
‘Why did you leave it to rot, then? If you love this place so?’
‘I don’t love Thornhallow. I hate it. All I can feel is pain, my father’s cruelty, and it is as suffocating as it was then. It’s the land. It’s in my blood. My soul.’
Rebecca nodded, and he knew she felt it, too.
‘With time...new memories... If you found a measure of happiness here...perhaps, you would not feel it so.’
I don’t feel it so...not anymore.
Not since she’d come here. Since she had infused her own light into the walls, as if chasing away his father’s darkness, his own darkness, and the terrible memories of Hal and his mother. He wanted to tell her that, to tell her...so much more.
Instead he nodded, wound himself around her and kissed her, willing the unspoken words to somehow flow into her heart.
It is with you I have finally found peace. And myself.
Dawn was still hours away when Rebecca crept out of Liam’s room, wishing as she had every day that she could stay there, basking in the warmth and tenderness of his arms forever. But that, too, was an impossible dream.
As she slid back into her rooms, her body and heart aching, demanding at least a few hours of rest before the coming day, Rebecca could not shake the feeling that everything was about to change. That the moment she’d dreaded—the moment when everything came abruptly to an end, when the world demanded things be righted—was fast approaching.
That was your last night. You know it in your heart.