‘You are a good man, war wounded and much troubled by the past.’
‘And you are the soul of tact and diplomacy,’ said Jonathan. ‘Do you think I can’t see the other thoughts that whisper to you behind your eyes?’
‘What do they whisper?’ she asked. He sees me? In response Jonathan only smiled again, took her hand and raised it to his lips, pressing a kiss into her chilly skin. Rachel felt the touch of his mouth right down to her bones, like a burn or a bruise, but sweeter. For a moment she couldn’t remember how to breathe. Because a week or so past he might have killed me, and now he kisses me? she wondered. No, said the echo, only because he kisses you. She suddenly thought how Starling would react to his gesture, and felt a little sick. As if he sensed this, Jonathan dropped her hand at once. He looked at her for one second more, his expression shifting, ambiguous, then he turned to the horizon again.
‘May I ask you something delicate, Mr Alleyn?’ Rachel said weakly.
‘I think you have earned the right to.’
‘What makes you so angry with your mother? I mean, long years living together under… difficult circumstances may well breed discord, I know, but it seems to me that there is more to it than that. That you blame her for something,’ said Rachel. Jonathan folded his arms, shielding himself. He did not break off his stare into the west.
‘Yes, I do blame her. She is the reason… I think. I mean, I can’t know because I know she lies, and does not tell the whole truth even when she deigns to tell me some of it. But she is the reason Alice wrote to me.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Alice’s last letter to me. She wrote to me, a letter that reached me in Brighton.’
I know. Rachel managed only in the last instant not to say this out loud.
‘She said… she said we had to part. That we could never be together, or marry. That it would be an abomination. That was the word she used. Abomination. To describe our love, that had been as strong and blameless as the sun since we were just children. She said… things between us could never be as they had been before. We should not meet again.’
Bridget was right, Rachel knew in that moment. Why else do rich and powerful men sponsor nameless young children? And if Alice had been Lord Faukes’s child, she would have been Jonathan’s aunt. Oh, poor girl, if she found that out. Rachel swallowed, she shut her eyes for a second, and Abigail flickered in the far corner of her mind, ever fainter. Rachel reached for her. Josephine could have been wrong. Perhaps Lord Faukes only adopted her. Found her, and adopted her, she thought desperately.
‘And there was more… I know there was! If only I could remember…’
‘You do not have the letter still?’
‘I can hardly remember that day. I had just got back to Brighton… I was injured, exhausted, half mad, half starved. I can barely remember my journey back to Bathampton at all. It’s like some strange, dark dream. And when I came to myself I didn’t have the letter in my possession. I must have dropped it, or cast it away. But – abomination. I remember that word; I did not dream it.’ He shook his head. ‘It was the retreat back to Corunna, you see… from the moment we marched into Spain, it was near impossible to write, and when I did write there was nobody to take the letters. She had no word from me for weeks and weeks, so she went to Box to see if they had news,’ said Jonathan, shaking his head slowly. ‘Oh, Alice! Why did you do that? If only she hadn’t. She must have thought that they would welcome her – she must have thought that they’d find common ground, in their love and fear for me. She wasn’t to know that my mother – and my grandfather – had rules she couldn’t hope to know about.’
‘So your mother told her something to make her flee?’ How much has he guessed?
‘Yes. When I arrived back to find her gone, they spun me the yarn that she had run away with another, and forsaken me. Mother told me she’d left a note, to my grandfather, to explain and apologise. They said she was a disgrace, a pariah, and I was to forget her.’
‘But you didn’t believe them.’
‘When my mother lies, I can tell. She has lied all her life, and though I can’t discover the truth, still I know she lies.’ His voice had turned hard and angry.
Rachel thought hard, searching for sense in the conflicting tangle of all that she had heard said.
‘But you said to me, some time ago, that you’d found a note from Alice’s… new companion. A note for her, to arrange an assignation.’
‘Yes, I…’ He broke off, and frowned. ‘I’m sure I did. But it was… I was not myself in those days. I have forgotten much… there are stretches of time I can’t account for. Dark spaces. They are one of the things I brought back from Spain with me. Dark spaces.’ He shook his head again, and Rachel felt a chill go through her. The first time I came to read to him, he said those words to me – dark spaces. When he could not remember throttling me. She thought of the brain in its heavy jar, teetering above her head, and the blank, blind look in his eyes. ‘But the note has gone, if I did find it. It has gone. Perhaps I destroyed it. Perhaps I… never saw it. A nightmare, it might have been. Brought on by the lies my mother and my grandfather told.’
‘Starling suggested as much.’
‘What?’
‘I…’ Rachel hesitated, unwilling to reveal the extent of her contact with Starling. ‘We have spoken, Starling and I. She was curious about my face… my resemblance to Alice.’ She held her breath but Jonathan sounded sad rather than angry.
‘Yes. She loved Alice as much as I did.’
‘She does not believe that Alice was keeping other company. That she ran away with anybody else.’
‘I know. She thinks I killed her.’ He looked at Rachel and smiled at the shock on her face. ‘We have had many years in which to fling hurtful and violent things at one another, Starling and I.’
‘But, she also told me…’ Rachel paused again, unsure if it was right or wrong to speak. ‘They had a housekeeper. Bridget Barnes.’
‘Bridget saw Alice speaking with another man, shortly before she vanished,’ said Jonathan.
‘You know already?’ said Rachel. Jonathan was still breathing deeply, his chest rising and falling emphatically.
‘Yes. My grandfather got it from her, and told me. But still, I… won’t condemn her. I know when my mother is lying. Whoever this man was, and why ever Alice went away with him, she can only have thought it was for the best. They must have deceived her in some way. Or perhaps taken her against her will.’
‘But you always seemed so angry with her – you seemed to blame Alice for abandoning you!’
‘And I did, for a time. Perhaps I still do, in darker hours; for I cannot think why she would go, and why she would stay away all this time. What could have been so terrible that we could not have surmounted it, together? So then, I think again – they must have forced her away somehow.’
‘Why would they, when she had been prepared to break it off with you? Your family didn’t want the two of you to wed. Alice went to them and revealed your intentions, and something was said to frighten her. She wrote to you to break it off. Why then would they go further?’
‘I don’t know! Don’t you think I’ve asked myself these things, time and time again? The only people who know are Alice and my mother. One cannot tell me, the other refuses to.’
‘So you think…’ Rachel was finding it hard to speak. Her voice was trapped in her throat, choked by her heart. ‘You think that Alice is still alive?’