The Beloved One (23 page)

There is something very wrong with you, man.  Something that goes a lot deeper than just the loss of your sight.

And with rising dread, he knew what it was.

He had lost confidence in himself.

He, the man who, if he could have chosen one word to describe himself, would have said "capable," was now a bundle of self-doubt, rejected by everyone and everything he'd loved, plagued by the bitter knowledge that he had let people down.   He had thought that if he ever recovered his sight, his insecurities would have been banished along with the darkness.  But now he could see, even if not perfectly, and his confidence in himself was no stronger than it had been last week.

He was frightened.

Very frightened.

And here was Amy beside him, another aspect of his life that spelled a decided and distressing lack of self-control on his part, dragging him down the street and pointing out everything under the sun to him . . .

"Look, Charles, just there through the trees is the Merrimack River, and the fine brig that they're building for Matthew Ashton!  And there is the little boat that we went sailing aboard!  Oh, tell me, Charles, what do you think?"

He swallowed and tried to focus on his surroundings, but already, he could feel the resentment building within him.  Resentment because the only thing he wanted was freedom to rediscover everything that had been denied him for so long; resentment because instead, all he could think of was his shortcomings, his fears, all the mistakes he had made, the people he had hurt, and most frightening of all, of the attraction he felt for this girl breezing along beside him.

"Charles?"

"Yes, Amy, I am looking . . . indeed, I am overwhelmed."

He tried to see beyond his own inner torment.  He tried to take delight in the way the sunlight came through all the leaves of the maples overhead, illuminating each fragile vein, making each leaf glow from within; the way the marsh grasses all bent beneath the hand of a gentle breeze; the way the sun drew shadows beneath each clapboard of the timber-framed houses that lined this street.  And since when had water showed so many variations of blue, from deepest azure to soft, pewter gray?  He looked at everything — at the ships and boats in the river, the spartan New England churches whose spires rose majestically above this bustling seaport, the sun and salt-beaten piers, the humble colonial folk all going about their business in homespuns, cottons, woolens and calicos. No priceless painting in Lucien's collection back at Blackheath Castle could rival the beauty of this world that Charles had rediscovered.

And no beauty presented to his starving eyes could rival that of the girl who walked beside him.

He wanted her.

He could not help but want her, even though her drab clothes did nothing to flatter her toasted-honey complexion, even though Lucien would never, not in a million years, approve of her as his wife, even though his heart was still sore from the wounds Juliet had torn in it — which was reason enough not to want any woman ever again.

But he could no longer make his mind obey reason.

And worst of all, he knew that Amy wanted him as well.

~~~~

That night at the supper table, as everyone celebrated the partial return of his sight, asking him what he thought of this or that, asking him how it felt to be able to see once more, and, in the case of the sisters, posing, preening and doing everything within their power to gain his attention, Charles had had eyes only for Amy.  She had had eyes only for him.  The tension between them, the force of the desire each had for the other, was like an invisible thread growing tauter with every veiled look, every furtive glance.  She watched him when she thought he wasn't looking; he did the same, noting that her dark gaze was mischievous one moment, laughing the next, and, on those occasions when she thought herself unobserved, wistful and adoring and maybe even a little sad.  But Charles
had
been watching.  Wishing.  And wanting, more than anything, to unwrap those coils of dark, shining hair from around her head; to loosen and comb them out with his fingers; to find out just how long that hair really was —

And to see it spread out on a pillow beneath her.

By the time the evening ended, Charles was in hell.

Long after everyone went to bed, he left the house and walked down to the riverfront that he had visited so often in his prison of darkness.  Under the faint glow of moonlight, he could see the broad surface of the Merrimack, and the low, dark hills of Salisbury, holding up the sky beyond it.  The stars looked down on him, twinkling brightly, making him feel that there was no one else in this world but himself.

No one else in this world but himself.

The answer came to him. 

He had never known the bitter taste of failure, but he knew it now — and he could not cope with it.  He could not cope with its aftertaste of disappointment, he could not cope with the thought of letting people down, and he could not cope with the physical and emotional reactions he'd had to Juliet, and now felt himself having toward Amy.  They were feelings he could not control, feelings that made him feel weak and vulnerable and overwhelmed.  As a man accustomed to having control over everything, it was a horrible and frightening thing to be buffeted about by such a mixture of passions.  He was like Mira's boat that day the rudder had snagged and the tide had swept them nearly out to sea.

He was not the man he had once been.  His confidence in himself, which he had always taken for granted, was gone.  He would not regain it here in Newburyport.  He would not regain it in Boston.  He would not regain it in England, where Lucien's disappointment in him would probably end up killing him.

And he could not stay here and risk hurting Amy as he had hurt Juliet.

As soon as he was sure she wasn't pregnant, he would put a saddle on Contender, and go away.

Far away.

Where he hoped that God, and introspection, and most of all distance from all temptations and hurts, would restore him to the man he had once been.

Chapter 16

October, 1776

Nearly a year and a half had gone by since Charles had left Newburyport, and for those he left behind, he seemed to have vanished without a trace.

He did not go back to England.  He made no attempt to contact the family, the army, or the fiancée who had rejected him.  Instead, he had bade a solemn goodbye to the Leightons, thanking them for all that they'd done for him and steeling himself against the tears in Amy's eyes before finally riding away, perhaps never to return.

He'd had no idea where he was headed.  He had simply let Contender carry him where he might, looking for a place where he could come to terms with all that had happened to him, retreat from society, and avoid the hurt and suffering that relationships and attachments had brought him.  Eventually — perhaps by accident but more likely by some hidden design — he'd found himself in Maine, the vast wilderness where Juliet had been born and raised.  There, he had fallen in with a pair of French fur trappers and made a humble, lonely living.  There, in the endless forests of cedar, pine and fir, where granite boulders were the size of houses, and the trees were so densely packed that day became night, he had thought he might find peace.  That his physical skills and mental resources would be tested such as to prove himself capable once more.  That he would be able to forgive himself for all the mistakes he had made, for the disappointments which had reduced him to this wretched, insecure shell of the quietly confident, supremely capable man he had always believed himself to be.

And that there, if anywhere, he would forget about Amy.

But no.  About the only thing he regained was, eventually, the full use of his sight. 

For Charles, an aristocrat raised to pomp and privilege in a gentle, mild country, had not been made for the brutally harsh climate of Maine.  He had cursed its summer, filled with vicious swarms of mosquitoes, midges, and biting flies that plagued him both day and night.  He had shivered his way through the longest and most bitterly cold winter he had ever known.  He had lain awake in the darkness beneath the stars, his flintlock cradled in his arms, unable to sleep as he listened to the endless and eerie howling of wolves.  And twice, because he had little sense of direction in the vast woods, he had to be rescued by the grinning Frenchmen when he didn't return to their camp by dark — a biting humiliation which stung him as a man, as a soldier, and as an Englishman.

The trappers tried to dissuade him and send him "back where he belonged," but Charles, angry with himself for his inability to adapt, stubbornly persevered.  He lasted through another Maine summer, learning to live off a diet of venison and berries and, when they entered a town and sold their pelts, enjoying the finer things like decent meals eaten off equally decent china, before venturing off into the forest once more.  And each time they left one of those little outposts of civilization behind and returned to the wilderness, Charles felt an increasingly larger part of him straining to stay behind.  Wanting only to remain in those warm, cheerful taverns drinking cider and sugared coffee, instead of huddling around a smoking campfire slapping mosquitoes or trying to stay warm.  Wanting only to sleep in a decent wood-framed bed with a feather or even a corn-husk mattress, instead of wrapped in a blanket with pine needles and moss and granite beneath him.  And as the days began growing cold at the obscenely early date of mid-September, and he found himself hating this bearded, buckskinned, shamefully unkempt creature that he had become, he realized that clinging to this venture just for the sake of his pride was nothing short of insane.

When they reached Bangor, Charles retrieved Contender from the farmer who had been boarding the horse for him, bid a fond farewell to the two Frenchmen and headed south, still wearing his buckskins and a bitter cloak of defeat.  He blamed himself for yet another failure in a life that, of late, had been filled with nothing but.  He didn't know what to do, where to go.  But he knew that in March, the English army had finally evacuated Boston and gone to New York instead, and so it was there that he decided he would go, both anticipating a return to a life he knew, and knowing, deep inside, that he no longer had what it took to be an officer.

~~~~

It took him several days to reach Falmouth.  Portsmouth, whose inhabitants were busy fitting out privateers against his own country's navy.

Newburyport.

His good sense told him he ought to just take the ferry across the river and continue on, but when he saw Newburyport's white steeples rising high above the gold, scarlet and orange trees of autumn, he thought of Sylvanus, and he thought of Amy, and he thought that he really owed it to them all to stop.  Surely he would be able to control himself around Amy now — after all, it had been a year and a half since he'd last seen her.  His feelings for her had probably faded.  And, for all he knew, some lucky sod had married her and given her a fine family by now.

Or so he hoped.

It was growing dark by the time he finally caught the ferry at Salisbury and crossed over the Merrimack to Newburyport.  As he reached the shore, he could not help but remember how it had felt to make love to Amy on these very banks.  He could not help but wonder what she was doing right now, at this very moment.  Would she be happy to see him again?  Angry that he had left in such haste?

With no small degree of trepidation, he rode Contender through the darkening streets.  Work in the shipyards had ceased for the night.  A church bell was tolling out the hour.  Most people were home eating their suppers, but Charles knew he did not pass unobserved.  Curtains moved at windows that glowed with candlelight.  A solitary carriage passed, slowing so that its occupants could get a better look at him.  A few last people hurried home from market, and a group of swaggering, already-drunk sailors eyed him with a mixture of distrust and curiosity as he rode past.  One of them called out a challenge, ridiculing his frontiersman's clothes and heavily bearded face.

The Charles of old would never have allowed such a challenge to go unanswered.

The new Charles continued quietly on.

He rode through

Market Square and headed up Fish Street.  The scent of wood smoke lay on the cold, brittle air.  There would probably be a frost tonight.  As he approached the Wolfe Tavern there on the right, he found himself longing for something hot to drink, and it was all he could do not to dismount and go inside for a mug of mulled cider or even black coffee.  But passions against England were far stronger now than they'd been when he had last been here, and he would instantly damn himself just by opening his mouth.  He was an outcast, a man who no longer belonged anywhere, and as he came up to the tavern, the sound of revelry within made something inside of him ache and mourn for the days when he had been the most popular person in Ravenscombe . . . the most popular member of the de Montforte family . . . the most popular commander in the King's Own.

No more.

Never again.

He was just passing the tavern when across the street, a sound caught his attention.

It was a woman, cloaked and hooded, just coming out of an apothecary shop.  Charles saw the pale oval of her face in the gathering gloom as she glanced about her; and then she hastily crossed the street, and, a parcel in her arms, hurried along as fast as she could.

The door to the tavern opened and a group of sailors, their voices raised in drunken song, stumbled out into the night.

"Bugger me arse, if it ain't the Leighton half-breed!"

They had seen her. 
Amy.

She picked up her skirts and began to run.

The sailors were drunk, but not so foxed that they couldn't walk.  Couldn't run.  And run after her they did.

"Oy, girl!  Come to ol' Jacko here!  I'll show ye those legs ain't meant for runnin!"

Charles sent Contender galloping forward.  Amy darted into an alley.  The sailors, led by a towering, bowlegged wretch with a long black pigtail, charged in after her.