The Escape (Survivor's Club) (3 page)

“On the contrary,” the duke said. “I looked into your eyes the day you were brought here, Benedict, and knew you were too stubborn to die. I almost regretted it. I have never seen anyone suffer more pain than you. Your younger brother assumed, then, that the title and fortune and Kenelston itself would soon be entirely his?”

“It must have been a severe blow to him,” Ben said with a rueful smile, “when I lived. I am sure he has never forgiven me, though that makes him sound malicious, and really he is not. When I am away from home, he can carry on as he has since our father died. When I am there, he no doubt feels threatened—and with good reason. Everything is mine by law, after all. And if Kenelston is not to be my home, where
will
be?”

That was the question that had been plaguing him for three years.

“My home is full of female relatives who love me to distraction,” Vincent said. “They would breathe for me if they could. They do everything else—or so it seems. And soon—I have already heard the rumblings of it—they are going to be forcing potential brides on me because a blind man must need a wife to hold his hand through all the dark years that remain to him. My situation is a little different from yours, Ben, but there are similarities. One of these days I am going to have to put my foot down and become master of my own house. But how to do it is the problem. How do you talk firmly to people you love?”

Ben sighed and then chuckled. “You are exactly right, Vince,” he said. “Perhaps you and I are just a couple of dithering weaklings. But Calvin has a wife and four children to provide for, while I have no one besides myself. And he is my brother. I do care for him, even if we were never close. It was a sheer accident of birth that made him the third-born son and me the second.”

“You feel g-guilty for having inherited the baronetcy, Ben?” Flavian asked.

“I never expected it, you see,” Ben explained. “There was no one more robust or full of life than Wallace. Besides, I never wanted to be anything but a military officer. I certainly never expected Kenelston to be mine. But it is, and I sometimes think that if I could simply go there and immerse myself in running the estate, perhaps I would finally feel settled and would proceed to live happily ever after.”

“But your home is occupied by other people,” Hugo said. “I would go in there for you if you wanted, Ben, and clear them all out. I would scowl and look tough, and they would toddle off without so much as a squeal of protest. But that is not the point, is it?”

Ben joined in the general laughter.

“Life was simple in the army,” he said. “Brute force solved all problems.”

“Until Hugo w-went out of his head,” Flavian said, “and Vince lost his sight and every b-bone in your legs got crushed, Ben, not to mention most of the bones in the rest of your body too. And Ralph had all his friends wiped off the m-map and his pretty looks ruined when someone slashed his face, and Imogen was forced to make a d-decision no one ought ever to have to make and live with her choice f-forever after, and George lost everything that was dear to him even without leaving Penderris. And half the w-words I want to speak get stuck on the way out of my mouth as though something in my brain needs a d-dab of oil.”

“Right,” Ben said. “War is not the answer. Life only seemed simpler in those days. But I am keeping you all from your beauty rest. You will all be wishing me to Hades. I am sorry, I did not mean to unburden myself of all these petty problems.”

“You did so because we invited you to, Benedict,” Imogen reminded him, “and because this is precisely why we gather here every year. Unfortunately, we have not been able to offer you any solutions, have we? Except for Hugo’s offer to remove your brother and his family from your home by force—which fortunately was not a serious suggestion.”

“It never matters, though, Imogen, does it?” Ralph said. “No one can ever solve anyone else’s problems. But it always helps just to unburden oneself to listeners who
really
listen and know that glib answers are worthless.”

“You are depressed, then, Benedict,” the duke said. “Partly because you have accepted the permanent nature of the limitations of your own body but do not yet know where this acceptance will lead you, and partly because you have not yet accepted that you are no longer
the middle brother of three but the elder of two, with certain decisions to make that you never expected. I do not fear that you will despair. It is not in your nature. I believe my ears are still ringing from the curse words you used to bellow out when the pain threatened to get past your endurance in the early days. You could have achieved the peace of death then, if you had only had the good sense to despair. You have only upward to go, then. You have, perhaps, rested upon a plateau overlong. Moving off it can be a frightening thing. It can also be an exciting challenge.”

“Have you been rehearsing that speech all d-day, George?” Flavian asked. “I feel we ought to stand and applaud.”

“It was quite spontaneous, I assure you,” the duke said. “But I am rather pleased with it. I had not realized I was so wise. Or so eloquent. It must be time for bed.” He laughed with the rest of them.

Ben positioned his canes and went through the slow rigmarole of getting to his feet again while everyone else stood.

Nothing had changed in the last hour, he thought as he made his slow way upstairs to his bedchamber, Flavian at his side, the others a little ahead of them. Nothing had been solved. But somehow he felt more cheerful—or perhaps merely more hopeful. Now that he had said it aloud—that his disabilities were permanent and he must carve out a wholly new life for himself—he felt more able to
do
something, to create a new and meaningful future, even if he had no idea yet what it would be.

But at least the immediate future was taken care of and did not involve one of those increasingly awkward and depressing visits to his own home. He would start out for County Durham in the north of England tomorrow and stay for a while with his sister. He looked forward
to it. Beatrice, five years his senior, had always been his favorite sibling. While there with her, he would give some serious thought to what he was going to do with the rest of his life.

He would make some plans, some decisions. Something definite and interesting and challenging. Something to lift him out of the depression that had hung over him like a gray cloud for far too long.

There would be no more drifting.

There was really something rather exhilarating about the thought that the rest of his life was his for the making.

S
amantha McKay was restless. She stood at the window of the sitting room at Bramble Hall, her home in County Durham, and drummed her fingertips on the windowsill. Her sister-in-law was lying on the daybed in her room upstairs, incapacitated yet again by a sick headache. Matilda never had ordinary headaches. They were always either
sick
headaches or migraines, sometimes both.

They had been sitting here together quite companionably just half an hour ago, Samantha stitching at her embroidery, Matilda repairing the lace edging of a tablecloth. Samantha had remarked on what a fine day it was at last, even if the sun was not actually shining. She had suggested casually that perhaps they should go out for a walk. She had almost turned craven and left it at that, but she had pressed onward. Perhaps, she had suggested, they should walk out beyond the confines of the park today. Although the grounds surrounding the house were always referred to as the park, such a word glamorized what was in effect merely a large garden. It was perfectly adequate for a sedate stroll among the flower beds or for sitting out in on a warm day, but it did not offer nearly sufficient scope for real exercise.

And real exercise was what Samantha had begun to crave more than anything else she could think of. If she did not get out beyond house and garden soon and walk,
really
walk, she would … Oh, she would scream
or throw herself down on the floor and drum her heels and have a major tantrum. Well, she would
feel
like doing all those things even though she supposed she would not actually
do
anything more extravagant than sigh and yearn and plot. She was nearly desperate, though.

Matilda, predictably, had looked reproachful, not to mention shocked and sorrowful. It was not—or so she had proceeded to explain—that she did not feel in need of a good walk herself. A true lady must, however, learn to master her base desires when she was in deep mourning. A true lady kept herself decently confined to her home and took the air in the privacy of her own park, shielded behind its walls from the critical eyes of the prying world. It was certainly not seemly for a lady in mourning to be seen out
enjoying
herself. Or to be seen at all for that matter, except by her close relatives and servants inside her own home and by her neighbors at church.

Captain Matthew McKay, Matilda’s brother and Samantha’s husband of seven years, had died four months before Matilda delivered herself of this speech. He had died after suffering for five years from the wounds he had sustained as an officer during the Peninsular Wars. He had needed constant tending during those years, or, rather, he had
demanded
constant tending, and the role of nurse had fallen to Samantha’s almost exclusive lot since he would admit no one else to the sickroom except his valet and the physician. She had hardly known what it was to sleep for a whole night or to have more than an hour here and there outside the sickroom during the day. She had almost never had the chance to go beyond the garden walls. Even a stroll in the garden had been a rare treat.

Matilda had come to Bramble Hall for the final couple of months of her brother’s life, after Samantha had
written to her father-in-law, the Earl of Heathmoor, at Leyland Abbey in Kent, to inform him that the physician believed the end was near. But the burden of care upon Samantha’s shoulders had not been lightened, partly because by that time Matthew really had needed her, and partly because he could not stand the sight of Matilda and always told her quite bluntly when she appeared in his room to take herself off and keep her Friday face out of his sight.

Samantha had been very close to the point of collapse by the time Matthew died. She had been exhausted and numb and dispirited. Her life had felt suddenly empty and colorless. She had had no will to do anything, even to get up in the morning or clothe herself or brush her hair. Even to eat.

It was no wonder she had allowed Matilda to take charge of everything, though she had written to her father-in-law herself within an hour of his son’s death.

Matilda had insisted that the second son of the Earl of Heathmoor be mourned according to the strictest rules of propriety, though she had not needed to insist—Samantha had put up no fight. It had not even occurred to her that she might or that the rules of which Matilda spoke were excessive as well as oppressive. She had allowed herself to be decked out from head to toe in what must surely be the heaviest and gloomiest mourning garments ever fashioned. She had not even insisted upon being fitted for the new clothes. She had allowed herself to be cloistered within her home, the curtains always more than half drawn across the windows out of respect for the dead. She had allowed Matilda to discourage any visitors who made courtesy calls of sympathy from coming again, and to refuse every invitation that was extended to them, even to the most sober and respectable of social gatherings.

Samantha had not missed mingling with society in
the form of her neighbors for the obvious reason that she never had mingled with them. She hardly even knew them beyond nodding at church on Sunday mornings. She had been at Bramble Hall for five years, and almost every moment of those years had been devoted to Matthew’s care.

For four months now she had not cared for anything beyond the numbness of her own all-encompassing lethargy and exhaustion. If truth were told, she had been rather glad that Matilda was there to take charge of all that needed to be done, even though she had never liked her sister-in-law any better than her husband had.

But numbness and exhaustion could last only so long. After four months, life was reasserting itself. She was restless. She was ready to fling off her lethargy. She needed to get out—out of the house, out of the park. She needed to walk. She needed to breathe real air.

She gazed outdoors, her fingers drumming, and then looked down at her widow’s weeds and grimaced. She felt the blackness of every ill-fitting stitch of them like a physical weight. She had tried reasoning with Matilda earlier. Surely, she had said, it would be harmless to go out for a walk along country lanes that were rarely traveled. And even if they did encounter someone, surely that person would not think any the worse of them for strolling sedately in the countryside close to their own home. Surely whoever it was would not dash off to spread the word throughout the neighborhood that the widow and her sister-in-law were kicking up a lark, behaving with shocking levity and disrespect for the dead.

Had she really hoped to draw a smile from Matilda with her exaggeration? Had Matilda
ever
smiled? What she
had
done was stare stonily back at her smiling sister-in-law, deliberately set aside her unfinished mending task, and announce that she had a sick headache,
for which she hoped Samantha was satisfied. She had withdrawn to her room to lie down for an hour or two.