She had been seen. Wren knew she had been. Perhaps they had looked at first merely out of curiosity, just like everyone else, because she had just married the Earl of Riverdale, but no one knew anything else about her except her ownership of the Heyden glassworks. They could not possibly have recognized her, especially just from her right profile. And they probably would not have recognized her name from the morning papers. Although the adoption certificate showed that Wren’s father had given his permission, it was unlikely he had said anything to her mother, who would not have wanted to know.
They had seen her, full face, during the interval when she had looked over to their box to find herself being scrutinized through her mother’s lorgnette. And they had understood. There had been something in their faces. But how could she have seen that from such a distance and through the lenses of a lorgnette? She could not, of course. But she had known. Perhaps it was the language of their bodies she had read more than their facial expressions. She had known that they knew. And she herself had known even before the hammer blow of hearing the name. Lady Hodges.
She was lost deep in memory when she became aware of Alexander’s presence in her room. Or perhaps memory was the wrong word, since she was not remembering any particular incidents from her childhood. What she was really lost in was identification. She was that child again, alone and friendless—almost friendless. But even that one thin, frail memory of love did not force its way into the child’s identity that held her curled into her corner, arms wrapped about herself for protection and to make her smaller and less visible. If only she could be fully invisible …
She heard a name that sounded familiar, just as the voice that spoke it did, though she could not immediately place either.
“Wren?”
They came from far, far in the future, that name and that voice. Mentally she sank deeper into herself. But the future would not let her be.
“Wren? What is it? What has happened?”
What had happened? She tightened her hold on herself.
“Will you let me help you up from there? Will you talk to me?”
And she knew suddenly who Wren was and whom the voice belonged to. But it had all been an illusion, that future. This was who she was, this child she could not let go of despite the pain of hopeless misery. She could be no one else. It had been a foolish dream.
“Go away,” she said, and repeated the words more clearly when he did not hear the first time. But he did not go. Instead, he squeezed in beside her, between the bed and the wall, and talked to her. She did not hear all his words or feel his arms come about her—she was still locked inside her old self—but she did hear his pain. And perhaps that was her salvation, that was what began to pull her back. For she had learned—her future self, the one called Wren, had learned just recently—that pain was not confined to her alone, that other people suffered, that suffering could either isolate the sufferer or lead her out of the prison of her aloneness into a shared suffering and a shared courage, and an empathy that reached to the ends of the world. Viola. Abigail and Harry. Jessica. And now Alexander. She had pulled him into her darkness, and she heard the pain in his voice.
“Wren,” he said. “Wren, my love, speak to me.”
And she told him—twice, because he did not hear the first time. She told him. She is my mother. And went spiraling downward and inward again.
But he would not let her go. Or, if she must go, then he would not let her go alone. He got to his feet, talking to her, and picked her up and carried her—away from her room and into his own and set her on the bed and did a few things to make her more comfortable before lying down beside her and gathering her to him.
My love, he had called her.
Darling.
He had also spoken her mother’s name and she had heard herself moan.
He did not speak now. He was Alexander and this was not his room. It was theirs. He was her husband. He had made love to her here last night—three separate times. With pleasure. It had not been just a dutiful consummation to him. She would have known. She had pleased him. He had gone to the House of Lords this morning, drawn by duty, but he had left early to come home and take her to Kew Gardens. And he had talked with her and touched her without any sign of revulsion. He had been relaxed and happy. He had laughed at the wonder with which she had beheld the pagoda. But it had been affectionate laughter. He had told her she looked like a child to whom the world was a new and wondrous place, and she had told him that he was exactly right. They had both laughed then, and for a while they had walked hand in hand instead of with her hand tucked through the crook of his elbow. He had not fully understood, though, that she was a twenty-nine-year-old experiencing the wonders of childhood for the first time.
He had not understood then. Perhaps he did now.
Oh, Alexander, Alexander, what have I done to you?
The room was in darkness. There were no candles burning, as there had been last night. He was fully clothed except that he was wearing no shoes. She could feel the soft folds of his neckcloth against her cheek and the buttons of his pantaloons against her waist. His lovely evening clothes were going to be creased beyond redemption. So was her new evening gown. He was warm and relaxed, but he was not sleeping. She knew that as she gradually came to herself, Wren again—Wren Westcott, Countess of Riverdale—and no longer Rowena Handrich, youngest daughter and second youngest child of Baron and Lady Hodges. The daughter most people probably did not know existed, except perhaps through rumor as the skeleton in the closet of the perfect life that was Lady Hodges’s.
“Alexander,” she said softly, breathing in the warmth and the now-familiar scent of his cologne and of him.
“Yes,” he said.
She kept her eyes closed, allowed the future to flow all the way back into her and become the present, felt the soft comfort of the bed around her, the protective muscled strength of the man against whom she was held from her head right down to her feet, heard the sound of a lone horse clopping past on the street outside and the distant chiming of a clock from somewhere inside, and dared to feel almost safe again. Though she did not know in what way exactly she had felt unsafe. It had not been a physical fear of being hurt or snatched away or killed. It had been a far deeper, more primal fear of losing herself or what she had become in the twenty years of distance she had put between herself and that child she had been. Though she had not left the child behind. She could not. And perhaps she would not if she could, for that child had deserved better of life. That child had been innocent.
“I will tell you,” she said. “But it is a dark tale, and I am afraid of pulling you into my darkness. You do not deserve that. I ought not to have—”
“Wren,” he said against the top of her head, his voice soft and deep. “I proposed marriage to you, if you will remember. After you had offered it to me, you withdrew your offer. I asked you a week or so ago because I wanted to marry you. And I knew the ten missing years of your life were dark ones. I knew too that eventually I would know about them. I married you anyway.”
She heaved a deep sigh. “Do you care?” she asked him. “You said a little while ago that you do.”
“I care,” he said.
“I wish you did not,” she told him. “You would be able to listen dispassionately and not get drawn in.”
“I hope that is not true,” he said. “I hope I will always feel compassion for suffering even if I have no personal involvement with the persons concerned. But I have an involvement with you. You are my wife. And I care.”