Miracle (31 page)

Falling to her knees beside John, who continued to stare into the fire, she gently laid the letter in his lap and waited for him to shift his gaze to hers. "The letter was postmarked only three weeks ago in Versailles. We could go there, John—"

"No."

She clutched his arm and did her best to continue to smile. "I have money, if that concerns you. I've saved up enough—"

"Leave it alone,
Mira.
I'll not allow
ya
to go
traipsin
' off to God knows where,
lookin
' for a ghost.
Nothin
' you could ever say or do could or would bring
Lorraina
back to this miserable pile of rocks."

Struggling from the chair, grabbing up his cane, John said, "Let it alone, lass. Be happy with what you have there—"

"They are naught but words on a paper," she argued. "How could I ever be satisfied with only that?"

"She loves you enough to care to write—"

"But she doesn't love me enough to come home or to bother with letting me know where I might find her." Standing, allowing the letter to drift like a leaf to the floor, Miracle moved to the window and did her best to focus her thoughts on something other than the tight band of emotion closing off her throat. Dusk had fallen, tinting the countryside a bleak, colorless gray. Lightning flashed in the distant clouds, and rising winds whipped up the sea waves into frothy caps.

"Well." She tried not to blink, tried not to acknowledge the hurt and anger choking off her breath. "It seems we're in for another storm tonight. I'll have Ismail bring
Hasan
around. I should get to the lighthouse as soon as possible."

"Miracle," John called as she moved toward the door. "I beg you, lass; don't go. You'll find no solace there from
yer
distress. Leave that wretched place to the damn wind and waves,
Mira!"

Still standing at the hearth, his drink in hand, Clayton watched Miracle quit the room, her shoulders back and chin thrust stubbornly, if not proudly, despite Hoyt's attempts to stop her. As Jonathan followed her into the hallway, Clayton bent and retrieved the letter and was still regarding it carefully when Hoyt reentered the room, brow sweating, his jaw flexed by the discomfort in his leg. He hobbled unsteadily to his chair and flung himself into it, gritted his teeth, and rubbed his leg before cursing explosively. Only then did he lift his eyes to Clay's, then to the paper in his hand. Dark color crept into the old man's cheeks, and he sank back into his chair.

Clayton folded the letter and tossed it into the fire. He watched it dance momentarily with the swirling, rising heat before it burst into tiny flames. Only when it lay in scattered ashes amid the coals did Clayton turn to John again. "When the hell do you intend to tell her that you wrote it?" he demanded in a soft, stern voice.

"I don't know what you mean," John snapped.

"I think you do. When the hell do you intend to tell her?" he said again, this time in a voice as steely as a lance.

Defeatedly
, John let out his breath and closed his eyes. "Soon," he finally said. "When I know the time is right."

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your

heart's desire. The other is to gain it.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Chapter Twelve

He found her standing upon the rickety old lighthouse perch, pale hands clasped to the deteriorating balustrade, her white face turned into the wind that battered the surroundings with a ferocity that was startling. Yet Miracle's stance was challenging, as if the upheaval of anger boiling inside her could match the savagery of the impending storm.

Clayton called to her twice before she turned her head and saw him, standing near the foot of the chapel, his exposed flesh stinging from the bite of the driven sand. While her long hair danced around her head and shoulders, she stared down at him with an emotionless smile, empty eyes; a stone statue void of the passion and happiness she had exuded earlier.

The platform on which she stood undulated in the wind like a boat on waves. It creaked and groaned and sprayed mortar to the ground; a sliver of wood spiraled downward, bounced off the
upthrusting
stone cross atop the chapel, then fell near Clayton's feet, and for the first time he experienced the same fear as John Hoyt. Little by little the old lighthouse was crumbling to pieces.

"Miracle!" he called. "Come down from there!"

"Go away," she replied. "I don't want you here!" then she disappeared into the house.

The tide rolled in. It slunk around his ankles and hissed like a snake cross the sand beneath his boots. Clayton shivered, stumbled back, unable to breathe until the water had slithered back out to sea, only to roll like some frothing green monster into a configuration that came rushing toward him with the speed of a horse out of control. He stood frozen, incapable of movement, anticipating the beast swallowing him, yet it didn't. Just feet away it deliquesced into rushing fingers that wrapped even higher around his legs—cold, clammy, insisting and taunting.

Clayton moved through the chapel door, refusing to look back as the sea scurried in after him and lapped at the feet of the painted Virgin. The first step leading up to the lighthouse was already underwater. Halfway up the spiraling stairwell, he paused and looked back; nothing so far, but there would be. It would climb up the narrow tunnel like water rushing into the bowels of a sinking ship._

At last, reaching the summit, Clayton leaned against the wall and tried to breathe; he mopped his sweating forehead with his coat sleeve and wondered if he were suffocating.

"I don't want you here," came Miracle's voice.

Clayton tried to focus his eyes. It wasn't easy. The room looked alive with light and shadows. The fire in the pit was only beginning to glow. It cast yellow spears through the windows toward the turbid sea, doing little to dispel the darkness.

At last, he found Miracle.

She perched upon the wide windowsill, her legs drawn up, arms hooked over her knees, head resting back against the wall. The fire's glow made a yellow slash across her face. Her eyes looked anguished.

At once he was struck with how truly beautiful she was, and how sad.

"He writes the letters himself, doesn't he?" came her small voice. "I've known for some time, or at least suspected. I wanted to believe, don't you see? I needed to believe. Just like when my mother used to read me letters from my father. Oh, how the words proclaimed his love for me. How he missed me. How he would someday take us away from this miserable, horrible place. Then, during one of his last visits, I heard them arguing. She said she was weary of the lying. What sort of man was he that he
would simply abandon a child—as if she never existed? I didn't stay to hear his answer, of course. I loved
him . . .

"Then my mother left." She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. " '
Twas
on a night like this. A fierce storm had rolled across the channel and I was frightened. Mummy tucked me into bed and kissed me. She said she loved me. That she would never leave me."

Clayton braced himself as the wind howled and the building shook. He glanced back, down the stairwell, watched the glow from the sconces on the wall gyrate upon the stones the way light reflected off waves. He smelled the sea, dank and musty, like stagnant water in the bottom of a well, and as calmly as possible, he tugged loose the stock around his neck so he could better swallow.

"Meri
Mine," he said in a dry whisper. "Come with me. This place isn't safe. This light isn't going to help anyone—it's too damn dim. So I want you to take my hand, and we're going to leave before it's too late."

She looked away, out into the dark, where lightning danced upon the distant, disturbed horizon. "I was frightened of storms, and always mummy was there to reassure me . . . but she didn't come that night. No matter how loudly I cried for her. Odd how those memories seem so obscure. I want desperately to remember that night. Can you understand that, Your Grace?"

He nodded and moved farther into the room. Had the floor really shifted? Had the walls swayed? He was
not
on a ship again. He
wasn't
sinking. Water wasn't going to pour into this cabin and suck him under. Rationalize, for God's sake. He was a grown man, not ten years old again.

"I come here," Miracle said, still staring out to sea, "because this is where
she
used to come. Always watching out there, dreaming of other places, hoping against hope that my father would return as he'd promised and take us away from here. She would stand there, on the platform, with her face in the wind and pretend that, if she willed it strongly enough, the wind would lift her up and carry her away. Occasionally she allowed me to join her, and we would both dream of—"

"Flying," he said softly.

Finally, she turned her big eyes back to his. "Would you fly with me now, Your Grace?"

"Where?"

"To wherever my mother is." Sliding from the sill, she moved as if floating across the floor, and raised up her hand to him. "Take my hand, sir."

Clayton stared at it before meeting her gaze again. Her eyes were luminous and distant, like one living a dream. "Do you intend to kill us both?" he demanded. "Pitch us off the walk or some such nonsense?"

"Trust me." She smiled and he suddenly felt unbearably touched, beset by a maze of conflicting emotions. He thought her insane. He thought her capable of killing them both, and with disturbing mental imagery, he saw them both plunging headfirst into the hungry sea.

Yet, like some helpless automaton, he took her hand, so fragile and cool, into his own, which seemed to him to be clumsily big, trembling, and sweating.

As she moved toward the door, he hesitated. She gave him a swift sideways and upward glance from her blue- green eyes that somehow made his reluctance crumble. He followed her through the threshold, onto the wobbly platform, into the wind, amid the rain and dancing spears of light and rumbling thunder.

Helpless. Helpless. Helpless. That's all he could feel.

Since the moment he had seen her standing in that verdant garden with her basket of flowers and vegetables, her ankles peeking at him from beneath her fawn skirt, that scattering of pale freckles across her nose, he had become helpless, unable to resist her. A man with so little willpower against her unusual magic that he had committed the grievous sin of falling in love with the woman who was to become his brother's wife.