Only Enchanting (6 page)

That left Flavian.

“Come with us out to the track, Flave?” Hugo suggested.

“I am going to stroll over to have a look at the cedar avenue,” he said. “I never did get there when I was here last autumn.”

No one protested his seemingly odd and antisocial decision. No one suggested coming with him. They
understood his unspoken wish to be alone. Of course they did. They must have half expected it after last night.

The late evenings during their gatherings were almost always taken up with the most serious of their talks. They spoke of setbacks they had encountered with their recoveries, problems they faced, nightmares they endured. It had not been planned that way, and even now they never sat down with the express intention of pouring out their woes. But it almost always ended up that way. Not that they were unalloyed grumbling sessions. Far from it. They spoke from their hearts because they knew they would be understood, because they knew there would be support and sympathy and advice, sometimes even a real solution to a problem.

Last night it had been Flavian’s turn, though he had not intended to talk at all. Not yet. Perhaps later in the visit, when he had settled more fully into the comfort of his friends’ company. But there had been a lull in the conversation after Ben had told them how his recent decision to use a wheeled chair after he had insisted for so long upon hobbling about on his two twisted legs between sturdy canes had transformed his life and actually been a triumph rather than the defeat he had always thought it would be.

And yet they all felt his sadness too, for taking to a chair had been his admission that he would never again be as he once was. None of them would. There had been a brief silence.

“It is almost a whole year since Leonard B-Burton died,” Flavian had blurted out, his voice jerky and unnaturally loud.

They had all turned blank looks upon him.

“Hazeltine,” he had added. “After a shockingly brief illness, it s-seems. He was my age. I never did write letters of c-condolence either to his f-family or to V-Velma.”

“The
Earl
of Hazeltine?” Ralph said. “I remember now, though, Flave. You told me about his passing when we were in London soon after leaving Penderris last year. He was—”

“Yes.” Flavian interrupted him with a flashing smile. “He was my former best f-friend. I knew him and was almost inseparable from him from my f-first day at Eton right up until—”

Well, right up until.

“I remember your talking about him,” George said, “though I did not know of his death. He never came near London, did he? You were never reconciled, then, Flavian?”

“He may r-rot in hell,” Flavian said.

“I had not heard either,” Imogen told him. “What has happened to Lady Hazeltine?”

“Her too. M-m-may sh-she r-r-r-o-o-t-t-t—” He thumped the side of one closed fist several times against his thigh in impotent rage and gasped for air.

“Take your time, Flave,” Hugo said, getting to his feet and taking the empty glass from the table beside Flavian in order to fill it again. He squeezed his friend’s shoulder as he passed him on the way to the brandy decanter. “We have all night. None of us is going anywhere.”

“Take a deep breath,” Vincent suggested, “and keep inhaling until the air blows a bubble out of the top of your head, like a balloon. It has never worked for me, but it may for you. Even if it does not, though, waiting to feel a bubble form takes your mind off whatever it was that was getting beyond your endurance.”

“I am not really upset,” Flavian said after drinking half his brandy in one gulp. His voice was suddenly toneless. “It happened almost a year ago, after all. He was not my friend for more than six years before that, so I have not missed him. And Velma preferred him to me, as was
her right, even if she
was
betrothed to me. I never wished them harm. I don’t wish her harm now. She means nothing to me.”

He had not stammered even once, he realized. Perhaps he really was over it. Over
them
.

“Are you still feeling guilty that you did not write to her, Flavian?” Imogen asked.

He shook his head and spread his hands just above his knees. They were quite steady, he was happy to see, even though they were tingling with pins and needles.

“She would not have wanted to hear from me,” he said. “She would have thought I was g-gloating.”

But he
had
felt guilty in all the months since he had heard—and resented the feeling.

“You have never been able to close the door on that part of your life, have you?” George asked. “And Hazeltine’s dying would seem to make it harder for you ever to do so. It really is too bad, Flavian. I am sorry.”

Flavian lifted his head and looked broodingly at him. “It was shut and bolted and locked and the key thrown away s-seven years ago.”

He knew—
damn it all!
—that it was not true. They all knew. But no one said so, and no one pursued the topic until he did. They never intruded beyond a certain point upon one another’s privacy. But there was a silence to allow him to say more if he wished.

“She is c-coming home,” he said. “Her year of mourning over, she is coming b-back.”

His mother and her infernal letters! As though he was interested in all the latest gossip from Candlebury Abbey, his ancestral home in Sussex, in which he had not set foot for longer than eight years. Lady Frome had called on his mother with the news, her letter had explained. Sir Winston and Lady Frome lived eight miles from Candlebury, at Farthings Hall. The two families had always been
on the best of terms, Sir Winston and Flavian’s father having grown up together and attended school and university together. Velma was their only daughter, much adored by her parents.

The letter had reached Flavian in London, just before he came to Gloucestershire. He would surely wish to return home to Candlebury for Easter this year, now that he
would have an incentive
, his mother had written. She had underlined the four key words.

Velma was coming home and bringing her young daughter with her.
Len’s
daughter. She had had no son. No heir.

“It does not m-matter that she is returning to Farthings,” he added, tossing back what remained in his glass. “I never go near C-Candlebury anyway.”

Imogen had patted his knee, and after a brief silence Vincent had started to tell them about the joy the birth of his son had brought into his life—and about the panic attacks he had to fight whenever he was overwhelmed by the realization that he would never see the child or any brothers and sisters he might have.

“But, oh, the joy!” There had been tears swimming in his eyes when Flavian had looked up at him.

No one wondered this morning, then, why Flavian chose to be alone. Some things had to be dealt with on one’s own, as they all knew from experience. Which fact led him to wonder about marriage—in particular, the marriages of three of the Survivors—as he stepped out of the house half an hour after breakfast and turned his steps in the direction of the lake. Was there space in marriage? There would have to be, wouldn’t there? Or one would feel suffocated. Even if one was wildly in love. Happily-ever-after did not mean being welded together for all eternity—ghastly thought.

What
did
it mean, then?

It meant nothing, of course, because there was no such thing. Even the marriages of his three friends would crumble if they and their wives did not work like the devil to keep them whole for the rest of their natural lives. Was it worth the trouble?

He had believed in romantic love and happily-ever-after once upon a time, silly idiot that he had been. At least—he stopped walking to frown in thought for a moment—he was almost sure he must have believed in it. Sometimes it seemed to him that his mind was a bit like a checkerboard—the dark squares representing conscious memory, the white ones just blank spaces to hold the memories apart. Whether the blanks meant anything more than that, he could not remember. And when he tried too hard to work it out, he either got one of his crashing headaches or else he looked around for something into which he might ram his fist without breaking every bone in his hand.

There was definitely
something
in those white squares. There was violence, if nothing else.

The ladies and Ben—with his canes rather than his wheeled chair—were before him at the lake. Ben had the door of the boathouse open, and the ladies were peering inside. Was he planning to play the gallant and row them across to the island so that they could take a closer look at the temple folly there? Flavian hailed them, and there was a cheerful exchange of pleasantries during which he did
not
suggest helping to row. He kept on walking about the lake and past the band of trees on the other side. It was a lengthy walk.

The uninitiated would assume the park ended with the lake and the trees on its far bank. But it did not. It stretched beyond into a spacious area that was a little
less cultivated, more secluded, more designed for solitude or the enjoyment of a tête-à-tête with a chosen companion.

It was solitude he wanted and needed this morning. Where the devil had that outburst come from last night? He had read the notice of Len’s death with some surprise about this time last year. It was always a nasty reminder of one’s own mortality when a contemporary died, especially when one was only thirty. And more especially when, once upon a time, one had known that particular contemporary almost as well as one knew one’s fellow Survivors now. Though he would wager his life that no one of the Survivors would steal away and marry the betrothed of any other who was incapacitated.

He had read the notice with some surprise but with no greater emotion. All that unpleasantness had happened a long time ago, after all, not long after he had been brought home from the Peninsula and just before he had been taken to Penderris Hall for treatment and convalescence. A lifetime ago, it seemed. It had all meant nothing to him last spring. Len had meant nothing. Velma had meant nothing.

A whole alarming lot of nothing.

It still meant nothing now.

Except that she was coming back from the north of England, which had always felt comfortably like the other side of the world. And it did not require any genius to imagine what excitement her return was arousing in the romantic, matchmaking bosoms of his mother and hers. The fact that his mother expected him to go running to Candlebury for Easter just because Velma would be at Farthings told its own eloquent tale. It also told him that they expected he would feel the same about Velma—and she about him—as they had felt before his injuries and Len’s betrayal.

He thought back, aghast, to that unexpected outburst last night and that equally unexpected relapse into an almost uncontrollable inability to get his words out. For two pins, if someone had said the wrong thing, he would have lashed out with his fists and done the Lord knew what damage to Vincent’s home. He had been alarmingly close to having a complete relapse into the state of animal madness he’d been left in after the war. And he had fought a throbbing headache for most of a largely sleepless night.

He thought of Vince’s bubble and chuckled ruefully.

And then he realized that he was not alone back here after all.

*   *   *

It had been unwise to come here today, especially when there was unlimited countryside, all of it teeming with new growth and the wildflowers of early spring, in every direction about the village. It was wildflowers that Agnes loved to paint. But the only daffodils she had seen were in the flower beds of people’s gardens—and in the grass of the meadow on the far side of the park at Middlebury. And daffodils did not bloom forever. She could not simply wait for three weeks to pass until Lord Darleigh’s houseguests went away.

Daisies and buttercups and clover would bloom in that near meadowland throughout the summer. There had been snowdrops there a few weeks ago, and there still were some primroses. But now was the time of the daffodils and, oh, she could not miss it.

It was a little-used area of the park. There was no direct route to it from the house, and it was a long walk away. One had to skirt about the lake and the band of trees that had been planted along its western bank. It was unlikely the guests would stroll there often, if at all. It was
very
unlikely they would walk there during a morning.

So she had taken the risk of coming back, her easel tucked beneath one arm, paper and paints and brushes and everything else she might need in her large canvas bag. She had tramped through the trees that lined the south wall, and emerged into sunlight and open spaces only when she was well out of sight of the house and the gardens and lawns fronting it.

She had painted a single daffodil two days ago but had been dissatisfied with it. She had made it too large, too bold, too yellow. It had been an object largely divorced from its surroundings. She might just as well have plucked it and carried it home and placed it in a jar and then painted it.

She had come back to paint the daffodils in their meadow. And she was rewarded by the sight of many more of them than there had been just two days ago. They were like a carpet spread out before her, their heads nodding in a breeze she had not particularly noticed. And they had the effect of making the grass in which they grew seem a richer green. Ah, they deserved to be painted just like this, she decided.

But how was she to capture what she saw with her eyes and felt with the welling emotions of her heart? How did one paint not just daffodils nodding in the grass but the eternal light and hope of spring itself? It was her first full spring here with Dora, and she had greeted it with a certain longing for something she could not even put into words. For life to resume, perhaps, as more than just a genteel existence. Or perhaps for life to
begin
, though that was a somewhat absurd notion when she was twenty-six years old and had already been married and widowed.

She did not usually think with her emotions.

She would try to paint. She would always try, for the
road to perfection held an irresistible lure, even if the destination remained always tantalizingly just beyond the farthest horizon.