"You have been hurt."
"It is nothing."
"You have been hurt," said his mother, and her face crumpled. "Oh, my darling. My darling boy."
And Adrian Ravensdale, Viscount Dunmere, late captain of the Tenth Hussars, who had held the gate at Hougoumont with his back against the oak, went down on his knees on the step of a small white house in Lyme Regis, in front of his mother, and put his face in her shawl, and wept like a child.
Clara went down the steps, and sat on the low wall at the bottom, and looked at the sea, and did not turn round for a long time.
They sat in the little front parlour for four hours.
It was a small low room, full of afternoon light, with a cat on the windowsill and a great many pillows of unfinished lace, and the whole of it smelt of orris root and ink. Mrs. Marsh, as she called herself, made tea. She spilled most of it, being a little shaky, and was gently relieved of the pot by Clara, who found herself, without quite knowing how, doing a good many small necessary things: finding a cloth, finding the milk, finding a second chair. Nobody seemed to notice. The two on the sofa were holding hands, and had been for some time, and appeared to have forgotten they had four.
She told her story simply.
She had been twenty-two when she married the then Mr. Ravensdale, and she had known within a month that it had been a mistake. He had not been cruel. It would have been easier if he had been. He had merely been cold, and exact, and so unshakably certain of his own rightness that it was like living with a very polite wall. She had a French cousin in Paris, and during the first years of the Revolution she had written to him in secret, as one does to family, to ask if he were safe. Edmund had found the letters. In the spring of ninety-seven, with England at war and the whole country in a fever of spies and suspicion, he had presented her with a choice.
"He said it would ruin us," said Eleanor. "A traitor's wife. And a traitor's son. He said it would be in all the papers. He said that if I went quietly, to a place of his choosing, and never came back, he would see that the story went no further. And that I might write to you, Adrian. I might write once a year." She turned the thin hand over in her lap. "I thought it was a bargain. It was not. It was a sentence."
"You could have come back."
"I could. After he died. But there was the shame of it, my dear. Nineteen years. I thought, he will be angry. Or he will not know me. Or he will have forgotten. Or—" She hesitated. "Or he will have a family of his own now, and a place in the world, and I will be a stranger who has turned up at the door."
"You are not a stranger."
"I thought I might be."
"Mama." He put his scarred hand over both of hers. "I kept your note. The one you left on my pillow. I have kept it for nineteen years."