Page 13 of Dark Tides
The room froze. Nobody spoke. Alys could hear the maid slowly laboring up the stairs from the hall and then the creak as she opened the door. “Am I to clear the crocks?” she asked into the stunned silence.
“Yes, yes,” Livia said, when no one else answered. She looked from Alinor’s white face to Alys’s fixed grimace. “Have I said something wrong? What is wrong?”
“James Avery is here? That was the visitor: James Avery?” Alinor demanded.
“Yes,” Alys said tightly. “I didn’t even know if you would recognize his real name?”
“Yes. It was to be my name. Of course I recognize it.”
“He is Sir James. Turns out he has a title. Did you think it would be yours?” Alys demanded.
“Yes. He came here to see me?”
Alys silently nodded.
Mother and daughter looked at each other as if they were blind to the maid clattering around the table and Livia’s avid face.
“Alys, when were you going to tell me?”
“I was never going to tell you.”
The maid took the heavily laden tray and walked out of the room, leaving the door open. They heard her slow progress down the stairs and then the knock of the whip handle on the front door. They could hear her sigh, and the rattle of crockery as she put the tray down on the hall table. They listened as she opened the front door and said impatiently: “Go in! Go in!” sending Sir James into the empty parlor as she hefted the tray again and went down the hall to the kitchen to yell from the back door for the wagoner to take the gentleman’s horse again.
“Has he been before?”
“Not before yesterday. I swear he has not.”
“Or written?”
Alys’s silence was a confession.
“He wrote to me? He has written to me?”
The daughter said nothing.
“Did you think you were keeping him from me, for my own good?” Alinor asked gently.
“No.” Alys was driven into honesty, the words spilling out with sudden tears. “It was for me. I could hardly bear to touch his letters. I’d never have let him in if I’d known who he was yesterday, I’d have slammed the door in his face. As it is, I told him not to come back. Notfor you, because I don’t know what you feel—now, after all this time. It was for me. Because I will never forgive him.”
“After all this time? As you say? After all this time?”
“More. More every year that you sicken.”
“But he was so good to Roberto!” Livia interrupted. “And so charming a gentleman. I don’t understand! You are angry, Sister Alys? You are distressed? And you…Mia Suocera?”
They both ignored her.
“He wrote to me?” Alinor’s voice was a thread.
“I dropped his first letter in the fire, and when the wax burned off, a gold coin fell through the bars of the grate into the ashes. I didn’t even know what it was, only that it was gold. It was a French pistole. I kept it. It paid for your medicine, we’d never have afforded the doctor without it. Next year he sent again. This time I lifted the seal and took the coin and burned the letter. I never wanted to know what he wrote. I never wanted to see his writing. I never wanted to see him again.”
“But Roberto said he was so good…” Livia remarked. “And he is such a gentleman! His clothes…”
“He wasn’t good to us,” Alys said with quiet bitterness. “He was no gentleman then.”
Her words drove Alinor to her feet, leaning on the breakfast table for support. At once, Alys jumped up to help her.
“No, I can walk. I’m just going to my chair.” She took the three steps, leaning on the table and then the back of the chair, and when she was seated she was breathless, her face pale.
