Page 2 of Dark Tides
“I could not come before. May I speak with you?”
She barely inclined her head in reply. “I suppose you’ll want to come in,” she said gracelessly, and led the way into the adjoining room, indicating that he should step over the raised threshold. A small window gave the view of the distant bank of the river, obscured by masts and lashed sails, and the noisy quay before the house where the lumpers were still loading the wagon, and rolling barrels into the warehouse. She dropped the window blind so that the men working on the quay could not see her direct him towards a plain wooden chair. He took a seat, as she paused, one hand on the mantelpiece, gazing down into the empty grate as if she were a judge, standing over him, considering sentence.
“I sent money, every year,” he said awkwardly.
“I know,” she said. “You sent one Louis d’Or. I took it.”
“She never replied to my letters.”
“She never saw them.”
He felt himself gasp as if she had winded him. “My letters were addressed to her.”
She shrugged as if she cared for nothing.
“In honor, you should have given them to her. They were private.”
She looked completely indifferent.
“By law, by the laws of this land, they belong to her, or they should have been returned to me,” he protested.
Briefly, she glanced at him. “I don’t think either of us have much to do with the law.”
“Actually, I am a justice of the peace in my shire,” he said stiffly. “And a member of the House of Commons. I uphold the law.”
As she bowed her head, he saw the sarcastic gleam in her eyes. “Pardon me, your honor! But I can’t return them as I burned them.”
“You read them?”
She shook her head. “No. Once I had the gold from under the seal, I had no interest in them,” she said. “Nor in you.”
He had a choking sensation, as if he were drowning under a weight of water. He had to remember that he was a gentleman; and she had been a farm girl and was now passing herself off as the lady of a poor warehouse. He had to remember that he had fathered a child who lived here, in this unprepossessing workplace, and he had rights. He had to remember that she was a thief, and her mother accused of worse, while he was a titled gentleman with lands inherited for generations. He was descending from a great position to visit them, prepared to perform an extraordinary act of charity to help this impoverished family. “I could have written anything,” he said sharply. “You had no right…”
“You could have written anything,” she conceded. “And still, I would have had no interest.”
“And she…”
She shrugged. “I don’t know what she thinks of you,” she said. “I have no interest in that either.”
“She must have spoken of me!”
The face she turned to him was insolently blank. “Oh, must she?”
The thought that Alinor had never spoken of him in all these years struck him like a physical blow in the chest; knocking him back in his hard chair. If she had died in his arms twenty-one years ago, she could not have haunted him more persistently than she had done. He had thought of her every day, named her in his prayers every night, he had dreamed of her, he had longed for her. It was not possible she had not thought of him.
“If you have no interest in me at all, then you can have no curiosity in why I have come now?” he challenged her.
She did not rise to the bait. “Yes,” she confirmed. “You’re right. None.”
He felt that he was at a disadvantage sitting down so he rose up and went past her to the window, pulled back the edge of the blind to look out. He was trying to contain his temper and, at the same time,overcome the sensation that her will against him was as remorseless as the incoming tide. He could hear the rub of the fenders of the barge as the water lifted it off the ramp, and the clicking of the sheets against the wooden masts. These sounds had always been for him the echoes of exile, the music of his life as a spy, a stranger in his own country; he could not bear to feel that sense of being lonely and in danger once again. He turned back to the room. “To be brief, I came to speak to your mother, not to you. I prefer not to talk to you. And I should like to see the child: my child.”
She shook her head. “She cannot see you, and neither will the child.”
“You cannot speak for either of them. She is your mother, and the child—my child—has come of age.”
She said nothing but merely turned her head away from his determined face, to gaze down at the empty grate again. He controlled his temper with an effort but could not stop himself seeing that she had matured into a strong, square-faced beauty. She looked like a woman of authority who cared nothing for how she appeared and everything for what she did.
“The child is twenty-one years old now, and can choose for himself,” he insisted.
