Page 58 of Lady Diana's Lost Lord
Soaked to the skin, he pulled Snowball to a halt outside the small stable stall and sheltered the horse within. His hands shook as he patted the horse dry and fed him a scoop of oats. Another goodbye to be said—Snowball would have to be sold, since they would travel by carriage to wherever it was they were going. He flexed his hands as he walked back toward the cottage in a vain attempt to still the frantic trembling of his fingers, heedless of the rain that crashed down around him.
It was still early.Tooearly, in fact, for his arrival to be interpreted for a natural conclusion of the day’s work. But he’d finished it—the mining, the pulling the raw graphite from the vein. All of it. And Diana—she would know it. She would know it the moment he stepped inside the cottage.
She would know it the very moment she saw his face.
With a growing sense of dread, he opened the kitchen door. And there she was, so damned beautiful, her silver spectacles sliding down the bridge of her nose as she bent over her needlework at the kitchen table beside Hannah. Diana startled at his sudden appearance, half-rising from her chair, dark eyes widening behind the lenses. She sat again, just as abruptly, as if her knees hadbuckled beneath her, and let the fabric of the handkerchief she’d been embroidering flutter from her fingers.
“Oh,” Diana said, in a toneless voice. “Oh. It’s today, isn’t it? It’s today.”
“What’s today?” Hannah asked, looking up from the paper set before her, her gaze swiveling between the two of them as a tiny furrow of confusion creased her forehead. “Papa? What’s today?”
Somehow, from deep within that pit of the remarkable strength she carried inside her, Diana dredged up a smile. Falsely bright and sparkling, she injected a tone of enthusiasm into her voice. “Your papa has done it,” she said, laying one hand on Hannah’s shoulder. “He’s found the graphite vein at last. And it’s enough—isn’t it?” This last she directed to him.
“More than.” It came out a dry, raspy croak. “More than enough.”
“That’s wonderful,” Diana said, though her voice had faltered just a bit over the words. A tiny, uncontrollable tremble threaded there through them, evidence of the grief that had welled up beneath. “That’s wonderful,” she said again, as if by repeating the words she could make herself believe them. “Hannah, darling, it means that your papa will be able to spend ever so much more time with you. He won’t have to go away any longer.”
Hannah bounced out of her chair, her mouth rounding into an O of delight. “And we can have a house of our own? And a kitten?”
“Yes, of course. You’ll have a ginger kitten and a house of your very own…by the sea.” Diana’s voice broke over the words, and Ben knew she had stretched her composure to its very limit. “I’m so very sorry,” she said, and she clapped one hand over her mouth as her chest hitched. “Excuse me for a moment.” Very slowly, very carefully she rose to her feet and headed for the kitchen door. Graceful, elegant, ever the perfect lady as she swept past him, slipped through the door, and closed it so gently behind her.
There was a muffled sob, barely audible over the pound of the rain, and even through the sheets of water that distorted the world outside the window, he could see the blur of her skirts as she staggered off of the porch, stumbled, and at last broke into a run, darting away from the house. Out into the thick of the rain, because the cottage was too small to contain her grief. Because she hadn’t wanted to inflict that grief upon him, upon Hannah, when they had every reason to celebrate the fruition of months of hard work.
“Papa?” Hannah had come up by his side, and she tugged at his hand to gain his attention. “Is Diana going to be all right?”
He laid his hand atop her head. “Yes,” he said, and he hoped it was the truth. “But she’s just a little sad at the moment.”
“Why?”
Another little sliver of his heart crumbled away into grief. Of course Hannah did not understand; she might have understood that Diana would have to leave, but she did not yet understand how soon that parting would be upon them, and she would be devastated when she learned it. That nebulous future he had hoped to earn for them was now a reality, and while she would delight in the promise of a kitten and a house all their own, still it would be accompanied by a sacrifice she was not yet prepared to bear. Soon. So much sooner than any of them would have liked.
They would have to explain it to her, and that—that would be a tragedy all its own. “It’s a bit complicated,” he said. “Finish your sums, hm?” He gently nudged her back toward her chair. “I’ll make certain Diana is all right.”
∞∞∞
“Diana.”
She winced at the sound of Ben’s voice and squeezed her eyes shut at the humiliation of having been caught like this—bedraggled, out of breath, a little bloodied. She had only stopped running when her legs had given out altogether, and then she had taken a nasty tumble through a bit of brush, torn a hole straight through her skirt and petticoat alike, and skinned her knee in the process. She had bent the right earpiece of her spectacles in her fall, and now they sat a bit crookedly upon her face.
She had fled as if by running she could somehow escape the grief. Like she might leave it so far behind that when at last she stopped running, it would be only a distant memory. Of course it had pursued her faster than she could flee, and it had caught her—and now, so had Ben.
Somehow she had ended up beneath the dubious shelter of a tree, but it hadn’t done much to stop the rain from soaking her straight to the skin. She couldn’t be sure if the water she swiped free of her face was rain or tears. Perhaps a bit of both.
“I really am very happy for you both,” she managed to say, somehow, though the words shredded her throat as they emerged. “I just—I need a few moments to myself. Please.”
“Not alone. Not now.”
Grimacing, Diana turned away from the hand he extended to her,dropping her head into the cradle of her arms. “Please, I—I am going to be very miserable and pitiful for just a few minutes, and I would prefer to do it in privacy.”
“Hell, no.” He dropped down beside her and pulled her out of the wretched little ball of melancholy that she had wound herself into, tugging her resisting body half across his lap. Slinging one arm around her, he pressed her cheek to his shoulder and notched his chin over the top of her head. “We’ll be miserable together. Just for a few minutes.”
A sob collected in her chest, pressing against the cage of her ribs. “We’ve run out of them, haven’t we? There aren’t any more tomorrows.”
“No.” It was a quiet acknowledgment, hardly more than a whisper. She felt the shudder of his chest with the long, slow breath he took. His fingers tangled in her damp hair, and he turned her face toward him and pressed his lips to her cold forehead. “No more tomorrows.”
They had only been borrowing them anyway, against a future that could never exist for them. That debt had come due at last, and its price was heartbreak. She had known it would be; she had thought she had prepared herself for the inevitability of it.
She had been so very wrong. The reality was so much worse, so much more devastating than she could ever have anticipated. Her fingers became claws, finding purchase in the sodden material of his shirt, and she turned her face into the hollow of his throat and sobbed through the horrible, seething mass of sorrow that had congealed in that black, empty space that had once held a heart. Once, but no longer.
