Page 30 of Marry in Secret
She turned and faced him, her arms folded defensively beneath her bosom. “Are you angry with me, Thomas?”
He blinked. “No. Why would you think—”
“Because I was about to marry again?”
“No, I—” He broke off. Perhaps he was a bit angry. But mostly with himself, not her. And the damnable situation, for which neither of them was responsible.
His uncle and his cousin were, ultimately.
She waited. He didn’t say anything. She turned back to gaze out of the window where there wasn’t a view. “They said you weredead, Thomas. Not merely missing. Not even lost. They said your ship was sunk, at the bottom of the ocean, and all hands drowned.”
“So I gather. But six of us managed to survive. Just me and five ordinary seamen. Three of us could swim, and we kept the others afloat, clinging to wreckage until we were washed ashore.”
“Where? Where did you land?” She still had her back to him.
“Does it matter?”
Her silence told him it did.
If he gave her a name it wouldn’t help. It would only lead to more questions and more, until she’d end up with a disgust of him. Better to have her angry.
“No place you’d ever heard of. A desolate land at the ends of the earth.” A blasted, benighted, hateful place.
It seemed to him her spine had further stiffened against him. “No letter? Not even a message? If I’d known...”
“No.” The fact was, he’d sent two letters, neither of them to her. Much good they’d done him.
“Was it difficult for you?” Maybe it wasn’t. If she’d told no one...
One shoulder hunched in a brittle, dismissive movement. “I managed.”
A flicker of anger caused him to say, “By not telling anyone about me? About our marriage? What was I, a dirty little secret you did your best to forget?”
“No,” she said after a long silence. “But I did decide it was better not to tell.” She paused and just as he decided she’d said all she wanted to, she continued. “You don’t know what it was like back then. If they didn’t know they couldn’tfuss, couldn’t ask me endless, impossible questions. If they’d known, they would have dragged me out of school, sent me who-knew-where, separated me from Lily, left her alone in that dreadful school—and to what purpose? You weredead, Thomas,” she repeated in a hard little voice. “So what was the point?”
What was the point?The brutal truth.
He should leave now before he said something he would regret. Make a clean break of it. She’d dealt well enough with his death; his departure from her life now would make little difference.
He regarded her stiff back and couldn’t keep the bitterness from his tongue.
“Did you even weep for me, Rose?” he asked, apparently needing to twist the knife in his heart one more time.
For a moment he didn’t think she’d heard. That, or she was going to ignore his question, his stupid, pointless, painful, irrelevant question. He’d made his decision. Why string it out?
“Weep for you?Weep for you?” She turned and, appalled, he saw that her face was drenched in tears.
“Rose?” All this time, giving him her rigid spine, tossing questions at him in that stiff little voice—no outward sign of distress—and yet her face and the neck of her dress were wet with tears.
A hollow opened up inside him, edged with panic. He hated it when women cried. And this was Rose.
“Weep for you, you big idiot?” She rushed at him and thumped him on the chest. Tears poured down her cheeks. “Why would I weep? What a stupid question. Weep? I was furious with you! Furious!” She pummeled his chest with angry, ineffectual fists. “You showed me a glimpse of heaven and then you left me. Left me!”
She went to hit him again and he caught her fist in hishand. “All alone with nothing—not even the slender hope of ‘missing.’ They said you weredead, Thomas! Drowned. All hands lost! In black and white they said it, printed in the newspapers! Just two weeks after our wedding!”
Helpless, guilty, paralyzed by her distress, he muttered, “I’m sorry.” He wasn’t even sure what he was apologizing for. Dying? Not dying? Making her cry?
“‘Dirty little secret’—how could you eventhinksuch a thing? I just hadn’t hadtimeto tell anyone. I had to wait until Lily was better—youknowhow sick she was, and she’s my beloved sister so of course I had to tell her first. And then—you were dead. And she was still away, recuperating, and I was stuck back in school, in a dormitory with five other girls.”
