Page 36 of The Secret of the Three Fates
“Was she wearing it when she died?”
Mr. Owen shook his head. “No. For here is the most peculiar part of losing my Mariah. She disappeared one night and I awoke with the ring on my finger and my wife gone.”
“Gone… which means you cannot be certain she is dead.” I breathed out. “What if she’s alive?”
“And how could she be? Ruby, I might have been a terrible husband but Mariah would not have left me. Not like that.”
I gnawed on my lower lip in thought. “Ruan, did Ben tell you anything else when he gave you the ring? Any indication why?”
He snapped the ring shut. “He did not say. Only that it had to be me. And I had to return it to his father.” Ruan fastened the strange little piece of jewelry against his neck, tucking it back into his shirt. “We were on the same ship home. He wasn’t doing well.” Ruan gestured to his own thigh. “A shrapnel wound that wasn’t healing properly. It had started to turn gangrenous. Some of my lads thought I could help him so I went to him against orders.”
“You tried to help?” My chest warmed at the thought, that even miles from home Ruan could not fight his nature. His need to heal people.
“I might have done, had I not been thrown into the brig with my men by Lennox.”
Mr. Owen suddenly slammed his fist on the table, rocking his chair back. “Out, the both of you. And take that damned ring. Throw it in the lake for all I care.” The suddenness of his proclamation surprised the both of us. “I do not want to hear any more of this. Not tonight.”
“Are you all right?” I leaned across the table, taking him by the hand.
He rubbed the back of mine with his thumb and shook his head. “I have not been all right in forty years. But sleep. Let me sleep, lass, and we’ll speak again in the morning.”
I nodded, taken aback by his quick change of mood, and leftthe room, Ruan following along after. He pressed the heavy three-paneled wooden door shut and turned the key. “Has he been like this long?”
“I don’t know what’s come over him. He’s always so… composed… cynical. And now he’s like this. Drinking at all times, swinging from uncharacteristically sentimental to melancholy with these flashes of anger and I—I am afraid to press him. The more he tells me of his past, the more it seems he’s coming apart at the seams.”
Ruan reached out, running his thumb across my brow. “This place. I’ve begun to fear we’re all unraveling here. Tonight at the lake. When was the last time you’ve done that?”
“Not since I was a girl. You don’t think there’s something about Manhurst itself making us this way?”
“I don’t know what I think. But I don’t like it here. And if I could, I would take both of you back to Cornwall on the next train.”
And I would go in a heartbeat.I leaned back against the door, closing my eyes. Mr. Owen had become the one curmudgeonly constant in my life since the death of my family, and Tamsyn’s betrayal of me during the war. When my family died, I thought Tamsyn and I would be able to make a life together. I loved her once, beyond all reason, and yet she too left me behind. When I found Mr. Owen I was a heartbroken, scarred, and angry young woman and he took me in regardless. And now… now after he’d revealed the extent of all his secrets, I scarcely knew who he was. He spoke of love and wanting to protect me, and yet for more than three years he’d hidden who he was from me.
“How long have you known him anyway?” I asked softly.
“I officially met him after the war when I brought the news of Ben’s death to him. And the ring.”
“But why did he leave it with you? If he believes the thing cursed or dangerous, why not destroy it?”
“Because I’m the Pellar, Ruby. If the item is cursed, as he believes, then it cannot touch me.” Ruan leaned against the dresser with a groan, crossing his left leg over his right.
“I’ve never believed in curses…”
“I never once thought you did. I might have met Owen after the war, but he knew of me long before. He knew of what I am from shortly after I was born.”
“Knewof you? You mean he’d been watching you?”
“More or less, yes. Not the most pleasant thought, mmm? I told you that I’d been sent to Oxford by a wealthy benefactor. I failed to mention that it washim.Owen took a keen interest in my well-being. My potential. He misguidedly believed that he could mold me. Take a country boy with peculiar abilities and shape him into—honestly, Ruby, I’m not sure what he thought he could do with me.”
I reached out of habit for my cigarette case, which was buried deep in my traveling trunk. “That sounds familiar. Mr. Owen always has a plan of some sort.”
“How did you meet him? I realize I hadn’t even thought to ask.”
I ran my fingers along the edge of the blanket around my shoulders. “Nothing exciting. I was angry after the war.”
“You, angry? I am shocked.”
I let out a little laugh and sighed, struggling to remember the girl I’d been once. The one who came back from France with a fortune to my name, and no one to share it with. My family dead, Tamsyn having abandoned me in France so she could marry Sir Edward. It was all quite the blow to my jaded little heart. “I answered an advertisement in the newspaper.”
