Page 93 of The Secret of the Three Fates
He reached out, taking me by the hand, and kissed my knuckles, holding it against his heart which beat rapidly in his chest. “A cleanly cut wound will eventually scab over, and in time—even the most grievous ones will heal. It may scar and be tender, but in time the pain will pass… Hope, however, is a festering sore.” His eyes grew wet as he dropped the bouquet of crimson and purple blossoms onto the snow at the foot of the monument. “How can a wound heal when it is rent back open each time there is a knock at the door? Or the post arrives? Or you catch a familiar scent on a crowded street? Each time—” His voice caught in his throat.
I threw my arms around him and hugged him tight. “Oh, Mr. Owen. I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have brought you here. I shouldn’t have—”
“Hush, Ruby,” he said, stepping back and putting his finger under my chin, tilting my face up to look him in the eye.
“For the first time in forty years I know the truth. I know there is no hope that my Mariah will return. I canheal. Because of you. You cannot underestimate the importance of that to me.”
“You truly loved her all these years?” I could not fathom that sort of love. Or at least, I could not fathom someone loving me in such a way despite the disturbing confession Ruan had hurled at me on the dock.
He nodded. “Isn’t it strange? She was gone more years than she was here and yet I scarcely drew breath without wondering where she was, and if I might find her again.”
“And yet you married again.”
He nodded. “I tried to move on. That’s what they always say, isn’t it? That wounds get better with time and distance. Ben’s mother was a wonderful woman. She knew of Mariah… not the particulars… but she understood that I was not the man that I had been before. She had lost her first husband too.” Mr. Owen sighed and stepped closer to the marble obelisk, running his finger over the etching of Mariah’s profile.
“Nunc scio quid sit amor,”he whispered before pressing a kiss to the monument.
Now I know what love is.
I wiped away a tear with the back of my glove, unable to keep them from falling. What must it be like to have a love like that?
He turned to me, tilting my chin up with a finger. “You are brooding. It is making me bilious.”
I let out a startled laugh as I brushed the snow from my lashes. “Mr. Owen, thisisa funeral, of sorts.”
“Yes, yes, but Mariah would detest all these tears for her sake. Yours and mine both. Besides, your brooding is giving me a headache. When are you going to write to Kivell and end my suffering?”
“That eager to get rid of me, are you? I thought you wanted me to stay with you in Exeter.”
“I do, my dear. I cannot imagine a day without you there rearranging my bookshelves and destroying my gardens and filling my parlors with the most frivolous of pompous peacocks trying to gain your affections. I would not have you any other way. I am simply growing weary of you being morose. It’s terrible for a girl’s constitution. Just ask my great-aunt Penitence.” He tried to make light of it—but it was the truth—I’d become a dreadful bore as of late.
“You’ve had some bad luck when it comes to love, I’ll give you that. But there’s no one to say that this affair with Kivell will endpoorly as well.” He tucked my hair behind my ear. “I thought I taught you that. If not, I’ve been the worst of fools.”
I rolled my eyes, slipping away from his embrace. “You’ve told me a great many things, but I don’t think I’ve once heard you pontificate on the merits of love and second chances. In fact, I believe youjustcalled hope a festering sore not five minutes ago. One could argue that these two things are contradictions.”
He harrumphed, his breath visible in the cold air. “Clearly, I have been remiss in my paternal duties. I should have taught you more in that vein, and less about binding glue and beetle larvae.”
“I did rather enjoy the demonstration on the difference between furniture beetles and deathwatch beetles.”
“I mean it, lass. You spend too much time with books and not enough with flesh-and-blood people.”
“Says the pot. The way I hear it, before I moved in with you, you didn’t see anyone besides your housekeeper and your library for months on end.”
“I find books better companions than most people,” he grumbled, before taking my hands in his own and giving them a squeeze to underscore the import of what he was about to say. “You have a chance, Ruby. A chance to be happy right here. Rightnowand you should seize it. Grab on with both hands and don’t bugger it up like I did.”
I settled down on the bench, gazing up at the gray sky. “Yes, well… It’s complicated.”
“All the best things in life are. Would be dreadfully boring otherwise. Oh, I know you aren’t the marrying sort—but I don’t believe Kivell minds. The lad has been alone for years. It’d probably be good for him. He’s far too set in his ways, it’s made him old before he’s earned the right to it. You’re a pair of lovesick pups—the both of you—go put the lad out of his misery. As my great-aunt Patagonia once said—”
“You don’t have a great-aunt Patagonia.”
He waved me off.
“Mr. Owen, you don’t understand—”
“—that he’s a Pellar? Believe me, girl, there are far more things in this world that we cannot explain than those we can. So what if the lad’s a witch? You aren’t exactly adhering to your copy of Emily Post now.”
I groaned at his reference to the daintily wrapped etiquette book that had been deposited anonymously on our doorstep not long before we set out for Scotland. The book had scarcely been published in the States when a copy arrived one morning addressed to me. “It wasn’t as if I sent for it. I couldn’t care less what some American socialite has to say about decorum.”
