Page 28 of It Takes Two to Tumble
They were treating him as if he did belong here, not on a ship a thousand miles away, but on a picnic blanket, basking in the sunshine. As if he belonged to these children and they to him, as if he were at all worthy of that. And somehow, this country vicar belonged there, too, with them.
After the cakes had been reduced to rubble, the children ran off to wade in the lake. Phillip knew he ought to acknowledge how happy and healthy the children were, not to mention how they had even come around to not openly detesting the sight of him. He ought to thank Sedgwick for giving him his family. But he couldn’t find the words. And even if he could have, he wouldn’t have been brave enough to speak them.
“I had a fine afternoon cleaning up the mess your Sir Martin Easterbrook made,” Phillip said, trying to put some distance between them with an unpleasant topic. “He’s closed off more grazing land.” He didn’t need to explain to Sedgwick, who had been raised here, that this communal grazing land was all that made it possible for some of the more modest tenants to scrape together a living. “And then he evicts the tenants who can’t pay their rents. So now my tenants expect the same treatment from me, which makes it damned hard to do business with them.”
“I doubt that Martin Easterbrook, whatever his faults may be, is single-handedly responsible for the tradition of mistrusting landlords.”
“Goodness. You’re a radical.”
“Hardly. But I was raised by radicals, so some of it might have rubbed off.”
“I called on him and he was an ungrateful little wretch.”
Benedict frowned. “He swam in this lake with my brothers and me. And now he’s...” He shook his head, obviously not wanting to say precisely what Martin Easterbrook was.
“He doesn’t seem overfond of your family,” Phillip said, striving for tact. “Says he can’t bear to see you happy when he’s miserable. And he seems to resent some expenditures your father made on behalf of you and your brothers.”
“He must mean my living or my brothers’ school fees, although the latter can’t have amounted to much. One of my brothers was mentioned in Sir Humphrey’s will, but I don’t believe it amounted to much.”
Phillip thought of the tiny church in the village and the rather tumbledown vicarage beside it; he took in the well-worn soles of Ben’s boots and the frayed edges of his cuffs. Giving the living of St. Aelred’s to Ben rather than selling it hadn’t been what impoverished the Easterbrooks. And the venom in young Easterbrook’s voice suggested more than resentment over a few hundred pounds a year.You really don’t know, the man had said. And now Phillip wondered if Ben even knew what lay at the heart of his neighbor’s antipathy. Whatever the source of Easterbrook’s rancor toward the Sedgwicks, Phillip knew Ben wouldn’t be pleased to learn of it. Phillip realized he would have given a good deal to protect Ben from what seemed an inevitable disappointment.
“You know,” Phillip said. “There’s a time-honored method of dealing with encumbered estates. When my father left me with debts to pay, I found a wealthy wife. I daresay Easterbrook could do the same. He has a title and an estate.”
He watched as Ben sucked in a breath and let it out slowly before he responded. “Is that the only reason you married? Money?”
“No, of course not. Caroline wanted a home and children of her own, and the fact that I would generally be away from home was, ah, perhaps a factor she weighed in my advantage when considering potential suitors.” She had quite explicitly said that she did not require a husband on the premises, and Phillip, remembering what life had been like for his mother during his father’s tenure at Barton Hall, felt that he quite understood. “I was fond of her. She was, I believe, fond of me, and marriage was the answer to both our problems. At the time I thought it not a bad bargain for either of us.”
Another minute passed in silence, and Phillip thought Ben might let the subject drop. “Did she know?” he asked, his voice pitched low.
The sound of the children splashing in the water fell away at this reminder of their shared predicament. He felt a sense of responsibility to help Ben navigate these muddy waters. “No, I don’t believe she did. I hardly think she would have known that there was anything to be known, if you follow me. It’s hardly a topic that a lady can expect to hear about in the ordinary course of things. And I couldn’t have told her without exposing myself to ruin.” That wasn’t true, though. Caroline would have kept his secret. She was too practical to do otherwise.
The real reason Phillip had never spoken of it to his wife, the woman who had been his ally and friend, was that he had been afraid she would think less of him if she knew his desires. And that perhaps she would think less of their marriage, their family, their friendship. He never wanted to risk finding out, so he had kept it a secret. Now Phillip wondered if he had spent his entire life keeping hidden the parts of himself that he feared would invite scorn. But the situation hadn’t been fair for either of them, and he felt a sudden swell of anger at the injustice of a world that left a man like him with so few options.
He turned to Ben, thinking of saying something to the younger man, some word of advice, but he realized he didn’t have anything useful to say. He couldn’t tell him not to marry this girl, not to live a lie, because what else was there? He had nothing to say, nothing to offer. And that felt terribly familiar.
Ben wanted to punch somebody. It had been a good number of years since he had actually needed to hit anyone, and he dearly wished he had a convenient target now—some fool who was unwise enough to bother one of his brothers or mock his mother and who desperately needed a corrective sock in the jaw—because his right hand was clenching into a fist on its own.
But now he was furious and he didn’t even have the satisfaction of knowing who he was furious with, unless it was himself. He was angry at life, and wasn’t that a stupid thing. He was angry that there was no way for him to have what he wanted, what he needed, what surely was any man’s dream—a home, a family, a place of his own in the world—without a wife, and he didn’t know how to have a wife without deceiving or misleading her on a matter that she must find of the utmost importance.
And it wasn’t only that. It wasn’t fair to himself. Until meeting Dacre, his attraction to men had been vague. He had known that he was drawn to men in a general way, as a category of people, but the objects of his desire had thus far been faceless, safe in their abstraction. Until he had felt Dacre’s hands on him, he hadn’t quite grasped what it meant to be with a person you desired.
Now he wanted this man’s hands on him, this man’s skin on his own, his mouth on his mouth. Only Dacre would do. Ben had to figure out what to do with himself now that he had this very inconvenient piece of knowledge. Because he couldn’t have Dacre or any other man if he married Alice. But he couldn’t marry Alice if he planned to go to bed with anyone else. And without marriage and children and a place in the world, he didn’t know what to do with himself. He’d feel incomplete, cheated of his own future.
Punching somebody was out of the question, so he hurled a stone into the lake. He didn’t even try to skip it; he just plonked it into the water to cause the biggest possible splash. Then he did it a couple more times. It was utterly unsatisfying, but it must have looked more thrilling than it was, because the next thing he knew Jamie had materialized from whatever tree he had been climbing and started hurling rocks into the water beside Ben. And then the dog, who really was not a very bright creature but was possessed of good intentions, thought he was meant to run after whatever Jamie had thrown. In due course they had a very wet, very confused dog.
Ben found himself laughing despite himself as the children tried to soothe the animal.
“You can hit me if it’ll make you feel better,” Dacre said, coming up behind him to watch the children.
Ben huffed out a laugh. “Am I that easy to read?”
“Sometimes. But I was angry myself, and I guessed.”
That they shared this reason to be angry did nothing to make Ben feel better, but solidarity was worth something. It had to be, because it was one of the few things Ben had left.
Dacre cleared his throat. “You said you don’t go in much for penance, and I believe you, but I’m afraid that I do. Not in a spiritual sense,” he added hastily. But he stepped closer to Ben, still watching the lake. “I’ll always regret the secrecy. I’ll always regret that I couldn’t be more to Caroline. She deserved better. But I don’t know what else I could have done.”
“Did you ever think that maybeyoudeserved better?” The words were out before Ben could really think of what he meant. “That you deserved the kind of life you believe you deprived your wife of?”
