Page 122 of The Viscount and the Vixen
Turning to her, he wanted to believe in a love that strong, a love that could transcend death. Out of the corner of his eye, a movement caught his attention, a shadowy image, two people holding each other close, walking away. Only when he looked squarely in that direction, he saw nothing at all. No distinct shadows, no footprints.
“What is it, Killian?” Portia asked softly.
It wasn’t possible. Ghosts didn’t exist. They were merely figments created by grief, a profound grief that was now washing through him, that had washed through his father for years.
Locke had been a babe when his mother died, too young to even understand loss, to weep for her, but he bowed his head now and let the tears flow, for a man he had loved and a woman he’d come to love through his father. Portia closed her arms around him, and they rocked while the wind wailed and the snow fell and at the residence the clocks ticked.
“It’s odd to hear the clocks keeping time,” Edward announced.
They were seated near the fireplace in the music room—the Marquess of Marsden’s sons and their wives. His funeral had been a grand affair. Locke had been unprepared for the number of people who came: royalty, nobility, villagers, servants, miners. People coming to pay their last respects to a man who many of them remembered with fondness. Apparently his father had spent a good deal of time corresponding over the years, letters offering advice, counsel, and opinions. His father may have been a recluse but he hadn’t been completely withdrawn from Society.
Fortunately, Portia had anticipated the crowd that descended on Havisham. Not that Locke was surprised. The daughter of a vicar certainly knew how to manage a funeral. His father now rested in a grave beside his mother.
“I’m growing accustomed to them,” Locke said.
“I remember the day we arrived,” Ashe said. “I never wanted to leave someplace so badly in all my life.”
“That’s understandable,” Portia said. “You’d just lost your parents.”
“It was more than that. It was the desolation, the wind, the silence of the clocks. And the way Marsden looked so lost. But that night after we’d gone to bed, he came to me and shared a story about a prank my father played at school. And he told me that it was okay to cry when I missed them, that for a year after he lost his wife he cried every night. ‘The pain will never go away,’ he said, ‘but you will learn to live with it. And I will show you how.’ Damned if he didn’t.” He raised his glass. “To the Marquess of Marsden and the privilege we had of knowing him better than most.”
“Hear! Hear!” they all said, lifting their glasses in a salute.
It was sometime later that Portia found her husband standing out on the terrace that led from the ballroom, the place where he had first kissed her, no doubt hoping to run her off. She ambled up beside him. “Are you looking for your mother’s ghost?”
“And my father’s.”
His words caught her by surprise. “I didn’t think you believed in ghosts.”
“The morning we found my father, I thought I saw something. I want to believe I did. My father and mother together.”
“Then you should believe it.”
“It makes me sound like a lunatic.”
“It makes you sound like a man who can believe in the impossible.”
He sighed. “When I was a lad, I awoke one night because I felt something brushing over my brow. But no one was there. I lay as still as death, afraid I was going insane, afraid I wasn’t.”
“You thought it was your mother touching you.”
He nodded brusquely. “I may have done my father a disservice, believing he was mad.”
“You never locked him away in an asylum. You cared for him. And he loved you. It was obvious in the letters he wrote me.”
He studied her for a moment. “I often wonder how he knew you were the one for me. What did you say in your letters?”
“Didn’t he let you read them?”
“No, he said I needed to ask my own questions. But I’m curious as to what questions he deemed important, what he asked of you.”
Wedging herself between him and the railing, she placed her hands on his shoulders. “He only asked two things of me.”
“Two? But he said you corresponded quite a bit.”
“We did. In his first letter, he asked me to describe myself and to explain why I felt I met the requirements he sought. You heard those answers on the first day.”
“And the second question?”
