He found the fastening of her dressing gown and opened it, searching for the ripe breasts he could feel straining toward him, tantalizingly close under the fabric. But she stopped his hand and moved back a step. “What is it?”
She looked at him, searching his eyes for something. He thought she was trying not to tell him something, so he waited until she had decided. Then she said, so softly he barely heard it, “I’ve seen Teddy.”
It didn’t register immediately.
Drummond said nothing about this
was his first thought.
She must not have told him.
But he knew it couldn’t be true and said so. “That’s impossible.”
“No.” She looked up at him. “I did see him. In Paris, late one night when I.... Devin, I wasn’t looking for him anymore, I didn’t
want
to find him—then, there in the dark, in the mist, there he was.”
“Where?”
She told him, not telling him why she had gone to the bridge at that hour of the morning, but going into great detail about what the bridge looked like, what Teddy looked like, her voice rising toward the end until he realized that she was becoming hysterical, and he reached out to pull her to him, gripping her arms hard enough to hurt, so that she snapped out of her frenzy.
“It wasn’t he,” Devin said.
“What do you mean?”
He looked down into her puzzled eyes. “You saw a slenderly built man of your husband’s height and coloring. Did you speak to him?”
“No.”
“Did he say anything to you? Did he seem to recognize you?”
“No. I did wonder about that, about why he should have run away again. All I could think of was ... Devin, was Teddy really involved in this plot? Have you known it all along and only wanted to spare me?”
“In a way. No, he wasn’t, but yes, I did.”
Bewildered, she looked at him again in that searching way, as if seeking an answer to a question she was afraid to voice. He looked over her shoulder, not wanting to meet her eyes, not wanting to tell her the truth. So she had to ask him again.
“Devin, why did you say it’s impossible that it could have been Teddy?”
She spoke very low, almost as if she hoped he wouldn’t hear, and when he took her closer into his arms, kissing her neck, breathing in the sweet scent of her freshly brushed hair, he could feel her bewilderment as palpably as he could her scantily clothed body.
“Do you love me, Maddie?” he whispered.
“Yes.” She said it quickly, as if she didn’t want to think about it. But he wanted her to.
“Will you always love me, whatever happens?”
“Yes!”
She believed it, but he could not, knowing what he did. He wanted to take her, to love her so violently that she would never forget it, because after he told her what he had to tell her, she would never let him do it again.
But he could not bring himself to do that to her even once, so at last he told her the whole truth. “It’s impossible—because I killed him.”
He could feel the shock go through her, like a bolt of electricity, but she didn’t immediately try to push him away. He wished he could see her eyes, know what she was thinking. But when he moved his head to look at her, her eyes were dead, the passion shocked out of them, and she said, very calmly, “Get out.”
He’d expected that, but now he didn’t want to give in to it. He wanted to explain. He gripped her shoulders to hold her still in case she tried to bolt.
“Maddie, I didn’t know who he was. I certainly didn’t mean to kill him. I didn’t mean to kill anyone, but he got in the way.”
It was coming out muddled, so he started again. “He was pretending to be someone else—another anarchist—and he threatened Claude, so because I thought he was the other man, I shot him—”
“No!”
She twisted violently to free herself from him. “I don’t want to hear any more! Get out!”
She was like a wild thing in his hands, and all he could think to do to stop her was to kiss her again, clamping his mouth on hers like a vise. She stopped moving then, so he moved his hands to pick her up and carry her to the bed. But as soon as he loosened his grip just enough, she tore herself away. She lost her balance and fell on the carpet, but when he reached to help her up, she lashed out at him, beating at him with her fists. He stepped out of her range and stared down at her, his fists clenched helplessly at his sides, hoping the storm would pass quickly.
But it wasn’t going to. There were too many old sins—and not just his—surging to the surface for either of them to control.
“You murdered him! Get out of my sight. Get out!”
She turned her face away from him then, covering it with her hands, and sobbing. Her anger seemed to leave her, only to transfer itself to him.
“You just said you didn’t want to find him!” he shouted, even though he was standing directly over her. “He wasn’t worth looking for, Maddie. He was no good. He was weak and easily led, and he didn’t care what he put you through. I’m sorry it had to be me, but it would have happened sooner or later. He would have stepped into some other situation he didn’t belong in and didn’t know how to handle.”
She curled up into an anguished knot in the corner of the sofa and put her arms over her head, not wanting to listen to him.
“Maddie—”
Their shared anger cooled as quickly as it had flared, and he reached down to her. She shivered pathetically as he lifted her up, and he wanted to comfort her, hold her in his arms and tell her everything would be all right. But he knew she wouldn’t let him. Not now. And it wouldn’t be all right. Not until she had forgiven herself.
He laid her gently on the bed and left without another word, closing the door on her muffled sobs.
Maddie did not go down to dinner that night, and despite Louise’s increasingly anxious questions, refused to say why she had lost her appetite, refused to say anything that would explain the blankness in her eyes and the defeat in her posture. When Louise finally, if reluctantly, left her, she lay down on her bed and for the first time in her life gave way to self-pity.
What had she done? Only given in to a dream, another dream of ending what was unhappy to find new happiness. She had dreamed the same thing once before, and it had turned into a nightmare, with no clear awakening to end it.
“Teddy, what would you do if I died before you?” she had asked once, when she was young enough to think of death as still only a theory, not a reality.
“I shall be so old by then,” he’d said, “that I guess I’d just die, too.”
If only she’d believed at the beginning of this search that Teddy was dead, she might have spared herself this long drawn-out attempt to bury herself with him. Yet if she had not gone to London chasing that impossible dream, she would not have found another dream, one that had now proved just as elusive.
Why was it that whenever she tried to give her love away, it was flung back in her face? Teddy had not wanted it, or he would not have left her like that. She would have given him a divorce—and all her money if he wanted that instead—if only she’d been able to say good-bye to him once and for all. She would have been free, then, to give her love again.
She was only now beginning to understand how Teddy’s little lies had weighed her down and restricted that freedom he pretended to give her. Just as the little adventures he found in life were not enough to satisfy her need to do something lasting and her own, so the little lies he told to make his life go more smoothly only slowed hers down. The burden of remorse she carried with her had made her talk as if she loved Teddy more than she really had, so that what she shrank from now was the memory of the lies she told Devin Grant about loving Teddy, lies that she had believed were the truth when she told them, but that he had seen through all along.
No wonder he had not wanted to tell her the truth about how Teddy had died. He must have known she would have to find her way through her own lies before she would be ready to face the truth.
But how could she convince Devin now that she could forget those lies? Could she live with him, without always remembering them—and being reminded of her own failure with Teddy?
But how could she live without him now?
“Will you always love me, whatever happens?” he had asked her, and believing it, she had said yes. Even now, she thought she could believe it, if only….
“Never say
if only
!” he’d said, too. “You can’t change the past….”
Maddie’s mind revolved in a dizzy spiral, looking for an answer, any answer. Her emotions went in circles, through self-pity to anger to despair. Finally, she cried herself to sleep and did not wake up until after ten o’clock the next morning.
#
But then it was as if a storm had passed and the sky was clear of clouds again. She lay awake in bed, looking up at the ceiling and feeling drained. She remembered why she had been so miserable, but she could not remember now how it felt. She could remember Teddy now only as a face in the distant past, someone she had met briefly and not really known, someone who had no connection to her life now. It was as if a war had ended.
All that was left was Devin. She wanted more than anything else to run to him, to tell him she loved him and that she would love him whatever happened, or had happened, as she had promised. But was there still time? Had he believed perhaps that the shock of his confession, which was really just the final painful tearing out of everything that was past, was the end of their love? No, it was a beginning; she had to be sure he understood that!
Despite her desperate need to tell him this, however, she knew there was something else that mattered to him now, something that had to be finished before they could be free to forget the past and the rest of the world in the wonder of each other. And she knew that if she did not help him finish this thing, she could never hope to be allowed to share his life later.
She had wasted so much time fighting to change the past. Would she know how to fight for the future?
She got up and rang for Louise, who entered her room with trepidation, to find Maddie ransacking her closet for something to wear.
“Oh, there you are, Louise,” she said, backing out of the wardrobe. “I’m going out. But please bring me a pen and some paper first.”
Louise, understandably taken aback, hesitated. Maddie looked up from where she was kneeling on the floor searching for shoes to go with the dress she had chosen.
“What is it, Louise?”
“Nothing, Mrs. Malcolm. That is ... are you quite well this morning, ma’am?”
“Yes, of course.” Maddie began stripping off her robe and nightdress, but when Louise moved to help, she waved her hand dismissively. “Pen and paper, Louise.”
“Won’t you ... wouldn’t you like some breakfast, ma’am?”
Maddie paused with her hand reaching for a clothes hanger. “Oh, yes. I’m starved. Order up a nice
big
breakfast, Louise,
after
you’ve brought the paper. And tell Oliver I want to see him.”
#
An hour later, having eaten her breakfast and sent a message to Devin’s room and had a talk with Oliver—from which Louise, who was beginning to feel decidedly put-upon, was excluded—Maddie was dressed and on her way across the Oos River by the nearest bridge. With Louise trailing determinedly behind, she started up the Lichtentaler Allee, trying to look like any other tourist out to take the air.
A glance in the mirror while she was dressing had told Maddie that her long night’s sleep had not entirely removed the red from her eyes and that she was looking paler than usual, but she had rouged her cheeks, put some drops in her eyes, and put on her newest, gayest morning dress to go out walking on the broad, tree-lined avenue that was Baden’s most fashionable promenade. Here the devotees of the spa’s restorative waters drank while they walked, sipping from their cups and glasses whenever they paused to admire the view down across the river to the town itself.
The gentlemen wore dark city clothes, spats, and top hats, but the ladies were dressed to the nines in picture hats and filmy summer dresses. In her robin’s-egg-blue walking dress, Maddie fit nicely into the elegant picture, but she found she had to deliberately pace her steps more slowly, from a brisk, anxious walk to a stroll, to keep people from looking after her curiously. She made herself stop every few minutes to put up her parasol and admire the view over the stone balustrade above the river.
It was while she was paused at one of these overlooks that Maddie became aware of someone other than Louise standing behind her. She drew a deep breath and prayed it was not too late to make him understand. It was a moment before he spoke, and then he sounded like someone else, like a servant she had sent for. “You wanted to see me?”
“Yes.” She made herself turn around and look up at him, hoping her eyes would tell him what she wanted to say. He studied her for a moment, then seemed to release his breath very slowly. He put one hand out, tentatively, to stroke her cheek, and she caught it in her own hand and held it there. For a moment she wished she had chosen a less public place for this meeting, but she had done it deliberately, after all. She took his hand away from her face, but held on to it just the same.
“I wanted to apologize—”
“Don’t,” he said. “Just say that you forgive me.”
“For killing Teddy?”
He winced at that, pulling away from her a little as if she had struck him. “There is no forgiving that, only that I didn’t tell you sooner.”
“If you had, I would never have forgiven you.”
“I know. I still should have told you.”
“Why didn’t you, then?”
“At first, because I was afraid you had some connection with the people who caused—the people your husband was involved with. Later ... because I was afraid. I knew you would be angry, or disappointed, or shocked, and in any case would never want to see me again.”
“That’s not true.”
He looked in her eyes, not quite trusting her words.
“It’s true that I was all those things,” she said, “but they’re gone now. I do want to see you. I do want your forgiveness, too.”