Guilford continued, seeming to understand her unspoken question. “He’s been rather…” He paused, as if searching for the appropriate words. “Surly. Angry. Angrier than usual,” he clarified with the pointed look she gave him. A ghost of a smile played about his lips.
Her eyes slid closed a moment. She forced them open. “Thank you.”
He bowed his head and kicked his mount forward.
Katherine dimly registered Harry’s approach.
“What was that about?” Harry murmured, staring off in the distance at the marquess’ swift retreating form.
She shook her head. “It is nothing,” she said, unable to speak of Jasper’s friendship with the marquess, and the marquess’s opinions of Jasper.
Harry held out his arm. “Will you join me for a stroll, Your Grace?”
“Er, I think I care to just sit here, Harry.”
His gaze searched hers. “You’re certain?”
She nodded.
With a sigh, he extracted a third kerchief. “Then, as you were, madam.”
Katherine caught it in her fingers. “Thank you, Harry,” she said softly, for so much more than just this scrap of fabric.
Harry beat his hand against his side. “You’re desiring your own company, aren’t you, Kat?”
He’d come to know her very well in these past months. Rather, they’d come to know one another. They could finish one another’s sentences. They were of like opinions on matters pertaining to the ton—they both abhorred London’s gossipy Society members.
And they’d come to know and respect one another enough to not delve too deeply into the secret demons that tormented them.
She smiled wanly up at him.
“You know he’s not deser…”
“Hush,” she chided him. No one, not her twin sister, Aldora or Michael, and not Harry knew the kind of man her husband was. Jasper possessed the valor to jeopardize his own life to pluck a stranger from the water. He gave the sole volume of poetry to a teasing young lady even as it happened to be the only enjoyment he took from life. He sang taproom ditties to babies. It was Jasper who’d deserved more—Jasper who’d had more, in his wife, Lydia.
Katherine would never be anything but a pale shadow in the other woman’s otherworldly glow of perfection.
Harry captured her hand and raised it to his mouth. He brushed his lips along the tops of her knuckles.
After he’d taken his leave, Katherine returned to what had become an all-too-familiar wrought-iron bench within the garden, considering Guilford’s appearance. And more, his revelation of Jasper.
In the time she’d known Jasper, she’d found him to be a surly, obstinate bear of a man. Surely Guilford’s claims that Jasper had become even more so, had nothing to do with her departure from his life. Why, he’d surely resumed the normal cadence of the comfortable, solitary existence he’d carried on since Lydia’s death, four…now four years and four months ago.
But what if he does miss you? A voice whispered at the edge of her mind. What if he harbors the same regret in your going, as you do in leaving?
Katherine picked up Wordsworth’s volume, and fanned the now all too-familiar pages. She paused upon a familiar verse.
Full often wished he that the winds might rage… She continued reading.
When they were silent: far more fondly now
Than in his earlier season did he love
Tempestuous nights--the conflict and the sounds
That live in darkness. From his intellect
And from the stillness of abstracted thought
He asked repose; and, failing oft to win
The peace required, he scanned the laws of light
Amid the roar of torrents, where they send
From hollow clefts up to the clearer air
A cloud of mist that, smitten by the sun,
Varies its rainbow hues. But vainly thus,
And vainly by all other means, he strove
To mitigate the fever of his heart.
She’d been a coward of the worst kind to leave him as she had. It had seemed at the time, her self-preservation was dependent upon distance between her and Jasper’s apathy.
Katherine had learned all too quickly, no matter the distance, no matter the time separating them, self-preservation would be futile. Whether Jasper wished it or not…she belonged to him.
~30~
Jasper stared unblinking at an all-too-familiar white sheet draped across the door. He folded his hands behind his back and continued to study the thick, crisp white linen, obscuring the wood panel and delicate handle.
Every day he rose and passed this bloody door and tortured himself with the evenly hung, thick white sheet.
With a curse, he ripped it viciously from the wall and it toppled to the floor in a noisy puddle of pooling fabric. He pressed the handle and tossed the door open hard enough it bounced back against the plaster of the walls.