“Perhaps you ought to take your grandfather’s advice and . . . er . . . sit down.”
She smiled. “I think I will retire, actually. I haven’t my usual liveliness of late. You will be here in the morning, won’t you?”
“Of course.” For the moment, at least, he had nowhere to go.
“Good. Sleep well, Gareth. I am glad you’ve come home.” She dimpled at him and he smiled back. “Alice is wonderful, to be sure, but she is not the most diverting creature. You are certain to amuse me endlessly.” Then she, too, was gone, leaving Gareth standing alone in the middle of the cold foyer.
“Welcome, and be damned,” he muttered aloud, startling the maid who had appeared from the back hall.
He promptly sent her off to find him a bottle of whiskey, then followed her upstairs. She led him to the room he had occupied until he’d left home. It was just as elegant as he remembered, reasonably comfortable, and completely devoid of anything personal. He wondered what had happened to his possessions: his models of ships, his books, the special globe that opened to show a map of the heavens painted inside.
Weary, but knowing he wouldn’t sleep, he crossed the room and drew back the curtains. The sky was still heavy, opaque from the day’s rain. But he knew what he would see had it been clear. The constellations: Draco, Perseus, Cassiopeia, the two Bears. And their stars, the names as mysterious and exotic as the lands he had eventually followed them to: Arcturus, Miram, Betelgeuse, Alula Borealis. And of course Polaris, the North Star. The star of sailors and explorers and long-departed wanderers. He had followed Polaris, in a way, as he’d come from Greece. Westward leading Polaris, guiding him back to a place where he had never really belonged and had no desire to be now.
Bottle in hand, careful not to spill any of its precious contents, he dropped back onto the bed and stared at the canopy. God help him if Clarissa’s child was a girl. If it was, the best case scenario was that he would forget thirty years of stargazing and take to howling at the moon.
Down the hall, Alice turned away from her own window. She drew her dressing gown more tightly around her. She was cold, despite the fire still burning merrily in the grate. She’d been standing by the icy window for too long, looking at the blank sky. Perseus, Cassiopeia, Andromeda. How many nights had she and Gareth stood under the stars, naming them, trying to outdo each other at recounting the myths connected to the constellations—the more dramatic and bloody and lovelorn the better. She had cherished every minute.
Alice had adored Gareth Blackwell from the first time she saw him, striding into his mother’s drawing room with all the brash confidence of his twelve years, whistling and trailing mud in his wake. He’d been so beautiful, so totally unconcerned with his mother’s pinch-lipped annoyance. Alice, eight years old, newly orphaned and handed into her grandfather’s loving if inept care, had been dazzled.
Perhaps it was that he was the younger son, second in everyone’s attention to his brother. Left behind when Arthur went to Eton, left in general to the care of indifferent tutors and fond but unchallenging servants. Perhaps he had genuinely liked her. Either way, he had cheerfully accepted her adoration, allowed her to tag after him whenever they met, eventually become her dearest friend. She had adored him from the first time they met. She had fallen head over heels in love with him six years later.
It had taken a further two years, two years of her wishing upon daisies and dandelions and stars. Two years of walks in Kilcullen woods and nights watching the skies, of the neighborhood winking and smiling and whispering young love. But at last he’d kissed her. Once. Days before he left. Her last view of Gareth until tonight had been of him racing toward Dublin and beyond on his father’s best horse, his laughter trailing in his wake.
Alice had had eight years to plan for this. Eight Christmases from the first, the first he didn’t come home. It had taken her two to accept he wasn’t coming back to her, three more to stop longing. But she had stopped longing. She’d had to. The alternative, that of years spent yearning for him, heartsick, had been too much for her practical head. So she had tried to forget how sweet her dreams had been, and when she couldn’t forget, tried to remember with the fond detachment of adulthood.
And how very successful she had been. When sporadic news came of him, she listened attentively but without emotion. She expressed her pleasure at his success in the navy, was relieved when he sold out without having been wounded, followed his sporadic missives to his family as he wandered the world.
And eventually, no one looked at her with pity when his name was mentioned. People stopped commenting on the irony of the elder Blackwell boy marrying the younger Ashe girl, when their siblings had been the ones expected to wed someday.