Silk and Secrets(147)

Ross watched her with rising horror, the image of the desperate girl she had been as sharp as the reality of her now. Never, even at his most anguished, had he thought of taking his own life, and he could only dimly imagine what kind of distress had driven Juliet to want to kill herself.

Reminding himself that she hadn't succeeded, he asked, "Who or what saved you?"

"The fact that I was too much of a coward," she said with sharp self-disgust. "I swam until I was too tired to lift my arms, then relaxed and prayed for oblivion so I would feel nothing more. But I found it isn't true that drowning is a gentle death. My mouth filled with water, my lungs burned, and I panicked, so terrified that I had the strength to start swimming again.

"Even so, I should have died because I was so far from the shore, but a squall blew up. The way the storm pounded, I thought I really was drowning. I remember it in horrible detail, right up until the moment I lost consciousness. By then, I must have been very close to the shore, because I learned later that the waves washed me up safely near a fisherman's cottage. He and his wife took me in, naked and bleeding."

Juliet turned toward him, her face stark as death. "There, at their cottage, I miscarried. I killed our child, Ross." Silent tears ran down her cheeks. "You wanted to know the worst, and there it is. I tried to kill myself, and instead I murdered our child."

She had warned him, but even so, the savage, visceral shock of her story was greater than anything he could have imagined. He felt as if an iron band was tightening around his chest, crushing his heart and soul.

Blindly he turned to the window and threw open the shutters as his tortured lungs struggled for air. He stared into the empty night, so saturated with pain that he could not separate his own from Juliet's.

So they had once made a baby together. The child would be almost twelve now, but would it have been a son or a daughter? Red-haired or blond or some unexpected variation? He tried to bring an image into focus, but he couldn't. Instead, his mind unexpectedly dredged up a half-forgotten memory.

Ross was his mother's child. But when he was grown, she told him that she had miscarried twice after his birth.

Because of her vivacity, his mother had been called "the laughing duchess," while her quieter twin sister, Sara's mother, was termed "the smiling duchess." But once, when Ross was about four years old, he had found his mother curled in the corner of the great hall of the Norfolk mansion, weeping hysterically, her beautiful face slashed by her clawing nails.

Terrified, he had run to find help for her. It had been hours before his father had been able to leave his wife long enough to look for his son, who was hiding in a corner of the attic too small for an adult to enter.

The duke had coaxed Ross out onto his lap. His own face marked with grief, he had explained that Ross's parents had wanted another child to love as much as him, but it was not to be, and his mother was mourning the baby that would never be born.

It was a long time before the duchess was her normal self again, and there were no more pregnancies; Ross suspected that his father took steps to ensure that his wife would not endure such emotional and physical punishment again.

But Ross had not forgotten his parents' pain. A dozen years later and in a far country, he mourned his own lost child.

Yet that sorrow was only one among many, a distant ache, not quite real. There was far more immediacy in Juliet's wrenching account of all that had happened in Malta. Like a kaleidoscope that had been twisted, the past had just taken on an entirely different pattern.

Now that he knew the whole, he could believe her claim that she had never stopped loving him, for it was clear that what had kept them apart was not lack of love but her soul-destroying guilt. If the circumstances had been reversed, he might have felt as unworthy and self- destructive as she had. Understanding that made it impossible to condemn her.

The wind caressed his face like a cool hand, and he realized that his cheeks were moist. There was a fitting symmetry to the tears, for he had not cried since that night in Malta, when he had wept for the loss of his beloved wife. Then his tears had been for himself, but this time most of his grief was for Juliet, and for the knowledge of how different things might have been.

It was a mark of Juliet's fierce sense of honor that she took full responsibility for what had happened, rather than trying to blame anyone else. Yet she had been scarcely more than a child herself, so confused and tormented that she had tried to take her own life.

Too vital to seek death again but convinced that she had sinned past redemption, she had turned her back on all she had ever known and run to the edge of the world. There she had turned all her personal and financial resources to helping others.