On Bended Knee, page 28
part #6 of Wicked Worthingtons Series
Gemma look at the girl. Of all the people in the world who might dispense advice on matters of the heart, a fourteen-year-old girl was the last one Gemma should listen to. Yet she found herself regarding the girl with great seriousness. "I shall take your opinion under consideration."
Satisfied with that, Atalanta scrambled into the second carriage like a child. Pollux, who should've known better, aided her with a shove instead of a gentlemanly hand.
Mr. Lysander Worthington was up on the fine thoroughbred Icarus, standing like a centaur statue out in the lane, waiting for the carriages to roll.
Gemma did not wave to him, nor did he do other than gaze back toward the house with his hat shading his eyes.
There was really nothing more to be said, was there?
IN THE SECOND LUXURIOUS carriage that rattled south down the river road, Button mused over Lysander Worthington's decision.
"Mrs. Oakes is such a sincere person, and with such perfect posture! I wish I could dress her again. And those eyes!" He sighed. "I am ever seduced by a gentle gaze." He chewed his lower lip for a moment. "How could he leave such a creature behind?"
Cabot picked nonexistent lint from a perfect cuff. "Lysander left because she asked him to." Then his sharp gaze rose to pin Button back to the velvet seatback cushion with the intensity of it. "Just as I did."
Button drew in a shocked breath. "I never asked you to leave!"
"You never ask for your tea either, but I always know precisely when to bring it to you." Cabot did not back down, nor glance casually away as he usually did when the conversation became a touch too personal. "I know you, Joshua Samuel Button, better than you know yourself."
Button lifted his chin. "No one calls me Joshua. I left him behind when I walked beaten and bloodied from my father's tailor shop." Only Cabot knew that tale, offered up a decade ago to comfort a furious and bewildered young man.
Cabot nodded. "And you created Lementeur, The Liar, master of fashionable artistry and subterfuge. You are a virtuoso, creating a new man, with attentiveness to every last detail. Except for one."
Button opened his mouth to protest but Cabot stayed him with an upraised palm.
"I have something to say and you will hear it, Joshua. That young man's heart could not be made over, for hearts never can be. So you buried it under charming generosity, expending yourself upon every broken spirit, every unfortunate figure, every searching heart. I count the romances you assisted by the hundreds. You are ever driven, my Joshua, my dearest beloved Button, my much admired Lementeur, to give the world the one thing of which you have deprived yourself. Love."
Button couldn't speak. His chest ached and his hands turned to ice.
Relentlessly, Cabot went on. "If Lysander Worthington can batter through his tragic silence to speak of his love, how can I keep hiding my own behind the wall formed of nothing but your illogical resistance?"
He gazed at Button, his cool urbane façade fallen away. In his clever clouded-sky eyes there blazed only his heart, unshielded and unafraid.
Button suddenly, desperately longed for such freedom from fear.
"I love you, Joshua." In the confines of the carriage, Cabot's words were inescapable. "Only you. Ever and always, you. I will not leave. I will not move on to someone else. For me, there is only and ever you."
Button gasped for breath, for words, for a line of reasoning in the whirlpool of fear and hope that choked him.
"But I — I am twice your age —"
Cabot smiled then, a sweet, sunny grin that Button had never seen before. "Not anymore. I am now thirty years to your forty-nine."
"Forty-eight," Button managed, a tiny flare of vanity piercing his overwhelming turmoil.
"Moreover, I am informed on the highest authority that I was born older than you."
Distracted by the ringing accuracy of that mad logic, Button managed some actual words. "Whoever said that?"
"Everyone's favorite prodigy and speaker of truths, Miss Atalanta Worthington."
"Oh." Attie never lied. "It must be so, then." Button turned away for a moment, his gaze fixed blindly on the grassy slope passing outside.
Silence fell, as if they sat calm and quiet together, as if there was only the trotting of expensive hooves and creaking of expensive woods. As if there was not a tempest within him.
He had been alone for so long.
An eternity ago, fifteen-year-old Joshua had turned to the one person he trusted the most for advice, for answers. Why did he feel the way he did? Why did he think the way he did?
Why was he different?
His father, his teacher, a man so proud of Joshua's skills and finesse, forever boasting of his great future as a tailor, had not answered with words but with a raised fist.
It'd been a long life since then, a good life for the most part. He had achieved so much, for himself and for the people he most admired, and yes, even for his country.
Perhaps he truly did have nothing left to prove.
Resistance and protest floated away, the storm ebbed, leaving behind only clarity and acceptance.
"Cabot," Button said, without looking away from the serenity of the dale, "I think I like it when you call me Joshua."
Chapter 29
IN YEW MANOR, GEMMA stood in the precise center of her stillroom until she was certain that the Worthington's fine borrowed carriages were well and gone.
Then she looked down at her aching hands to realize they had been tightly fisted the entire time. Why? She wasn't angry, or frustrated. After all, she'd been the one to ask him to go.
Perhaps to stop yourself from reaching out to stay him?
Gemma spread her whitened fingers wide before her in denial of that wayward thought. She had done the right thing, the responsible thing.
However, she felt stifled by the redolent air of the stillroom. She wanted the grassy breeze upon her face. Turning on one heel, she strode swiftly from the room, through the kitchen and out the door. She needed to breathe.
When she stepped outside, she closed her eyes and pulled in great lungfuls of air.
I just need a bit of quiet.
Yes, the great mob of Worthingtons and friends had quite overwhelmed her. The loss of Jennie, she could not yet bear to touch. She felt raw and restless and as if something was very, very wrong.
Yet all the commotion had passed. Now it was time to go back to her ordinary routines. That would be the most steadying thing. There were herbs to gather and transform into her little store of tinctures and extracts. The chamomile was blooming in the garden already. She was letting the flowers go to waste.
Instead, Gemma pressed her palms to her heated cheeks, her fingers covering her eyes. She felt ripped apart inside, torn by the past days, by the joy and the grief, like a band pulled too far from its original shape, now unable to return to it. She couldn't feel her own place in the world anymore.
She opened her eyes and could not stop her gaze from turning to the road south. The carriage would be well down the dale by now, along the river road.
"Only one road in and one road out."
At that gruff voice, Gemma tore her gaze away from the farthest curve and looked down. Her hands were doing it again. She spread them wide across her midriff, where Mr. Bing would not see. "Don't you have some tasks to attend to?" At that moment, she did not need Mr. Bing's paternal interference.
"The lad and his brother hove to in the stable this morning. Hammered that shoe back onto the Icky horse and did a week's worth o' chores to boot. Not the usual sort of toffs, that lot."
Gemma pointedly ignored him. He huffed. "He worked himself to the bone, that lad. I’ve never seen anyone so determined to make something right. Except for you."
When she didn't respond, he took her hint and stomped off.
No, the Worthingtons were not the usual sort of anything, were they? Dashing Pollux, with such longing in his eyes. Fierce Atalanta, terrified underneath. Beautiful broken Lysander.
Gemma's knees gave a bit and she sank to sit on the top step, despite the gritty state of the stone. I shall have to sweep. But the thought flowed right through her mind without stopping.
She found she was watching the road again.
Did she truly expect him to come riding back, pounding up the road on Icarus, just to be sent away again? For that was precisely what she would do if he did such a mad thing.
Wouldn't she?
Topknot lurched slowly across the yard. Mr. Bing must've released her from her confinement in the stable. Gemma had been certain the dog would want to follow Lysander, but Topknot was a Yorkshire lass, through and through. London was no place for her.
But it's all right for him?
No. She was quite sure it wasn't. Lysander had been in London for several years, yet it was here in the Yorkshire Dales, in the clean and quiet, where he had found his voice at last.
Thus your prescription for your patient is to immerse himself in grime and noise? To breathe air tinged with soot and try to make himself heard above the city's cacophony?
Excellent advice, Dr. Gemma.
He was not her patient anymore, though, was he? He was something else, something different, something that crossed the line between patient and doctor, something that confused and distracted her.
But you're not a doctor. You're a widow with an herb garden and a pony cart, rattling about the dale with delusions of grandeur.
Gemma did not bow before that critical voice this time. She'd been through the fire yesterday and since then, something had turned to steel within her. She'd loved Jennie and she'd lost her. Yet she now understood something important. There had been a chance to save both Jennie and her child and Gemma had taken it.
Furthermore, she would make the same choice again. She was certain now that Jennie would agree that it had been worth a try.
She lifted her eyes to take in the sweep of the dale before her. I am only what I am — but I am all they have.
She mattered here. Lysander had helped her see that.
Topknot stood staring down the road, her nose lifted high. What stories did scent tell dogs? Did Topknot know how reluctantly Lysander had climbed into the carriage? Could she detect the way Atalanta had stared at her wayward brother when he had seated himself across from her?
Atalanta desperately wanted her family to stay together, yet she'd seemed astonished that she'd been able to persuade her brother to leave.
But it was I who convinced him. I broke his heart and stole his words away again.
There. She'd admitted it to herself at last. She, who only wanted to heal, had driven a sword into the heart of someone who had never done her harm.
Why had she done such a thing?
I had to send him away. I don't love him.
She was swept with a sudden memory — his hands, his lips in the dark. The tenderness of his touch that had brought tears to her eyes. The feeling of drifting to sleep with her head on his chest, with his strong arms around her. Stronger for the sharing of themselves, not weakened by it.
And the words she'd heard but not answered because sleep stole her away at just the precise moment.
I love you, he'd whispered into her hair, so nearly silent that she knew she wasn't meant to hear.
She'd been filled with wonder, and then darkness had taken her, but she knew what she would have said if she'd had the chance.
I love you too.
That sweet, sleepy moment had been lost to her until now, swept away by tragedy and grief and guilt, obscured by her own self-hatred and the terrible tale he'd told her.
What Lysander had done in battle was unthinkable, wasn't it?
Or was it? Gemma forcibly set aside Edmund's oft-stated opinions and considered the matter for herself.
Lysander was no physician. He had been a man alone on a field of suffering, injured himself, facing a hell she could not grasp.
Edmund had been a good man, a paragon. But paragons could be uncompromising, like a statue chiseled from stone. When Gemma had assisted her husband in the army medical tents, surrounded by the agonized, dying men who could not be helped, hadn't she sometimes wished he would unbend enough to give those poor doomed soldiers some ease?
Who was she to judge Lysander?
It'd been he alone, abandoned on the storming battlefield, holding desperately to someone he cared about, someone shattered and suffering, someone who pleaded for release from unimaginable pain.
Topknot wandered closer, sniffing at Gemma's hem. Gemma did not reach to pet the dog's silky ears, for she knew Topknot would only flinch from her touch.
She was quite certain she would not be able to bear that right now.
When she felt the soft weight on her knee, she went entirely still. Surprised, she looked down in wonder at Topknot's black-and-white muzzle resting there.
The dog let out a deep sigh, almost a groan. As Gemma carefully let her hands fall to tentatively caress the patchwork fur, she marveled at how perfectly Topknot's mournful noise reflected her own deepest feelings.
We are all different now. I cannot go back to the life I lived before, or to the woman I was before. She could not make time close over Lysander's presence in her heart, like water closing over a dropped stone.
He had come to the dale and he'd changed it. He had changed everyone he touched: cantankerous Mr. Bing, the angry village, suspicious Shepherd Orren, fearful Topknot, even poor, misunderstood Bad Pony.
Gemma healed people. She kept their bodies well, but Lysander did something else. He saw what they needed in their hearts and he gave it to them.
In his silent, tireless way, he had inspired the village, a pony, a dog, a woman, and even an old curmudgeon like Bing to think beyond mere survival. To hope for more.
I am not who I was before. I am not content with safe routine and tentative medical actions.
I want more. I want to be more.
Her breath left her with the impact of her realization.
I want to be a doctor.
She wanted to study and learn as much as she could to help her dale. This certainty swept over her like a flood, yet she had never felt more grounded and stable.
That is who I am meant to be.
She paid no heed to conservative voices from the past clamoring to make her stop, to question herself, to doubt.
If Lysander Worthington could claw his way out of a collapsed tunnel choked with heavy mud, then surely she could outlast those faded remonstrations and criticisms?
He had survived everything that had happened to him, and he had come to her dale. Had he ever asked for help? Had he seen her as his remedy, clung to her, sapped her dry with his need?
He had not.
Gemma stroked Topknot's feathery ears and gazed down into the dog's sad brown eyes.
So much healing had followed Lysander Worthington into her dale. So much help had sprung from his tireless hands.
He'd given them all gifts, like a somber Father Christmas, taking the burden of hard labor from Mr. Bing, lifting her own desperate loneliness, adding his strength by her side in her moment of need, even shattering the barrier of his choking silence, offering up his own private sins to convince her that the guilt of losing Jennie was not her burden to carry.
Bad Pony neighed from the stable, calling to his lost friend Icarus.
Lysander Worthington, fallen angel, soldier, mercy killer. And rescuer, healer of creatures, helper of men and women alike. Hadn't Theo's death been a type of rescue as well?
She closed her eyes, remembering Lysander's hands on her. Without the use of his words, touch had been his principal form of communication. Remembering the reverential tenderness of his touch made Gemma realize the true depth of his feelings for her.
I love you, Gemma Oakes.
The unbelievable had happened. A knight in shining armor had ridden right up to her on a fine horse.
Her eyes opened wide. And I sent him packing.
Well, not for long!
Gemma grabbed Topknot's fluffy head and bent to kiss her right on her wispy topknot. Grinning madly, the future Dr. Gemma Oakes stood up and shook out her skirts.
"Mr. Bing! Harness Bad Pony at once, if you please!"
POLL SAT WITH ATTIE facing forward in the carriage while Lysander rode opposite them in the back-facing seat. Poll had induced Lysander to ride with them by implying that Icarus's newly healed leg would fare better without a rider on the journey back. Poll wanted Lysander in sight at all times, and Daedalus would thank him later for granting his prized horse an easy trot home tied behind the carriage.
There was much Poll wanted to know and he could feel a similar tension emanating from Attie. She was bursting with questions as well.
How had Gemma Oakes cured his brother? She was certainly impressive and Poll would never forget the way she had brought that tiny baby into the world. Yet Poll found her cool and rather haughty, despite her physical beauty. He liked strong women, but when they had taken their leave this morning, Mrs. Oakes had seemed resolute and grim, almost hard.
Brave, though, to take on a patient like Lysander. Braver still to take his dark, dangerous brother as a lover.
Poll had found himself alternately alarmed and inspired over the past few days. Yorkshire was hardly the rest cure they had all imagined for Lysander.
And the way Gemma Oakes had so politely but firmly suggested that they should pull their borrowed horses and grooms from her stables, board their carriages and be gone — well, Poll had been thrown out of finer homes than Yew Manor, but never with such chilly efficiency.
Yet, there had been something in her eyes when she had instructed him to listen. Poll eyed Lysander across the rocking carriage. His brother seemed as indecipherable as ever, yet there was much less edge on the blade, so to speak.
Had Lysander been happy in Yorkshire?
Did Lysander even remember what happiness felt like?
For that matter, did Poll?
A memory came to the fore, one night of carousing with Castor and Lysander and poor old Theo. How the four of them had laughed, too drunk for good sense, not drunk enough to stay out of trouble. Before Miranda, before the war, before any of them had suspected for a moment that the world as they knew it would soon come to an end.
