Total pages in book: 127
Estimated words: 129951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 650(@200wpm)___ 520(@250wpm)___ 433(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 129951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 650(@200wpm)___ 520(@250wpm)___ 433(@300wpm)
His surprised eyes coasted to the letters and journals then back to me when I kept speaking.
“Saint, Bishop, and his younger brother Flint recruited two footmen to assist them in disposing of the body. Marie, her maid Beatrice and Aileen cleaned up the mess. Unity never learned of it. And Harmony doesn’t know where, but Arthur Hughes-Davies’s remains are buried somewhere on this property.”
“Christ,” he whispered.
He could say that again.
“Harmony was undone by the events,” I carried on. “She understood Hughes-Davies was a rapist, pedophile and all-around creep. However, she was not at one with killing him, which was not her intent. Stopping him, yes. Stabbing him, if she had to. Killing him, no. This might have to do with how much he bled all over her. It was gruesome. And perhaps as an unknown-at-the-time but definitely therapeutic measure, she detailed precisely how gruesome it was in her journal. His attack on her didn’t help. She felt unclean. And unworthy of a man as good as Charlie.”
Understanding and compassion suffused his face.
“So she begged off,” he surmised.
“She did,” I confirmed. The tears hit my eyes, and I picked up the last letter in the stack. “But apparently, she wrote him another letter, a few years after the trauma. However, by that time, he’d met and become engaged to my great-grandmother. His response was loving and kind and of a sort, brokenhearted, even if he was in love again. He’d moved on, and as such, with a good deal of agonized prose, he shared he couldn’t start things up again and why, and encouraged her to move on too, like he had. Since he was with Great-Grandma, I can’t know for sure, but he’d probably tucked the other letters away, and when that one came, he possibly threw it away so she wouldn’t see it. Whatever befell it, it wasn’t with her others.”
“And the ring?” Battle queried.
I reached for another letter and flourished it. “Right before all of this happened, Charlie was getting impatient. He posted her engagement ring to her. It was right after that, she begged off. Eventually,”—my hand with the letter listed down—“he got angry. Told her to keep the ring, not that she really wanted it, his words. He never was truly hurtful. What he was, was deeply wounded.”
I looked down at the ring on my finger and kept talking.
“He thought it wasn’t fancy enough. He thought it demonstrated the life she’d be leaving behind to be with him, and she didn’t want anything to do with the life he could provide for her. That was the last letter he wrote to her, and she didn’t respond, until she approached him again years later.”
“But he thought wrong,” Battle stated.
I nodded despondently.
Then I slipped an envelope out of one of the journals.
“Apparently, some time later, she wrote him once more. And he wrote back.”
“What did he say?”
“She’d obviously been living for years wracked with the idea that he thought she thought he wasn’t good enough for her, so she told him all about it. From what I can tell from Charlie’s response, she shared everything about Arthur Hughes-Davies.”
His head ticked in shock. “Jesus, that was a risk.”
I tucked the letter back into the journal. “This might explain why the last two letters are gone from his stash, at least the very last one. I can totally see him destroying it to protect her.”
“Yes,” Battle agreed.
I kept sharing.
“He was again brokenhearted. And this time, even though years had passed and he was happily married, he was pissed. He was angry she didn’t tell him. Angry she didn’t trust him. Angry she didn’t think he’d love her, no matter what, support her, no matter what she went through. Even so, he was more pissed at Hughes-Davies, and you could tell he still cared for her greatly, because he might have been mad, but he was again, not cruel.” I shook my head. “All of it was hard to get through. But somehow, that was the worst. Him sharing what she should have known. That his love was real, and no matter what, he would have stuck by her side if she’d only given him the chance.”
Battle traced his knuckles over quiet tears I didn’t realize I’d shed.
And it made me feel better, especially when he whispered, “Darling.”
“That last bit, honey, was because I had to quit reading her journal around the time they were falling in love. Great-Grandad was right. She should have known. She should never have doubted him. The way she described how they fell in love.” I swallowed. “Obviously, it was completely different. It still reminded me of you and me.”
At that, he leaned forward and kissed my nose.
When he sat back, I told him, “There’s good news.”
“Please share,” he said gently.
“She didn’t die a sad spinster. She may have lived nominally in this house, but for the most part, she was partner to a farmer who leased the south field. They had no children, because one of them couldn’t conceive. But from the age of thirty-two to his death when he was seventy-four, and he was two years older than her, they lived together and loved each other. She returned to The Downs fully for the next year, after which she died.”