“What are you thinking?” I asked at last, unable to ask for reassurance, fearing to ask for the truth.
“It’s only that I had a thought,” he answered, still staring out at the manatees. “About Willoughby, aye?”
The events of the night seemed far away and unimportant. Yet murder had been done.
“What was that?”
“Well, I couldna think at first that Willoughby could do such a thing—how could any man?” He paused, drawing a finger through the light mist of condensation that formed on the windowpanes as the sun rose. “And yet…” He turned to face me.
“Perhaps I can see.” His face was troubled. “He was alone—verra much alone.”
“A stranger, in a strange land,” I said quietly, remembering the poems, painted in the open secrecy of bold black ink, sent flying toward a long-lost home, committed to the sea on wings of white paper.
“Aye, that’s it.” He stopped to think, rubbing a hand slowly through his hair, gleaming copper in the new daylight. “And when a man is alone that way—well, it’s maybe no decent to say it, but making love to a woman is maybe the only thing will make him forget it for a time.”
He looked down, turning his hands over, stroking the length of his scarred middle finger with the index finger of his left hand.
“That’s what made me wed Laoghaire,” he said quietly. “Not Jenny’s nagging. Not pity for her or the wee lassies. Not even a pair of aching balls.” His mouth turned up briefly at one corner, then relaxed. “Only needing to forget I was alone,” he finished softly.
He turned restlessly, back to the window.
“So I am thinking that if the Chinee came to her, wanting that—needing that—and she wouldna take him…” He shrugged, staring out across the cool green of the lagoon. “Aye, maybe he could have done it,” he said.
I stood beside him. Out in the center of the lagoon, a single manatee drifted lazily to the surface, turning on her back to hold the infant on her chest toward the sunlight.
He was silent for several minutes, and I was as well, not knowing how to take the conversation back to what I had seen and heard at Government House.
I felt rather than saw him swallow, and he turned from the window to face me. There were lines of tiredness in his face, but his expression was filled with a sort of determination—the sort of look he wore facing battle.
“Claire,” he said, and at once I stiffened. He called me by my name only when he was most serious. “Claire, I must tell ye something.”
“What?” I had been trying to think how to ask, but suddenly I didn’t want to hear. I took half a step back, away from him, but he grabbed my arm.
He had something hidden in his fist. He took my unresisting hand and put the object into it. Without looking, I knew what it was; I could feel the carving of the delicate oval frame and the slight roughness of the painted surface.
“Claire.” I could see the slight tremor at the side of his throat as he swallowed. “Claire—I must tell ye. I have a son.”
I didn’t say anything, but opened my hand. There it was; the same face I had seen in Grey’s office, a childish, cocky version of the man before me.
“I should ha’ told ye before.” He was searching my face for some clue to my feelings, but for once, my giveaway countenance must have been perfectly blank. “I would have—only—” He took a deep breath for strength to go on.
“I havena ever told anyone about him,” he said. “Not even Jenny.”
That startled me enough to speak.
“Jenny doesn’t know?”
He shook his head, and turned away to watch the manatees. Alarmed by our voices, they had retreated a short distance, but then had settled down again, feeding on the water weed at the edge of the lagoon.
“It was in England. It’s—he’s—I couldna say he was mine. He’s a bastard, aye?” It might have been the rising sun that flushed his cheeks. He bit his lip and went on.
“I havena seen him since he was a wee lad. I never will see him again—except it might be in a wee painting like this.” He took the small picture from me, cradling it in the palm of his hand like a baby’s head. He blinked, head bent over it.
“I was afraid to tell ye,” he said, low-voiced. “For fear ye would think that perhaps I’d gone about spawning a dozen bastards…for fear ye’d think that I wouldna care for Brianna so much, if ye kent I had another child. But I do care, Claire—a great deal more than I can tell ye.” He lifted his head and looked directly at me.
“Will ye forgive me?”
“Did you—” The words almost choked me, but I had to say them. “Did you love her?”
An extraordinary expression of sadness crossed his face, but he didn’t look away.
“No,” he said softly. “She…wanted me. I should have found a way—should have stopped her, but I could not. She wished me to lie wi’ her. And I did, and…she died of it.” He did look down then, long lashes hiding his eyes. “I am guilty of her death, before God; perhaps the more guilty—because I did not love her.”
