The arrangements for their travel had been made and executed so efficiently that Celeste could almost have been persuaded that Jack really was taking her on a secret mission. He had been, for the most part, the rather intimidating commanding officer she had witnessed at Wellington’s dinner. It effectively created a distance between them, which Celeste knew was the point. That night at Hunter’s Reach had been their beginning and their end. She could only surmise that his determination to expedite her quest was rooted in his desire to put an end to their time together. She tried very hard to persuade herself that he was acting in her interests as well as his own. She tried, with considerably less enthusiasm than she once would have, to persuade herself that she was as set upon remaining the one and only architect of her own future.
‘Ready?’
Celeste grimaced. ‘As I will ever be, I suppose. Jack, do you really think you will find something?’
He nodded. ‘I told you, there is always something to be found if you know where to look.’
She wandered over to the edge of the pier and gazed out to sea. ‘Such a—a tangle of revelations have brought us here. I still find it difficult to make sense of any of it. My mother was so reticent. She was like a mouse, scuttling about, hoping no one would see her. You know, I’d even forgotten how beautiful she was until I looked at the miniature in my locket. She always covered her hair with caps, and her clothes...’ Celeste wrinkled her nose. ‘Black, black, brown and black.’ Her face fell. ‘Why did I never notice that, do you think?’
‘Because she didn’t want you to?’
‘You are right. How she hated questions, Maman. Almost as much as she hated being noticed.’
‘I would imagine that you would have caused a great deal of notice when you were growing up. Even as a child, if the picture in the locket is true to life, you were ridiculously lovely.’
Celeste flushed. ‘It is just a trick of nature that makes my face appear beautiful you know. Symmetry...’
‘I don’t much care what it is. You have the kind of face and figure that turns heads wherever you go, as that dinner of Wellington’s proved.’ Jack touched her hair. ‘This alone must have got you noticed here in the south. The people here are generally very dark.’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Yes, but you were sent off to school when you were ten, weren’t you?’ Jack said, looking much struck. ‘And to Paris, where you would not exactly blend in with the crowd, but nor would you be quite so distinctive.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your mother patently came here to disappear. A daughter who would have every lad in the village setting his cap at her would hardly be conducive to anonymity.’
‘That’s ridiculous, Jack.’ Celeste rolled her eyes. ‘Though no more ridiculous than the idea of Maman being forced to go into hiding in the first place. And I suppose it is a little bit more palatable a story to swallow than that she wanted to be rid of me.’
‘I thought you had accepted by now that that simply wasn’t true.’
‘Oh, I think she loved me in her own way, but her own way was to make sure she didn’t show it. I don’t understand why.’ She brushed a tear away angrily. ‘Now you will think me a pathetic creature.’
‘I think you many things, but pathetic is not on the list.’ Jack dabbed at her cheeks with his kerchief. ‘The wind and the salt air are the very devil for making one’s eyes run.’
Celeste managed a watery smile.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jack said. ‘I have been so set on getting us here, that I have not thought about what an ordeal it will be for you.’
‘Not an ordeal. It’s just a house.’
‘Stuffed full of painful memories. Perhaps it would be best if you went to an inn, if there is such a thing here, and I can search the house.’
‘Jack, I am not precisely looking forward to going back to the house, but I do need to go. I’m sure if there’s anything to be found that you will find it, but you can’t lay my ghosts for me.’
‘When we first met, you were adamant that there were no ghosts to lay.’
‘When we first met, I was very sure about a good many things, and I have been quite wrong about almost every one. English cooking. English weather. Englishmen.’
Surrendering to the urge to touch him, she flattened her palm over the roughness of his cheek. He caught her hand, pulling her tight up against him. ‘Celeste.’ His lips clung to hers for a long, tantalising moment, then he dragged his mouth away. ‘If you knew how much I have to struggle not to— If you knew.’
The feelings she had been working so hard to control made her snap. ‘If it is such a struggle, Jack, then perhaps we are wrong to deny it.’
‘We know we’re not.’
