Marriage Made In Hope. Sophia James

thought you had are no longer quite so lengthy, there is a propensity to look back and wonder.’

      ‘Wonder?’

      ‘Wonder if you should have lived more fully, made braver choices, taken risks.’

      His voice was weakening with the effort of such dialogue and he stopped for a moment to simply breathe. ‘Once I used to think the right path lay in work and social endeavour, too, just as Richard does. But now I wish I had seen the Americas and sailed the oceans. I would have liked to have stood on the bow of a sailing ship, the breeze of foreign lands blowing in my face, heard other languages, eaten different foods.’

      Sephora’s fingers tightened around Jeffrey’s. It was as if this conversation lay on two levels, the spoken edge of truth hiding beneath each particular word. She did not want to be one day wishing her life had been other than what it was and yet here already she was considering other pathways, different turnings.

      Could Richard’s father feel this? Was he warning her? Uncle Jeffrey had asked for a moment alone and this was something he had not done before.

      ‘You are a good girl, Sephora, a girl of honour, a girl any man would be proud to call his daughter. But...’ At this he leaned forward and she did, too. ‘Make certain you get what you need in life. Goodness should not mean missing out on the passion of it all.’

      A coughing fit took him then and a servant on the far side of the room hurried forward to deal with his panic. Richard also came towards them, pulling back a little as if he did not wish for the reminder of sickness or for the messiness of it. He did not venture further forward, but waited for her to rise and come to him.

      ‘I think we should go, Sephora.’ He made a point of drawing his fob watch out and looking at the time. A busy man and important.

      ‘Of course.’

      Going back to Jeffrey, she explained their need to depart whilst Richard stayed at the doorway impatient to be gone. Her husband-to-be took her hand as she came up to him and placed her fingers firmly across his arm.

      Mine.

      The word came hollow and cold, an echo of uncertainty blooming even as she acquiesced and allowed him to lead her out.

      * * *

      Sephora dreamed that night of the water. She felt it around her face, the coldness and the dark, sinking and letting go.

      In this dream, though, she did not panic. In this dream she could breathe in liquids like a fish and simply watch the beauty of the below, the colours, the shapes, the silence and the escape. Her hands did not close over her face and Francis St Cartmail did not dive in from above and give her the air of life, his tightly bound lips across her own.

      No, in this dream she simply was. Dying, being, living, it was all the same. She felt the shift of caring like a scorching iron running across bare skin, changing all that was before to what it was now. And Uncle Jeffrey was there, too, beside her, sinking, smiling as he lifted his face to a breeze inside the water. Foreign lands and different shores.

      Nothing made sense and yet all of it did. Permission to live did not only come from another saving your life, it also came from within, from a place that was hope and hers.

      She woke with tears on her face and got out of bed to stand by the window and watch a waning moon. Once a long time ago she had often sat observing the stars and the heavens, but that was just another thing that had fallen by the wayside.

      Once she had written a lot, too, poems, stories and plays, and it was only as she got older and Richard had laughed at her paltry attempts that she had stopped. She had not only stopped, but she had thrown them all away, those early heartfelt lines, and here at this moment she felt the loss keenly.

      When had life begun to frighten her? When had she become the woman she was? The one who allowed Richard to make all the decisions and bided by all his wants and needs? He was a marquis now, but his father was ill. How much worse would it be when he became the Duke of Winbury?

      She wiped away the tears that fell down across her cheeks because the thought of being his duchess made her only want to cry.

      She felt vulnerable with such a loss of identity and at a quandary as to how to change it. If she talked to him of her feelings, what would she say? Even to get the words making sense would be difficult and he was so very good at laughing at the insecurities of others.

      She was also more frightened of him than she had ever been, frightened of his overbearingness and his lack of compassion. Even with his father today he had been distracted, impatient even, and she had seen a look of complete indifference as Jeffrey had coughed and struggled for breath.

      Her touchstones were moving, becoming fragmented. She no longer believed in herself or in Richard and the thought of marrying him no longer held the sense of wonder it once had. But still, was it her near-drowning that had brought things so dreadfully into focus, the want for a perfection that was as unreal as it was impossible?

      She rubbed at the bare skin on the third finger of her left hand and prayed to God for an answer.

      * * *

      Francis spent the next few days going through every file his uncle had kept on the Sherborne family and there were many. He’d had them brought down from the attic, the dusty tomes holding much in the way of background on both Clive Sherborne and his unfaithful wife. There was little information on the child, however, a fact that Francis found surprising.

      Anna Sherborne herself was languishing against the stairwell as he walked up to instruct his men which new boxes he wanted brought down. Her hair had been cut, he noticed, bluntly and with little expertise. It hung in ill-shorn lengths about her face.

      ‘Did Mrs Wilson cut your hair?’

      ‘No.’ The word was almost spat out. ‘Why would she?’

      ‘You did it yourself, then?’ His cousin sported tresses a good twelve inches shorter than she had done yesterday and her expression was guarded.

      An unprepossessing child, angry and diffident. He sat himself down on the step at her level and looked at her directly, the thought suddenly occurring to him that he might find out a lot more of Clive Sherborne’s life from questioning her than he ever could from the yellowing paper in boxes.

      ‘Was Clive a good father to you, Anna?’

      Uncertainly the girl nodded and without realising it Francis let out his breath.

      ‘Better than my mother at least. He was there often. At home, I mean, and he took me with him most places.’

      ‘Did you have other brothers or sisters?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Aunts. Uncles. Grandparents.’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Did Clive drink?’

      She stiffened and stepped back. ‘Why do you ask that?’

      ‘Because he died in a warehouse full of brandy.’

      One ripe expletive and she was gone, the thin nothingness of her disappearing around the corner of the dim corridor. But Francis had seen something of tragedy in her eyes before she could hide it, a memory he thought, a recollection so terrible it had lightened the already pale colour of her cheeks.

      He took me with him most places. God, could the man have taken her there to the warehouse and to his appointment with death? Had she seen his killer? Had she seen the only man she knew as a father die? He shook his head and swore again roundly. At his uncle and at her mother. At the unfairness of the hovel Anna had been brought up in, at the loneliness and the squalor. She was angry, belligerent and difficult because in all her life it seemed no one except the hapless Clive Sherborne had taken the time to get to know her, to look after her. And now she was abandoned again into a place where she felt no belonging, no sense of safety, no security.

      She’d cut her hair as a statement. No one can love me. I am uncherished and unwanted. His hands