Mary Balogh: Simply Love

She wished then that she had decided to go back. But it was too late to do that. As she approached closer to the man, keeping to the footpath that would pass behind the promontory on which he stood, he became aware of her and turned rather sharply toward her.

She stopped short, not more than twenty feet from him.

And she stood transfixed again-but with horror this time. The empty right sleeve of his coat was pinned against his side. But it was the right side of his face that caused the horror. Perhaps it was a trick of the evening light, but it seemed to her that there was nothing there, though afterward she did recall seeing a black eye patch.

He was a man with half a face, the extraordinarily beautiful left side all the more grotesque because there was no right side to balance it. He was beauty and beast all rolled into one. And all of a sudden his height and those powerful thighs and broad shoulders seemed menacing rather than enticing. And equally suddenly the beauty of the gathering darkness and the peaceful solitude of the scene were filled with danger and the threat of an unknown evil.

She thought he took one step toward her. She did not wait to see if he would take another. She turned and ran, leaving the path and the cliff top behind her, half stumbling over the uneven ground, tugging at her cloak as it snagged against gorse bushes, and feeling the sharp sting of their scratches on her legs. Her stockings would be torn to ribbons, a part of her mind told her.

The trees surrounding the inner park were dark and threatening as she crashed through them, making all sorts of loud noises to reveal where she was. The lawn when she reached it looked dauntingly wide and very open, but she had no alternative but to dash across it and hope that at least she would be within screaming distance of the house before he caught up with her.

But her first panic was receding, and when she glanced quickly and fearfully over her shoulder, she could see that she was alone, that he had not followed her. And with that realization came a return of some rationality.

And deep shame.

Was she a child to believe in monsters?

He was merely a man who must have suffered some fearful accident. He had been out to take the air, as she had. He had been minding his own business, enjoying his own solitude, gazing quietly at the view, perhaps as affected by its loveliness as she had been. He had not said or done anything that was remotely threatening except to take that one step toward her. Probably all he had intended was to bid her a good evening and go on his way.

She felt quite mortified then.

She had run from him because he was maimed. She had judged him a monster purely on the strength of his outward appearance. And yet she had a reputation for tenderness toward the weak and handicapped. When she became a governess, she had deliberately taken a position with a child who was not normal according to the definition of normality that society had concocted. She had loved Prue Moore dearly. She still did. And she was forever instilling into the girls at school and into David her conviction that every human being was a precious soul worthy of respect and courtesy and love.

Yet she had just fled in panic because the man whose left profile was godlike had turned out to be horribly maimed on the right side. He had no right arm. What had she expected he would do to her?

Hunger and shame made her feel somewhat light-headed. But she closed her eyes, drew in deep lungfuls of sea air, and then opened her eyes and deliberately returned the way she had just come.

Darkness was definitely falling now, and she was aware that she ought not to be wandering thus in a strange place. But she had to go back and make amends if she could.

She came to the path she had been following. And there, she thought as she looked about to get her bearings, was surely the promontory. She looked to left and right and decided that yes, that was certainly the place where he had been standing.

But he was no longer there.

She could not see him anywhere.

She hung her head and stood where she was for some time. She might have said good evening to him and nodded genially. He probably would have replied in kind. And she might then have walked onward, content with her behavior, and mourned whatever it was that had destroyed his beauty.

But she had recoiled from him, run away in fright and revulsion. How had he felt? Was this how other people treated him too? Poor man. At least all her hurts were inner ones. People-especially men who had looked on her with admiration and interest-sometimes shrank from her when they knew her for what she was, an unwed mother, but at least she could walk along a street, or along a cliff path without causing anyone to turn in horror and run.

How could she have done it? How could she? And now she had been suitably punished for her cowardice in running away from the house. She had been discourteous-worse!-to a fellow human being who had in no way offended or hurt her.

Perhaps, she thought as she made her way back toward the house again, he was a stranger passing through and had just wandered by chance onto the duke’s land. Perhaps she would never see him again.

She despised herself for hoping that was so.

It was suitable punishment, she thought as she drew near to the house and her stomach rumbled with emptiness, that she must go hungry to bed.

She could not get the maimed man out of her mind all night. She kept waking and thinking of him.

Poor man. What must it be like to carry one’s pain and one’s deformities like that, for all to see? Ah, the loneliness of it!

Poor man.

But such beauty! Such physical perfection to have been so cruelly destroyed!

Sydnam watched her go. For a moment he considered going after her, but he would only increase her panic by doing that.

Besides, he did not feel at all kindly disposed toward her.

Who the devil was she? Lady Alleyne Bedwyn perhaps? She was the only one of the Bedwyn wives he had not met. But what had she been doing out here alone? Why was Alleyne not with her? And had no one warned her about the monster who was Bewcastle’s steward?

He had been in another world. Or rather, he had been in this world, but he had been deeply immersed in the final, breathtaking moments of a dying day, with the sun just dropped behind the western horizon but the night not yet quite descended. It was a scene of grays and silvers and majesty. His right hand had itched to grasp his paintbrush more tightly so that he could reproduce the scene both as he saw it and as he felt it, but he had resisted the urge to flex the fingers of that hand, knowing that as soon as he did so he would have to admit to himself, yet again, that it was a phantom hand he carried at his side, that both it and his right arm were no longer there just as his right eye was no longer there. And there was no paintbrush. He would have had to admit to himself that his vision of the scene was distorted, the depth and the perspective as well as the breadth of vision no longer feeding accurate information to his artist’s soul.

But he had still not come to the moment of that admission. He had still been transported by beauty. He had still been immersed in the illusion of happiness.

And then something-a flutter at the corner of his eye, a footfall, perhaps-had brought awareness crashing back and he had sensed that he was no longer alone.

And when he had turned, there she was.

Or perhaps the crash back to awareness had come a moment after he turned to look.

For that moment before it happened the woman standing on the path had seemed a part of the beauty of the evening. She had looked tall and willowy slender, her cloak flapping in the breeze and revealing a dress of lighter color beneath. She had not been wearing a bonnet. Her hair was fair, perhaps even blond, her face oval and blue-eyed and lovely, though truth to tell he had seen it one-eyed from twenty feet away in the dusk and could not be sure he had observed accurately, especially as far as the color of her eyes was concerned.