“How old is he?”
“Seventeen years old.” He seemed to be choosing one word at a time thoughtfully, gingerly, as though he was forging a path through unfamiliar terrain without armor, uncertain of his reception. Watching for her reaction.
He cleared his throat. “When I was seventeen, during my first year of university, I met a girl in a village in Scotland named Anna Jenkins. Brown eyes, black hair. I fell in love with her the way a boy of seventeen does. It wasn’t so much falling as plummeting. Madly and recklessly and completely. And she was in love with me.”
Cat held herself motionless, lest that sudden flare of spiked, acrid jealousy bump against her heart. Her breathing went shallow. Her head felt tight from imagining this controlled man a tender, ardent boy, helplessly in love.
And it was accompanied by the sore, paradoxical tenderness of picturing him as a boy, free and vulnerable, his feelings unbounded and reckless.
He swallowed. “Anna and I were... intimate. Just once. And she fell pregnant.”
Catherine’s breath left her in a sharp exhale.
He swallowed. “When she told me... we were both terrified. I was at university, would have ruined my life’s plans, and yet... we became excited, too. It seemed a miracle. I wanted to marry her, of course.”
Catherine was silent. Her breaths were shallow. Her arms were cold with nerves.
“And I suppose I ought to have taken her straight to Gretna Green, but like a fool I went the honorable route and paid a call on her father to ask for her hand. But her father had for some time been convinced I was worthless and held little hope of me becoming otherwise. To be fair, I was as unprepossessing a seventeen-year-old as ever existed. Skinny. Small. Had a temper. Full of myself. Had no notion of how I would support a wife and child at that age. But I would have found a way. Nomatterwhat it took. Believe me.” He looked at her sharply.
“I believe you,” Catherine said faintly.
“And right after that she disappeared. I called upon their house and her father aimed a rifle straight at my face and threatened to kill me if I ever came near him or her again. He had that musket cocked.”
“Dominic...” she breathed. “Oh, Dominic.”
Her heart was hammering. How ghastly, sick fear of the threat of death. His love and his child torn from him. She was nauseous from imagining the pain. Her chest felt tight.
“Itriedto find her. No one who knew her would tell me a thing. I didn’t know whether she was alive or dead. I didn’t know if she’d survived childbirth, or if the baby did. I didn’t know if I had a son or a daughter. I couldn’t properly grieve and I couldn’tforget. I never told another soul. And eventually I continued with school as my uncle offered, because what else could I do? I wrote letters to her that I could never send. And weeks became months became years and I suppose I got on with my life, but I never, ever forgot. It hasalwaysbeen a presence in my life. My life has been built around it. I simply didn’t know where to look for her. Anna Jenkins. Do you know how many people in the whole of the British Isles are named Anna Jenkins?” He gave a short, dark, humorless laugh.
Catherine was motionless.
“I don’t know quite how to describe the sort of... flailing, awful emptiness of someone vanishing like that. But I know you know what it’s like to lose someone you love.”
She took a breath, absorbing this. “I only know that for a time you absolutely lose your moorings in the world. Everything familiar is suddenly strange and almost frightening and new, and that’s when you realize how much that person touched literally everything in your life.”
His eyes were softer as he regarded her, kindling with warmth. He exhaled.
“That’s precisely it.”
“And I tortured myself imagining how alone and frightened Anna must have felt without me when she was sent away. Had she thought I’d abandoned her? I didn’t know what she’d been told. It crushed me, Catherine. For that, I can never forgive her father.”
She could feel it now: his suffocating desperation and grief. She could hardly breathe for imagining it.
“But you did learn what became of her?”
“I recently learned she was sent to an aunt inYorkshire, where Leo was born.” He looked at her. “Leo is my middle name.” His voice was frayed.
Dominic Leo Kirke. She hoarded this information like found treasure.
“When Leo was three years old Anna married a Yorkshire farmer by the name of Atwell. He was a widower. The man who raised him has always known the truth of his parentage, but raised him as his own. She has four children now. And as it turns out... Leo is the only troublesome one.” He smiled faintly. “Because—and I know this will come as a shock to you—he’s annoyingly clever and headstrong and beset with all manner of gifts. Which is why...” He turned to her. “When Anna saw my name in the newspaper in recent months, she wrote to me.” He paused at length. “She hadn’t been sure it was the same boy she’d known. But she knew she had to try.”
She went airless, imagining the cataclysm in his life encompassed by his last two sentences.
The dam between him and his past finally breaking and the memories crashing through. The grief, the joy, the terror. The swooping relief of finally knowing. The renewed sense of crushing loss.
“It must have been a shock.” The words felt inadequate.
He seemed to be considering what to say. “It was. And a relief. And tremendously awkward, as you may imagine. Then again, I’ve never shied away from awkward.” He smiled with a hint of his usual wryness. “We met again for the first time in Yorkshire. Her father...” He cleared his throat. “Her father had told her I’d run away from her.”