Page 17 of Fair as a Star

Mark’s mouth hitched. “I wasn’t going to ask anything of the sort.”

“Good. Because I have prayed. It hasn’t done me any good at all. I expect God has more important matters to concern himself with than my trifling problems.”

“You are important. And faith does help. But we can’t abdicate our own responsibilities. If there’s action to be taken, we must take it, both for ourselves, and for each other.”

Action? What action was left, other than to follow Mr. Cooper’s gruesome recommendations.

She would die, rather.

“Do you think I haven’t?” she asked. “That I haven’t tried everything I can to—”

“Easy,” he murmured. “I know you, despite what you think. I know you’ll have fought like a tiger to rid yourself of this feeling. Trust that much, at least.”

His strong fingers brushed the bare nape of her neck. Soft. Tender. It was almost a caress. Enough to send a delicate shiver down Beryl’s spine.

Mark must have felt it, too, for he quickly removed his hand. It seemed as though he might have said something more, but in that same instant, a gentle gust of wind caught his tall hat from the pile at his side. It tumbled down over the grassy slope of the riverbank, coming to a halt on a cluster of flowering weeds. He made no effort to chase it.

She looked up at him in question.

His expression turned wry. “‘There are few moments in a man’s existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress as when he is in pursuit of his own hat.’”

A slow smile spread over her face. “The Pickwick Club,” she said, temporarily diverted. “I’m amazed you can recite it so readily.”

“But not faithfully.”

“Still,” she said. “It must have been more than six years since we read it together.”

Along with books on every other imaginable subject, the library at Rivenhall Park contained most of Mr. Dickens’s works. One summer, soon after Mark had come home from university, the two of them had torn through them all, sharing the stories between them, and trading quotes like secrets. Mark had always preferred the humorous passages. He’d seemed to relish coaxing a smile from her.

“I’d like to claim superior memory. The truth is”—he lifted a book from the stack beside him—“I’ve been reading it aloud to one of my ill parishioners.”

She sat up straighter. “Is that the same copy?”

“It is. Look here.” He opened the leather-and-cloth cover. In the top right-hand corner of the engraved frontispiece, a tiny butterfly was sketched in long-faded black ink.

She touched it with her fingertip. Memory flooded through her. Long days spent immersed in a fictional world. The excitement she’d felt, looking forward to the next scene and the next. Excitement she and Mark had shared together. “I don’t know what possessed me to draw in it. Your brother would be appalled.”

“Henry doesn’t read novels. Besides,” Mark said, “I asked you to do it.”

“Did you?” She didn’t recall it. All she could remember was the illicit thrill of dipping a sharpened quill into the inkpot and sketching the tiny body, antennae, and wings. It had felt like a crime. “I suppose you must have done. I wouldn’t have dared otherwise.”

“I wanted something to remember you by,” he said. “That summer was one of the best times of my life.”

A pang of nostalgia pricked at her soul, already so raw and aching. “Mine as well.”

His gaze was upon her. She felt the weight of it just as she’d felt the weight of his touch. “Would you like me to read to you?”

Her heart leapt. Yes, she wanted to say. Please. But she wasn’t the girl she’d been at eighteen. Maturity had made her cautious. “Here?”

“It’s quite private.”

It was at that. The trees curved down around the riverbank, shrouding their lonely patch of harebell-covered grass from view. It was cool and secluded—half light, half shadow—and so quiet that she could almost convince herself that she and Mark were the only two people on earth.

“Very well,” she said.

He turned the gilt-edged pages. “I’ll start at the beginning of the passage about Mr. Pickwick’s hat, shall I?” When she made no objection, he began to read, his deep voice clear and steady. “‘Man is but mortal; and there is a point beyond which human courage cannot extend…’”

Beryl lay back on the grass, staring up at the blue sky that peeked through the branches of the trees. She was weary from weeping, but as Mark read, she felt a sense of increasing peace. She could rest here. She might even fall asleep. And he’d be here to watch over her. To keep her safe from harm.