Forgotten Vows
“Ask her.”
“I wish I could, Mr. Carlton. I pray daily for that option.” He raised one hand, either in supplication or to stop Edward’s continued attempts to stand. “I told you that Jennie was injured. It was rather more than a minor accident. We almost lost her. Even some of her doctors lost heart, at least for a while. I don’t ask her because she doesn’t know, Mr. Carlton. When she regained consciousness, Jennie had no memory of anything that had gone before.”
The concrete bench sat in a shaded arbor in the vicarage garden and was slightly cool, but the May sunshine, dappled through the leaves, and the gentle breeze were caressingly warm. Jennie raised her face to both sun and wind and laughed softly in delight.
“There, love,” Matilda said from her protective stance beside her. “Didn’t I promise you would enjoy this?”
“That you did, Matilda.”
“Now, drink your tea.”
Jennie grimaced but spoke with mellow good nature. “You’re beginning to sound like a nanny again, Mrs. Higgins.”
“Oops. Sorry.”
But Jennie could tell that the woman wasn’t sorry at all. She smiled in the general direction of her mother hen, took a sip from her cup, set it on the bench beside her and reached for Matilda’s hand. “Now, the guided tour you promised me. Please.”
“Where shall we start? The herb garden? The perennial garden? There is some spring color there. Or the maze?”
Jennie breathed deeply, fighting the sense of frustration and loss that bombarded her, fighting the tears that welled in her eyes. “Let’s start with something simple,” she suggested, hating the quaver she heard in her voice, “something I’m at least a little familiar with.” She found a bright smile for Matilda—the woman deserved no less. “Let’s start with—”
“Matilda? Mrs. Higgins?” Reverend Winthrop called from the house.
Matilda put a comforting hand on Jennie’s shoulder. “Would you like to wait here? I’ll just hurry and see what he wants and be right back.”
Jennie smiled and nodded. “Of course. I’m enjoying being out here. Take your time.”
She’d finished her tea, and Matilda still hadn’t returned. The bench was getting cooler. And the ray of sun had moved so that it no longer lay warm on her face. Jennie squirmed on the bench, easing tight muscles and trying to ignore the growing sensation of someone, or something, watching her. Maybe she could walk a short distance by herself. The paths were well defined; she’d learned that already. And the garden was walled—she’d learned that, too—so there was no way she could get lost.
The fine hairs on her nape prickled; her arms responded to the caress of unseen eyes. She twisted on the bench to face the direction from which those sensations seemed to come. “Is anyone there?” she whispered.
She shook her head, answering her own question. “Of course not.” Of course there wasn’t anyone there. The birds were still chirping merrily. She was just being… fanciful. She supposed it was the newness of being alone in the garden. She really ought to take advantage of this opportunity for independence. Her keepers were loving but much too protective. Surely she had some skills. But how was she ever going to discover them unless she explored?
For a moment, fear tightened her throat and raced her heart. For a moment, her hands clenched on the edge of the bench. She could do this! She could. Then she became aware again of the sensation of unseen eyes watching her. Panic welled up within her, unexpected and unexplainable. Giving a little cry, Jennie rose from the bench and stumbled along the garden walk.
Edward stood in the shade of an ancient oak tree watching the woman on the bench. She was lovely—selfcontained, beautiful. His wife. He felt pain twisting inside him again, as demanding and unwelcome as the desire that tightened and readied his body as he let his wayward eyes caress her.
For a few minutes after the older woman left her, Jennie had sat calmly, to all appearances enjoying her solitude. And Jennie in repose was truly beautiful—truly a beautiful sight in any attitude, he corrected. He’d always been aware of that, but the past six months had refined her beauty. He mourned the loss of her hair, but without the weight of its length, it curled softly—a dark chestnut cap to frame her finely drawn features and emphasize dark brown eyes that had always seemed to be alight with the joy of discovery.
A wide-brimmed, floppy hat with ribbon streamers lay on the bench beside Jennie, and she was wearing a softly floral-patterned, flowing dress. Edward felt the pressure of his lips drawn against his teeth. How appropriate, Jennie, he thought. And how much in character for your setting.
Did she really not remember the past? Edward doubted that, just as he doubted she would thank the minister for his well-intentioned interference with her plans for a haven.
He couldn’t fault Reverend Winthrop for his innocence, for being taken in by Jennie’s act. Hell! He’d been deceived, too. And he was experienced in facing the dark side of his fellow creatures. Before Jennie, many had tried; the Carlton money, the Carlton power were too tempting for a greedy person to pass by without at least attempting to gain some. He’d learned that in a harsh and well-remembered school. But until Jennie, no one had succeeded in getting past the defenses he had so painstakingly constructed.
He clenched his hands into fists. Damn it, Jennie! Why? J wanted to give you the world. I wanted to give you my heart.
And that, of course, answered his question. The world, Jennie would have taken. It was Edward she didn’t want. And although that knowledge still had the power to hurt, it had no power to surprise him. He had always wondered how the laughing, delightful, loving woman he’d thought he’d known could love him, reserved, incapable of voicing even the simplest terms of affection or letting himself believe that love truly existed—unless what she felt for him was really only pity.
Well, he’d been wrong. About himself. About her. Love existed. It had trapped him in a hell from which he might never escape. And pity hadn’t controlled Jennie’s actions toward him. Greed had. Why hadn’t he listened to Madeline from the beginning? Madeline was more than a trusted employee, she was the closest thing to a friend he had allowed himself in years.
As though the turbulence of his thoughts had somehow called out to her, the woman on the bench twisted slightly, raised a hand to the back of her neck and appeared to be listening. Edward leaned back against the tree, deeper in the shadows. He would announce himself soon—Winthrop had granted him only a few minutes alone with her—but not yet. He felt strangely debilitated, unsure of himself and of his ability to confront this woman who had betrayed his deepest trust.
Not yet.
Again, Jennie fidgeted on the bench, but this time she turned, too, until she faced him. Looking almost directly at the spot where he stood beneath the tree, she whispered, “Is anyone there?” Then her eyes darkened. She shook her head. “Of course not,” she said in the same tense whisper. She seemed to listen for a moment longer, her hands clenched on the edge of the bench. Then, with a soft cry that could have been a moan or a plea, she rose from the bench like a startled fawn unused to its new legs, and stumbled away from him, along the brick walk.
Edward’s eyebrows drew together in a stunned frown. Jennie was a graceful woman, as light, as ethereal on her feet as a moonbeam. Why then this halting, awkward gait?
He saw the raised bricks of the path where an ancient root had tunneled beneath and lifted them; Jennie apparently did not. With a startled cry, she fell, tumbling from the path and into a bed of some green ground-cover. Edward started toward her, but something about her actions slowed his steps.
Her eyes filled with tears. “Damn,” she moaned, flailing at the ground with tiny balled fists. “Damn! Damn! Damn!”
She took a deep, shuddering breath and knelt there in the plants for a moment, as still as death, then began patting the earth in front of her, as though looking for something. When her hands encountered the brick walk, she crawled forward until she touched the elevated bricks. She patted them three or four times as though validating their existence or confirming their blame for her fall.
She dragged herself to her feet and shuffled carefully onto the path, then stood very still.
And Edward stood equally still, transfixed by the actions of this woman he had once called a wood sprite.
Jennie took one careful step, then stopped. She turned and reached in front of her, groping at space as she took another step.
Edward saw her eyes, troubled, filled with frustration. Tears quivered on her lashes. She bit at her lower lip, and her eyes darkened, the frustration shifting, changing to— to panic?
“Is anyone there?” she whispered again, her hands extended, palms out. “Please. I can feel you here. Please. Please say something.”
And the truth slammed into Edward with the force of the worst pain he had ever felt—the pain of knowing she was truly gone, that after enticing, inviting and winning his love, she had left him.
The truth. Oh, God. Edward bit back the involuntary cry that lodged near his heart.
Jennie Carlton, his wife—Allison Jennifer Long Carlton—the artist whose work Wilbur Winthrop declared had blessed both their lives—Jennie was blind.
Two
She was broken, and even she didn’t know how badly.
In the long hours of the previous night, Edward had plotted what he would do today. He’d promised himself he would see Jennie, show his contempt for her and her larcenous heart, give in to Madeline’s prudent suggestions to file for divorce and then—oh, God—and then find some way to take his much-needed revenge.
But now that he had seen her, Edward knew he could do none of the rest.
Revenge? He remembered Jennie’s eyes—laughing, glowing with what he’d thought was love, lost in contemplation of the work on her latest canvas. He thought of the stacks of completed work that had filled her studio, of the color and beauty with which she had always surrounded herself, and another small piece of him died. He felt that piece shift and tear. Curious, he thought numbly. He had thought himself past grief.
“Please,” Jennie whispered again.
Edward took a deep breath. Revenge? This was beyond anything his fertile mind would have—could have come up with.
“Don’t be alarmed,” he said softly, walking to her side. He reached for her. “Here I am. Take my hand.”
Jennie closed her eyes briefly as she slid her hand into his much larger one and tilted her head to look up toward him, just as she had countless times in the past. Edward watched the panic fade from her beautiful eyes. For a moment, forgetting, Edward expected recognition to flood them. For a moment, he expected her to smile, to whisper his name with that breathless catch of anticipation that had always beguiled him.
Instead, he saw a curious blankness in the depths of her eyes, a subtle, almost unnoticeable lack of focus, and then, finally, faint confusion.
“Do I know you?” Jennie asked.
Did she? Had she ever really known him? “Once,” he said, swallowing back every angry word he’d ever wanted to hurl at her, gentling his voice as he gentled his words.
She tightened her hand in his and reached with her other hand to grip his arm. “Before?”
“Yes,” he said, knowing instinctively that she meant before whatever had brought her to Aval on. “Before.”
Tears trembled once again on her lashes, and her soft lower lip quivered slightly before she covered it with one fragile hand and closed her eyes against an emotion so strong, Edward felt it vibrate through her, and because of their joined hands, through him.
“Oh, thank God,” she said. “I thought—I was afraid no one would look for me.”
Edward heard a world of fear and loneliness in her words, far more than seemed possible in the pleasant surroundings of the vicarage garden.
“Who are you?” Jennie asked him, once again grasping his arm. “Who am I?”
Edward covered her hand with his, marveling as always at the contrast between her soft, fair, almost translucent skin and his rougher, darker, almost swarthy coloring. He didn’t know which of them was trembling; it didn’t seem to matter. What mattered was the emotion that gathered in his throat, making speech all but impossible. What mattered was this fragile, delicate woman who was looking up at him with such hope. How could he tell her who she was and what she had done? How could he even believe it himself?
Why had Jennie left him? Not for money. He’d bet his life on that. Now. How—why—had he ever thought her capable of that?
His arms ached with his need to pull her close, to hold her against his heart, to fill his senses with her light perfume, to take the comfort her arms, to feel the passion her sweet body had always brought him. Instead, he restrained himself, limiting himself to smoothing his hand over hers one more time before taking a step away, still holding her hand. A lifeline, he thought, looking at their entwined fingers. But for her? Or for himself?
“I think—” Remarkable. His voice almost worked. But what could he tell her? “I think before either of us says much more, we need to talk with Reverend Winthrop.”
A second man was waiting in the parlor with Reverend Winthrop. He studied Edward critically and narrowed his eyes when he saw what Edward only now noticed: Jennie’s scraped knees and the small tear in her skirt. At about six foot two, the man stood eye to eye with Edward, although he probably carried a few more well-muscled pounds than Edward. He had the look of a battered warrior, in his eyes and in the lines of his face. Edward had no doubt that somewhere on his person, this man carried a badge of some sort—a fact that was quickly confirmed.
“Good afternoon, Miss Jennie,” he said in a gravelly voice that carried the remnants of a soft southern drawl.
Jennie smiled toward him. “Good afternoon, Sheriff Lambert. Isn’t it wonderful? This man knows me.”
“Might be, Miss Jennie. Might be. You hurt yourself?”
Jennie grimaced and sighed. “Am I a mess? I fell. It was stupid, I know. To fall, I mean. I was trying to walk in the garden alone. But, Sheriff Lambert, this man knows who I am. He said he wouldn’t tell me until we came back to the house. Ask him. Please ask him.”
Lambert put both his hands on Jennie’s shoulders, with the familiarity of someone who had done so many times before, and Edward forced himself to deny the tension that tightened in him.
“I will, Miss Jennie. But now I want you to go upstairs with Mrs. Higgins and take care of your lovely knees.”
Jennie straightened her small shoulders, and Edward recognized the defiant lift of her chin. “Sheriff Lambert,” she said in the same gentle voice Edward had once heard her use on a gallery owner who had made the mistake of thinking he could lie to her about sales of her work, “in spite of appearances and circumstances, I am a mature adult. I will not be sent to my room like a child.”
“No, Miss Jennie, and I wouldn’t do that to you, either. But I’m going to talk to this man and find out who he is before I let him try to tell me who you are. When I’m satisfied, we’ll all talk together. And that’s a promise. Until then, you just don’t go getting your emotions in a lather.
“You’ve been hurt enough, and none of us,” he continued, giving her shoulders a little shake, “none of us is going to let you be hurt again. Understand?”
After Jennie and a woman introduced as Mrs. Higgins left the parlor, Edward walked to the fireplace and looked again at the framed watercolor. His ship, the Lady B, named by his father years earlier, created the visual focus for the painting. Even at rest, bare-masted, with no sign of a crew, she seemed to dance in the water, to shimmer across the misty canvas.
He bowed his head in his hand. What now? How had Jennie come to Avalon? Why had she come to Avalon? And how had she been hurt? He straightened his shoulders, drawing his strength around him, and turned. Wilbur Winthrop was still standing near the door to the hallway. Edward pierced him with an accusing glare.
“You didn’t tell me she was blind.”
The two other men exchanged a long, measuring look, but it was Lambert who spoke. “Well, now, that answers one question, but it sure does raise up a host of others.”
“I’ll need to use your telephone,” Edward told the minister. “I have to call my assistant, arrange to have my plane flown here, put a—a what?—a neurologist? on standby, have someone get my apartment ready for Jennie—”
“I don’t think so.”
The quiet determination in Lambert’s voice put an abrupt end to Edward’s disjointed planning.
“You don’t think so? Sheriff, I have every right to take my wife home.” Edward heard the words spilling from his mouth.
Where had those words come from? He had fully intended to leave her to her own devices, with her greed to keep her company. Greed? Jennie?
He felt a hand on his arm and dimly realized Winthrop had led him across the room, was pushing him down into the chintz-covered chair, was once again wrapping his fingers around a squat, heavy glass. “Drink,” Winthrop insisted. “You look like the walking wounded.”
Edward did as he was told. He laid his head back against the chair and drew deep, even breaths, at first barely aware of what he was doing, then gradually recognizing what was happening to him. He began fighting the shock, fighting the fear and anger that had waited just below his conscriousness to claim him. Gradually, he summoned the strength of will that had sustained him over the years.
He couldn’t come apart now; he hadn’t since his parents’ deaths, and he’d been only ten at the time. He was an adult now, a grown man who could face any problem.
He became aware of the force with which he grasped the chair’s arms, of the silence in the room broken only by the ticking of a clock, of his own breathing. He became aware of Lambert watching him. Slowly, he released his grip on the chair, eased his breathing and met Sheriff Lambert’s steady gaze. Instead of the derision or pity he expected to find in the sheriff’s eyes, Edward found a grudging respect, as well as a wariness he felt sure this battle-weary warrior showed everyone.
“I have some questions for you, Mr. Carlton,” Lambert said, taking a small notebook from his suit coat and making no reference to what had just passed. “Let’s start with Jennie’s full name.”
“Allison Jennifer Carlton,” Edward told him in the same dispassionate tone of voice the sheriff used. Then, realizing Jennie had claimed the name Carlton for only a few hours before she disappeared, he added, a little too loudly in the waiting silence of the room. “Long. Her maiden name was Long.”
He saw Winthrop’s head jerk up, saw the horrified questioning glance the minister shot at the watercolor he so prized.
“Yes,” Edward told him, without waiting for the man to ask. “Yes,” he said, sighing, expelling a little of his own pain. “Jennie is that Allison Long.”
Jennie leaned back in the chaise longue in her room, her knees faintly smarting from the antiseptic Matilda had applied, her ego faintly smarting from being sent to her room.
Her life was being discussed downstairs. She had a right to be there. She had a right to have a voice in any decision made.
She smiled ruefully. Sheriff Lambert was probably right to exclude her. Apparently, she hadn’t done such a bang-up job of running her own life until now.
Her finger ached. Absently, she rubbed it, as she found herself doing often when she tried to put order to the puzzle of her life. The doctors told her they could fix it—a simple surgical procedure—rebreak the bone, set it properly. Jennie shivered. She’d had enough pain to last a lifetime. Too much pain, she acknowledged, remembering how it had been when she first woke up in the Avalon hospital.
She closed her eyes, and the field behind her closed lids grew dark. It wasn’t always dark; it was—it was more like walking into a dense fog just after twilight. Interesting, she thought. A new analogy. Before, she had compared her lack of sight to trying to look through layer upon layer of vaporous gray scarves.
When she slept, she had vision: color—vibrating, shimmering color—if not always shape. And sometimes her dreams were peopled. One person appeared repeatedly—a tall, stern man. In her dreams, she teased him, sensing it might somehow be similar to baiting a tiger. And although she never clearly saw his face, on rare occasions she found her efforts rewarded by a rusty, little-used smile.
Was he the one who had come for her?
She had been so afraid—When? Jennie couldn’t consciously remember feeling the soul-shriveling depth of fear she now knew had once gripped her. When?
“Here you go, love,” Matilda said as she entered the room. “Blackberry tea and some of Mrs. Winthrop’s wonderful chicken salad.”
Jennie looked up, not distracted by Matilda’s loving offering. The man who had come for her was tall. Was he… dark? Was he… stern?
“Matilda,” Jennie asked. “The man who—the man downstairs—what does he look like?”
“Ah, Jennie, Jennie,” the older woman said softly, sitting beside her on the chaise and placing the tray across Jennie’s lap. “I suppose he’s a fine-looking man, healthy, strong of will and body, but, child, he doesn’t look like he’s ever in his life smiled.”
Sheriff Lucas Lambert’s office was in keeping with the affluence of the town: state-of-the-art computers and communications equipment shared spacious, carpeted quarters with high-tech filing and retrieval systems, welldesigned furniture and cubicle dividers and professionally uniformed employees.
The office was distinctly out of keeping with the rugged, world-weary man who seated himself behind his oversize mahogany desk and glanced quickly through a file a deputy had handed him as he and Edward had entered the building.
Lambert tossed the folder onto his desk, glanced at it, glanced at Edward, opened a desk drawer and brought out a much fatter folder and placed it beside the first one. He took the pen and small notebook from his jacket and aligned them with the folders. He picked up the pen, rolling it between his fingers as he studied Edward. Then, apparently reaching a decision, he dropped the pen to the desktop. “Your identity checks out.”
Seated in a chair in front of the desk, Edward only nodded. He was unaccustomed to being doubted, surprised there had ever been any question of his truthfulness.
“You didn’t report your wife missing.”
“There didn’t seem much point in reporting anything,” Edward said tightly. “I had a—a farewell note from her telling me how much better her life would be without me in it.”
“Didn’t you find it a little strange that your wife of— what?—eight hours or so just up and took off?”
“Hell, yes, I found it strange,” Edward said with quiet fury. “As strange as the fact that our airline reservations for our trip to Hawaii had unexplainably been rescheduled for a later flight, as strange as the fact that my private office was burglarized that afternoon requiring me to go down there. As strange as the fact that when I returned to my home, my brand-new wife, one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of bonds and several other reasonably valuable items were missing. As strange as the fact that when I went to Jennie’s studio, trying to make sense of what had happened, I found it stripped of any sign of her, including all of her unsold work.
“Yes, Lambert. I found it damned strange. But I had a note from her. A note, damn it man, that stripped me as bare as that studio. A note taunting me with the wonderful new life she was going to lead once she broke free from me.”
Lambert leaned back in his chair, once again sliding his pen through his fingers, once again seeming to come to a decision. He stood and nudged the fatter of the two folders across the desk toward Edward. “Take a look at this while I change clothes. Then we’ll both go take a look at the place where your new bride spent two, maybe three days of that wonderful new life.”