No Graves as Yet_ A Novel - Anne Perry [136]
They moved from the temporary shade of the archway out into the next quad.
“What about Elwyn?” he asked. He was concerned for them all, but Elwyn particularly. He was a young man with far too much weight to bear.
“Oh, dear,” she said softly, but her voice was full of emotion. “That is the one thing for which I really dislike Mary. I never had children of my own.”
Was it pain in her voice, masked over the years, or simply a mild regret? He did not turn to look at her—that would be unpardonably intrusive—but he thought of her love affair with Beecher with a new clarity. Perhaps there was more to understand than he had imagined.
“I cannot know what her loss is,” she went on, looking at the sunlight on the grass ahead of her, and the castellated roof against the blue of the sky. “But Elwyn is her son also, and she is indulging her own grief without any thought for him. Gerald is useless! He mopes around, most of the time saying nothing beyond agreeing with her. And I’m afraid he is helping himself to rather too much of Aidan’s port! He is glassy-eyed more often than not, and it is not simply out of grief or exhaustion. Although Mary would be enough to exhaust anyone!”
Joseph kept step with her.
“Poor Elwyn is left to try to comfort his mother,” she said, shaking her head. “He’s attempting to shield her from the less pleasant truths that are emerging about Sebastian, who has reached the proportions of a saint in her mind. Anyone would think he had been martyred for a great cause rather than killed by some desperate person, in all likelihood goaded beyond endurance.” She stopped, turning to face Joseph, her eyes wretched. “It isn’t going to last. It can’t!”
He was startled.
“She’s going to find out one day, she has to!” she said so softly he had to lean toward her to catch the words. Her voice was tight with fear. “And then what can we do for her?” Her eyes searched his. “For any of them? She’s built her whole world around Sebastian, and it’s not real!” Then she sounded surprised at herself. “Sometimes I feel desperately sorry for him. How could anyone live up to what she believed of him? Do you suppose the pressure of it, his own knowledge of what he was really like, drove him to some of the ugly things he seems to have done? Is that possible?”
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. They were walking very slowly. “Perhaps. He was remarkably gifted, but he had flaws like any of us. Maybe they now look the greater because we hadn’t known they were there.”
“Was that our fault?” she asked earnestly. “I thought he was . . . golden. That he was superbly clever, and that his character was as beautiful as his face.”
“And his dreams,” he added. His own voice was hoarse for a second as grief overcame him for the loss not only of Sebastian, but for a kind of innocence in himself, for the lost comfort it carried with it. “And yes, it was my fault, certainly,” he added. “I saw him as I wanted him to be, and I loved him for that. If I were less selfish, I would have loved him for what he was.” He avoided meeting her eyes. “Perhaps you can destroy people by refusing to see their reality, offering love only on your own terms, which is that they be what you need them to be—for yourself, not for them.” It was true, gouging out the last pretence inside him, leaving him raw.
She smiled very slightly, and her voice was very gentle. “You didn’t do quite that, Joseph. You were his teacher, and you saw and encouraged the best in him. But you are an idealist. I daresay none of us are as fine as you think.”
Again her love for Beecher rushed into his mind, and the hard, abrasive thought that Sebastian had known of it and used it