The Heir - Catherine Coulter [15]
She walked to the south of the old abbey ruins, where the ground rose gently. She turned off the wide path into the neatly plotted Deverill cemetery. She made her way through the straight rows of Deverills from generations past to the very center of the cemetery to where her father had erected his own Italian marble vault. The archangel Gabriel hovered overhead, his white stone wings spread protectively over the heavy oaked Gothic doors.
Arabella tugged open the wrought handles and slipped into the dimly lighted chamber. She sank wearily down to the cold stone floor beside the earl’s empty coffin. Her long slender fingers, with infinite sadness, slowly traced out each individual letter of his name.
Dusk was shadowing the season-faded names on the gravestones when the earl eased open the vault doors and stepped quietly inside. His eyes widened to adjust to the dim light, and he made out Arabella curled up like a small child, asleep, her feet tucked up beneath her skirts and her arm resting gently atop her father’s coffin. She looked vulnerable. She looked utterly helpless. He hated it, hated what he must do, hated now what he had promised to do five years before.
He moved to her side and dropped to his knees. His eyes followed the unremitting black of her gown to where it cut a severe line at her throat, casting a dark shadow over her pale cheeks. She whimpered in her sleep, her hand fisting for an instant, then easing again. Pins had worked themselves loose and her dark hair fell in thick waves over her forehead and across her shoulders, hair the blackness of his own. He saw that she didn’t have a cleft in her chin as he did. Her father hadn’t had a cleft either. He wondered if she had dimples. He had always hated his until he had seen her father’s dimples, rarely, of course, since he was a man who was usually in command, unsmiling. But when he did smile and laugh, those dimples dug deeply in his cheeks and it changed him utterly. The dimples humbled a man, made him more human, gave him a charming indulgence when he laughed.
It seemed a pity to awaken her. Even as he gently shook her shoulder, he knew that when she opened her eyes and saw that he had awakened her, all thoughts of compassion he felt for her would flee in an instant of time. He couldn’t begin to imagine what she would say to him. It wouldn’t be conciliatory, that, at least, he knew.
She awoke slowly, with another soft whimper, as if loath to quit a sleep that kept her from what was real, from what she would have to face. She opened her heavy black-fringed lids and looked straight into clear gray eyes. The dim light and her drowsiness clouded her sight as she gasped, “Father!”
It needed but this, he thought. He cleared his throat and said slowly, very slowly, so as not to shock her more, “No, Arabella, it is not your father. It is I, Justin, come to fetch you back to the abbey. The light is very dim in here. Your mistake is natural. I am sorry to have frightened you.”
Arabella flung out her arms, nearly unbalancing him, and scrambled to her feet. She stared down at him. “No one said you could come in here. You don’t belong here. I should have locked the vault against you. How dare you make me believe you were my father?” She felt fury at herself for showing him her pain. “You did not frighten me. You haven’t that power.”
The earl rose slowly to his feet, looking for control, for patience. He looked searchingly down at her, and saw the furiously pounding pulse in the hollow of her throat. “We seem to meet in the most peculiar places. First the fishpond and now the cemetery. Come, Arabella, it is chilly and dark in here. Let us return to the abbey. It is a long walk, but it is just as well, for I believe we have much to say to each other.” He sounded calm, bored, really, and wanting nothing more than to walk away from her, to never