these many years has practically erased his face in my mind.”
Her words pricked Darcy. “That is something I shall pray returns.”
“I loved William, but your father—he was my favorite child, and I asked for you because you are a part of him. He left without saying good-bye. He knew we would not approve of him marrying Eliza. She was beneath him, you see. So he was gone. My husband sought him out, found him, but it was too late. They had taken their vows.”
Darcy embraced her. The old woman trembled in her arms, then pulled away. Such expressions of affection were not normal at Havendale.
Madeline patted down her coverlet. “Why did he not come with you?”
Her memory slipped again, but Darcy was patient. “My father journeyed west, Grandmother. No one has seen or heard from him since—not even Uncle Will.”
“And that has pained you, hasn’t it, Darcy?”
“Yes. I cannot understand why he abandoned me, and why he left River Run to decay. Uncle Will lives close by, but why he did not take it over I do not understand.”
“Perhaps Hayward asked him not to.”
“That may be. I want to believe what I’ve been told, that my father could not bear the loss of my mother, nor take care of me alone.”
Madeline straightened her back. “I am glad Hayward left you with William. No doubt he has been a father to you, Mari a mother, and your cousins sisters.”
“They are my family in every sense of the word.”
“You miss them?”
“Yes, very much.”
“Thank the Lord, Hayward did not take you with him. Think of the hardships you would have suffered.”
“I fear I would have become even more savage than what Charlotte said I was.”
A burst of understanding came to Darcy, and she pondered her grandmother’s words. All these years she had felt unwanted, unloved, and forgotten. But now she realized that her father loved her so much, he left her with the Breeses. She had a roof over her head, food to eat, and a family. Although the world beyond River Run fascinated her, Hayward had done the right thing in leaving her behind. But that he ran from his troubles by losing himself in the backwoods worried her.
She picked up her grandmother’s hands, cupping hers around the crooked fingers. They were cold. “I am sorry he hurt you by leaving the way he did. I’m sure he never meant to.”
“His love for the place you call River Run was stronger than his attachment to me,” Madeline said. “Do you care about that place?”
Drawn back to the land and river she loved, Darcy felt a yearning so deep within her soul, a summons to return, that a long, deep breath slipped from her lips. Would Ethan go with her, back to the place where they first fell in love?
“I care as if it were my life,” she answered.
Madeline laid her hand on Darcy’s shoulder. “Then you must go back to the place you love most, and remember me as you saw me—alive, and happy to have seen you, for I have seen my lost son in your eyes. Havendale is not for you. It is depressing, full of ill, and Langbourne is its master.”
23
Strong gusts of wind shook Darcy awake, rattling the windows, causing the walls of her room to shudder, and hurling across Havendale like the waves of a boiling sea. She sat up in bed. Goosebumps bristled over her skin, and she glanced about the room. It had been a dream, but so real.
She began to remember—how her palm pressed against window glass, how the frost outlined her fingers, the tree with its heavy branches casting long shadows over patches of stiff brown grass, a silent sentinel on a winter’s night. Her swing glided back and forth on thick ropes encrusted with ice. Darkness and moonlight. A woman’s figure crossing the yard. Her cloak fanning out in the wind, flying forward around her legs. Gusts blew back her hood. Flaming red hair, illuminated like tongues of fire by the flame that flickered in a lantern near a hitching post.
She remembered creeping to the door in a pair of scratchy woolen stockings. Voices were outside in the hallway. Footsteps clattered up the staircase. Shadows moved on the wall. Muddy footprints marred the polished floor. Two figures disappeared into a room at the end of a passage. A shaft of candlelight spread out across the Turkish runner. She walked toward it.
Inching around the door, she saw her mother, her ebony hair, rich