health troubles.”
Rowena splayed her fingers before her. Looked at her hands, her livelihood, and wondered what it would be like to lose the use of one completely. “Oh,” was all she could think of to say. Any other words were closed off, her throat tight and heart hurting for the young man who had lost so much and the younger boy who blamed himself.
“So.” Simon neatened the tools that didn’t need neatening, probably to keep his back to Rowena. “Now you know. I think the world of your shop, and I wish I could help you. I’ll do my best, and I won’t give up. I can’t, because Howard needs money. But I never stay anywhere for long because I hurt people.”
He was repeating the cycle, she realized: part of an apprenticeship, and then he ran. Onward, across England, darting from town to town and skill to skill until at last he’d made his way to London. Here a man could get lost, could hide from anyone. Except himself.
“Why do you have to leave,” Rowena asked, “just because you always have before? You could find a good place here in London. Surely your friend would be best served by you keeping a steady position with a good income.”
Simon scoffed. “I had one—two, actually—and lost them.”
“Playing the horn, you mean? Yes, but now you’re here.”
“Ah, but you can’t afford to hire me. You told me so the day we met.”
“I can’t put a price on you,” she blurted, and he turned to look at her at last.
“Now who’s the incorrigible flirt?” He smiled. “Sweet of you to say so, but we both know my work here was a move born of desperation.”
“Was, or is?”
“Was.”
Your desperation, or mine? She did not know which of them had needed the other more.
Instead, she asked, “And what is it now?”
He caught his breath. In the sunset-warm light, the dim of the lamp, his eyelashes made touchable shadows on his cheekbones. “Now it’s a dream.”
Her heart went out to him, to the bleakness on his face. He could not carry such guilt if he had not cared deeply for his friend. “You cannot forgive yourself, can you?”
“Why should I when the harm I caused still exists?”
She understood this feeling, and her heart hurt. She realized how tender it had become for him, so that his pain could pierce it. She wanted to take him in her arms, and she wanted above all to ease the pain within him.
She took his hand, savoring its warmth and strength. “What good is guilt? Does it honor your friend if you feel guilty? If you don’t allow yourself to make more friends? If you never settle?”
“No, of course not. Guilt doesn’t honor him. I don’t know how to honor him.” Simon’s fingers clung to hers, tightly intertwined. “I do the best I can. I send him money. I know it’s not enough.”
“What you do is enough for me.” Rowena laid a gentle hand on his face, stroking the stubbly roughness and the hard line of his jaw. “It is. Thank you for trusting me with your story.”
“You’ve told me yours.” He sighed, shutting his eyes. “I wanted you to know mine. I wanted you to know what sort of fellow I am.”
“I already knew.” Her other hand, she laid over his heart. The quiet thunder of his heartbeat was unbearably intimate, his life beneath her palm. All they had to give was time, the precious gift they traded for coin. To help others. To support the life they wanted. To pay for the burdens they’d taken on.
But they had given time to each other for the sheer sweetness of it, too, for a touch and a kiss and a conversation of bitter, pure truths. Such time was precious, and Rowena could not allow it to end. Not yet.
“Simon.” She brushed a kiss to his cheek. “Come upstairs with me. Let’s do something for the joy of it.”
Chapter Six
“When he loved, and he never really loved but one, it was with so violent, so blind a passion, that he might be said to doat upon the very errors of the girl to whom he was thus attached.”
From Glenarvon by Lady Caroline Lamb
He was in Rowena Fairweather’s bedchamber, and it was more beautiful than the fireworks at Vauxhall. Her laugh, as she clasped his hand and shut the door behind them, was more tuneful than the sweetest arpeggio.
Simon could hardly dare breathe. “What do you want?”
He’d almost asked, What do you want