The funeral was concluded. The guests had gone.
But Henry remained.
How could he leave her?
Something stuck in his throat, raw and barbed, like thorns catching at the sensitive skin as he blinked heavily to try and clear his vision.
“Your Grace?”
Henry jerked, not expecting the voice so close to him – soft and careful as fingers alighted on the sleeve of his jacket.
Catherine was a small woman, even smaller than her sister had been, and while she had a totally different colouring and facial structure, it was abundantly clear that she and Martha had been sisters. They had the same nose. The same tilt of theireyes and soft, thin lips. There was a delicateness to the women of their family, a beauty that caught one off guard.
And seeing her so close, standing at the foot of Martha’s grave, made Henry want to crawl inside himself to avoid the reminder that she provided.
“Henry,” he corrected her belatedly, his voice scratching out of his throat. “There is no one else here but the two of us, Catherine. I am still your brother-in-law.” And he always would be. To have her return to addressing him the way that she had several years before would be like erasing the very few years of love he had been allowed to spend with her sister.
Catherine smiled, a slow, barely-there curve of her lips as she nodded.
“The funeral is over, Henry.” Her fingers pressed softly into the sleeve of his jacket. “Everyone has gone home.”
Henry’s eyes lifted from her to sweep the empty graveyard, already knowing her to be right but still unable to help himself. Only their two carriages were left, although he could see that it was her mother’s waiting, not her husband’s and her own.
“Don’t allow me to keep you from getting your mother home before the evening chill sets in,” Henry said quickly,avoiding the question in her mahogany eyes. “I would be more than happy to see her home and you back to your own, but–”
He didn’t have a reason to really give her, his words cutting out as abruptly as he ran out of them.
Catherine’s fingers tightened on his sleeve. “Oh, Arthur took mother home already,” she assured him quickly. “I decided to take her carriage back. I didn’t want to leave you here on your own …”
Henry felt a brief stab of guilt.
Followed by a melancholy thought that that was all he was any longer: on his own.
“I just wanted to …” Words failed him again, his eyes flitting back to the mound of fresh earth in front of them both as he tried to even rationalize what he wanted. Or rather what he could say aloud. He very much doubted confessing to wanting to crawl inside that coffin with his wife was the sort of thing her also grieving sister would want to hear.
“It’s only natural for you to grieve,” Catherine assured him gently. “You loved her.”
There it was. The past tense again in reference to his wife. Like a serrated knife inserted into an already raw wound.
“She was the love of my life,” Henry agreed heavily.
And he meant it.
She was all that he knew of love. She embodied it, even after death. She had taken his from him with her when she left the earth, leaving him a hollow shell of a man in her wake.
“She would want you to be happy,” Catherine whispered.
Henry recoiled from the words.
Happy?
How could he be happy when his happiness lay six feet beneath him?
“You know how she felt about grief,” Catherine pressed on. “You remember what she would always say after Papa had died? He is not in the earth; he is not gone. He is the sound of the notes being played on his grand piano; he is in Arthur’s poorly timed jokes and is the whisper on the wind reminding us that he is here.” Catherine recited it by rote, her voice so soft that Henry found himself leaning in. Even if only just to hear his wife’s words repeated again.
The whisper on the wind …
Like she had summoned it, a breeze tickled his cheek, his eyes closing as he fought the tears that had been absent all day.
