“What do you want?”
“Not much.” Orkey hunched down, eye level with Meg, with a smokey darkness in his eyes that made her skin crawl. “Just her.”
A candle was waiting for Tom in the millinery shop window. He’d known, somehow, that it would be.
Without knocking, he slipped in the back kitchen door and padded with wet feet to the hearth. Pease pottage simmered in a cauldron over the flames, the warm scents of peas, onions, and carrots steaming into the air.
Tom hung his shoes on a chair.
Then unrolled his wet trouser pants, water dripping down his ankles, heat pinkening his skin. His eyes still stung. He never should have cried.
Too long, he’d sat in that grimy boat with his head between his hands. Once, he’d glanced up at the sky and blamed the murky heavens for his misery. He blamed God.
No.
He blamed himself.
And somewhere between wiping his eyes and smacking his fist into the mast pole, he found himself kneeling between the wooden slats. The dirty slush and nets had ground into his knees. The boat had swayed him.God, I know Ye hear me.
Maybe he’d known that all along.
Maybe it was never God he’d stopped believing in, but himself.
I’m sorry.
For disobeying Papa, for killing Caleb, for abandoning the things Mamm had taught him. For the bottle of ale he’d tried to drown his pain with. For going to church with Meg and cursing the Bible from a box pew.
He’d been a wretch, all these years, to make Meg his lifeline.
She’d become everything.
His salvation—when he already had one in Christ.
Ye know what’s right. I know that Ye do. I’m sorry.He’d wept the words, over and over.I want to feel Ye again. I want to love Ye again.Some of the weight in his chest shifted. His skin prickled, and that long-ago whisper of peace parted the sea of his pain.I want to be Yer son.
Even as he’d prayed the words, he knew he already was.
Had been, all this time.
“There you are.” A sleepy voice drew him back to the present.
Tom squinted in the firelight as Mrs. Musgrave shuffled into the kitchen with Lenox slinking behind her.
“Did I wake ye?”
“Tut-tut.I never sleep anyway.” She wore a loose white nightgown, her hair all tucked away beneath the lace edges of her mob cap. She glanced with a frown at the hearth. “Oh dear. I went to bed and forgot to douse the fire. Are you hungry by any chance?”
“Ye know I cannae say no to ye.”
She smiled with satisfaction and turned as if she were ready to find her bowls—then paused, eyes flickering back to his face. She stepped closer, studious, then bent next to him and touched his cheek. “Tommy. You have not been crying, have you?”
He turned his chin away in embarrassment and smiled. “Listen to ye. Just like a woman to be chattering her head off when a man is starved.”
“And just like a man to avoid the question.” She harrumphed. “Well, whether you shed a tear or not, you have a kinder look in your eye, Tom McGwen.”
He wasn’t certain what to say to that. He prayed instead, as Mrs. Musgrave bustled to prepare his food. Something about lifting words to heaven stilled the tension usually so rampant in his body.
He could get used to this.
