Page 11 of Now Comes the Mist

He blinks down at me. “You are … teasing me.”

“A bit,” I admit.

For a moment, we stare at each other. And then the most unexpected thing happens.

Arthur Holmwood laughs.

He laughs, and it transforms him. And every memory of Dr. Seward’s beautiful hands and Quincey Morris’s charm disappears from my mind in the light of Arthur’s face laughing. His eyes crinkle, his jaw softens, and on the right side of his mouth is a perfect, kissable dimple. And now that I have made him laugh, I am filled with the most urgent need to do it again and to hold on to his smile before it disappears.

“You are so full of life,” he says, and that is unexpected as well. “You always have been, ever since we were children playing in your garden. Do you know … I believe I have never known anyone in our circle as long as I have known you? When I look back at my childhood, it seems that you have always been there.”

I am stunned. This is the most that Arthur Holmwood has ever spoken in my presence, and I am afraid to reply for fear of scaring him off, so I let him surge on. He seems to be talking as quickly as he can, letting the words out before his courage fails him.

“But we were never friends,” he says. “And I think that was my fault.”

“How so?” I ask.

“Well, I was always afraid of you.”

It is my turn to laugh, hoping he will laugh with me so I can see that dimple again.

But his face remains serious. “You were too brilliant, you see, with your frocks and your smile and the way you beat everyone at every game. I still remember how you destroyed Peter Redmond and Edward Hart at cricket in every sense of the word one summer. They were angry at being defeated by a girl, and you told them they should have been more upset about losing so spectacularly after boasting about their skills.”

“How do you remember that?” I ask, astonished.

“I remember everything about you,” Arthur says softly, and a warmth spreads out from the core of my body to every fingertip. “But I only watched from afar because I knew I didn’t deserve you. A timid, coddled boy like me? With no gift for sport, no courage, no cleverness, and no conversation? I suspected I would always remain in the background of your life.”

The waltz ends, but we continue dancing as another piece of music begins.

“I went off to school, and every holiday, I came back to find you even more brilliant. Even more beautiful.” His cheeks redden, but his voice remains steady. “You grew up into the woman I expected you to become, and I knew someone like you could never notice me.”

“Arthur,” I say helplessly. It is the first time in our adult lives that I have said his name to him, as though we are more to each other than what he has described. As though that name is very dear to me. He hears it in my voice, and emotion washes over his face.

“With all your liveliness, I could see there was something different about you after you lost your father. Forgive me for touching on a painful subject,” he adds quickly. “But I know you’ve been sad for a long time. I … I still watch you, you see. Even if it seems like I never do. You always touch your locket whenever someone mentions him, and your eyes … It’s like you go somewhere. Somewhere you can be alone and not pretend anymore.”

I look down at the gold and jet locket around my neck, stunned that solid, emotionless, seemingly unobservant and uncaring Arthur has seen so much of me. “There’s a photograph of Papa inside,” I say. “It was the last one taken of him before he died.”

We are both silent, lost in thought, moving among the other couples without seeing them.

“I’m sorry, Lucy,” he says quietly. It is the first time in our adult acquaintance thathehas ever saidmyname. “Every time I saw you struggling, Iwished I could help. But I didn’t know how. Or whether my sympathy would be welcome to you.”

I study every inch of his face, from his grave brow beneath his walnut-colored hair to his eyes, both tender and serious, and the slight cleft in his chin. And I realize that aside from Mina, this man might be the only one to have ever seen a bit of the true me.Me, the woman behind the flirtatious smile and the fluttering silk fan. The woman who is still the girl who had never gotten over so much loss and death, and who may never do so.

“I want you to know,” I tell Arthur, “that you have not been in the background of my life for some time. You have been in the front, with your back turned to me.”

His lips tremble. The hope in his eyes is almost terrifying and breathtaking to behold. “My back has never been turned to you,” he says in a voice so low that I can barely hear it over the music of the orchestra, “and it never will be.”

I am surprised to find my eyes are wet as I smile up at this shy, sweet, and timid man who has just confessed to being afraid of me for most of our lives.

Arthur smiles back, the dimple appearing again. “Jack Seward doesn’t mean anything to you, then?” he asks, searching my face. “I heard you say that he sent you flowers tonight, too. Roses. And I feared that you … and he …”

I can’t help it. I lower my eyelashes, enjoying his anxiety.

“And Quincey Morris. I saw you laughing as you danced with him, and I thought … I was worried that …” He groans at my silence. “Lucy, you’re torturing me.”

“Only because you’ve torturedme,” I tell him.

It isn’t even remotely an answer to his questions, but he reads the truth in my eyes. His hand is firm but gentle on my waist, and I am awash in memories of the first time he held me this way, on another night at another ball. This time, it is different. This time, we have come dangerously close to admitting that we are important to each other. That we have, each in turn, been watching the other from afar and wondering if we will ever share more than a childhood and a single dance.

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