The Burlington Manor Affair

I never took the time to explain things to you, which I do regret.

Unease ran over Rex. A confessional? He wasn’t sure he wanted to give it the time of day. His curiosity was baited, though.

I messed things up with your mother, and I was lonely.

Rex lowered the page. Lonely? What a joke. The irony hit him hard. The truth of the matter was that Charles Carruthers had only ever been lonely right at the end. What about the mistress you kept on the side when I was a child? The woman, whoever she was, obviously hadn’t meant that much to Charles Carruthers. And yet she was the real reason that his parents’ marriage fell apart. That made Rex despise his father’s attitude even more.

Sylvia restored my life; she lit all of our lives. She made Burlington Manor a proper home again. It was as if the house was alive, after several years of being a desperate place, after your mother had gone.

As he read, Rex’s terse attitude to this after-death confession morphed from irritation to frustration.

Carmen was part of that. She was the daughter I never had and it felt more like a family home than before. But I was wrong when I expected you and Carmen to become brother and sister.

Initially I thought you were coping with the new adjustments better than I could have wished. Once I knew you had true feelings for her, it felt as if everything was going to be spoiled, that I was doomed to be unhappy. I couldn’t let that happen. But now I see it was my fault, not yours, because my expectations were unrealistic. I see that, after all this time I’ve had to reflect on it alone. It pains me that I’ve left it this late, and I don’t know if I even have the courage to send this letter to you, and ask you to forgive me, and come home.

I wish things had been different. Perhaps I can make amends. I know it won’t be easy to

The letter ended abruptly and midsentence. It wasn’t signed.

On first reading it made Rex angry. His dad hadn’t even had the guts to send it. Rex despised that.

“It’s all well and good being sorry now,” he muttered, throwing the letter down on the desk, “or whenever the hell it was you had a moment to regret what you’d done.”

When was it written? He dug through the accompanying accounts for clues. The papers seemed to be from around a year earlier.

Rex picked it up and read it again.

It seemed that the old man really had realized that he’d got it wrong. What did he mean about making amends? Rex stared at the letter, turned it over and put it down. He sifted through all the other papers in that box, but there was no continuation and no other indication that he’d given it any more thought after that night.

The old man had probably been sozzled on whisky and feeling sorry for himself, trying to think of a way to gather his pitifully small tribe back together again. But it never would have worked, would it? Perhaps that’s why he never finished the letter. In life, there was nothing he could do to make it right. If he’d tried, it would have been a vast humiliation for him, and Charles Carruthers would never have accepted that.

Rex’s anger flared and he screwed the letter into a ball, spun the office chair around and hurled it at the portrait of his father. The paper bounced off the painting and dropped to the floor at Rex’s feet.

Rex stared at the portrait again, transfixed, because a strange notion was evolving in his mind. Had Charles Carruthers found a way, in death, to make amends? Had he attempted to do so via the very structure of his will?

Originally Rex thought he left them a share each simply as a gesture toward Sylvia Shelby’s memory and Carmen’s relationship to the house. It was what the will had stated, but was there more to it than that? Had Charles Carruthers put the two of them together to deal with this problem because he knew that if they were meant to be together the way Rex had been convinced that they were—all those years ago—then it would happen? At least he’d given them the chance to reunite here, to try.

“Why the hell did you wait so bloody long?” Rex picked up the balled letter and returned to the desk, where he slumped into the chair.

Could it be true? The weird part was, that was exactly what was occurring whether Charles Carruthers had planned for it or not. They were testing a pathway that had been laid for them many years before. How differently his father could have handled it, though. Nevertheless, they might never have seen each other, apart from that brief sighting at the graveyard, if he hadn’t structured his will that way.

The very thought of it made Rex long for Carmen.

When the circumstances of the will had been read out Rex had been delighted—exactly for that reason, because it meant he and Carmen would have to spend time together. He’d been so elated, in fact, that he’d barely stopped to think of the whys and wherefores. The fact that his share of the estate represented exciting new investment possibilities for his business was nothing to him compared to being with Carmen.

That fact, in itself, hadn’t entered his consciousness until now.

Rex pushed the chair back against the desk, his hands going loose on the armrests as he contemplated it. He stared around the office with unseeing eyes and tried to imagine what he would do if he were in the same position as his dad had been, alone with his regrets. Had the need to right a wrong haunted the old man all those years?

If it was indeed intentional, how clever it was.

If they’d both moved on and weren’t interested in each other, it wouldn’t happen. No harm done. If it did, then the injustices of the past would be dealt with through the natural course of events—passion reignited while they looked at the future of the manor together.

It angered Rex that his father still held power over them, even from the grave. The old bastard, playing with people’s lives like they were pawns. I don’t want to be like him. It had always been Rex’s fear, to be self-centered and to hurt people close to him. Yet sometimes recently he wondered if it was inevitable. Several women had screamed their grievances at him when he’d decided he wanted to be alone. That was because he didn’t want to string anyone along, though. He’d never felt committed to a relationship; he always tried to make that clear when he slept with a woman. He just figured he wasn’t cut out for it, because of his background, the broken home and all.

Since his reunion with Carmen he knew the real reason why.

Subconsciously he’d always known. There was no hiding from the truth now. Carmen was the reason why—because his hankering need for her had never gone away.