Hugh was watching her. He asked, “Is something wrong?”
Everything’s wrong, Mary wanted to say. You are going away. But she shook her head. Found her voice. “No.” Not exactly her voice, so she cleared her throat lightly and tried again. “No, it is only that this is a beautiful gift, and I’ve nothing to give you at all in return.”
There was silence a moment, as though he were thinking. “A story will do.”
Mary brought her head up at that, grateful he’d given her something to smile at. “My stories,” she said, “are in no measure equal to this, and you know it.”
He looked at the silver that gleamed in the hand she’d held up as her evidence, and with a stubborn shrug told her, “I’d count them above it.”
The gift of his approval was as precious to her as the silver equipage she fastened with great care upon her gown before she turned to lean again upon the parapet, uncaring that the twilight was now properly upon them and there was no view to see beyond the ghostly outline of the broken bridge against the darkness of the shore and hills beyond. And looking at that battered bridge and at the dark gray water surging at it from beneath the place she stood, she felt a sudden desperate need to bravely stand against the current that was so uncaringly attempting to tear one more piece away from her. “What tale,” she asked him, “would you have me tell you?”
He considered this. “The one ye told at Mâcon.”
She had only told one tale she could remember at Mâcon, and it embarrassed her to think of it: the tale she’d told the younger of the frilly sisters while they’d walked and talked in French, when she had thought MacPherson could not understand that language, and she had made sport of him by fashioning a fine dramatic tale of tragic love, with him its hero. The stone beneath her hands was cool and weathered, pitted like old bone, and Mary pressed her fingers to it. “I have long since owed you an apology for what I said at Mâcon.”
Hugh stood watching her a moment longer, then came slowly forward on the bridge and bent to lean beside her on the ancient parapet. “And why is that?”
“You know why. I should not have told that story.”
With another shrug he said, “I liked it well enough. All but the ending.”
Mary turned her head so she could see his profile in the dimness. “It was not my ending. Nor even my story, for all that. You read the original version in Lyon, in Madame d’Aulnoy’s book, you must have noticed. The tale of the Russian prince.”
“Aye. Yours was better,” he said. “Tell it over.”
She sighed. “Hugh.”
“It starts with him lost.”
She could not refuse him, not when he had given her such an incredible gift of his own, so relenting she started the story and tried to repeat it the way she had crafted it when he’d been walking behind her at Mâcon, a shadow she’d longed to be free of. And yet, as she told the tale over again to him, Mary could not keep from noticing all the small points of connection to how things had happened with them in real life—from the earliest part where the hero had gazed upon his lady and had followed her without her ever noticing him in return, to their first meeting when the hero’s lady had dropped her scarf and he’d returned it, to the time when he had kissed her and her world had been forever changed, until Fate cast a pall upon their happiness and forced him to decide between remaining with his lady or returning to the battlefield.
She stopped the story there, because she found it struck too close to home. The twilight now had settled all around them and the lamplight gleamed within the windows of the tile-roofed buildings clustered on the little ship-like island that would never leave its moorings, never know another shore.
Hugh said, “Go on.”
“You do not like the ending,” she reminded him. “You told me so yourself.”
He turned his head towards her then, his face so far in shadow now she scarce could see his eyes. “Then write a different one.”
Mary was not sure at first that she understood what he was asking.
Until quietly he told her, “Write a better one.”
She realized he was speaking in the same tone he had used at Maisonneuve to tell her she should call to Frisque. And hope—a tiny twisted knot of it—began to loosen and expand within her. She remembered what she’d written in her journal so despondently this morning: If it were my choice to make I would lay all my heart before him and refuse to leave his side. And he was making it her choice.
Beyond his shoulder she could see the paler marble outline of the Janus pillar with its faces turned in all directions and so worn by time and weather they were featureless, that no one now could know or guess at who they might have been. So it would also be with them, she knew—when time had turned and people of an age to come would stand upon this ancient bridge and she and Hugh would be but faceless shadows then themselves, and none would know they’d ever been there.
None would know that on a mid-May evening, with the stars beginning to appear and glimmer in the darkening deep blueness of the arching sky, a young and lonely woman had put all her heart within her hands and laid it full before the silent man who leaned beside her.
“Then he told her,” Mary said, “that he must leave, for he could not neglect his duty nor his honor. And his lady sighed with sadness, but she understood, and said to him, ‘Your honor and your duty are so very much a part of you I could not ever ask you to abandon them, but neither do I think I can endure it, sir, if you abandon me. So what to do?’” She could not hold Hugh’s gaze although she could not truly see it, so she looked away again, repeating, “What to do?”