And thus dismissed, he withdrew to his own room until she was ready to go back downstairs.
You sound like a little boy begging for approval.
Good God!
* * *
• • •
The window of Viola’s bedchamber had been ajar all night. Now she flung it wide and stood before it, breathing in the crisp autumn air as she drew her shawl more closely about her shoulders. There were trails of mist in the valley and pale blue sky above. It was surely impossible to get closer to paradise than this while one still lived. She allowed her heart a conscious welling of happiness . . .
. . . and wondered if there was a letter from Harry awaiting her at home. Or a letter about Harry. She wondered if her brother and sister-in-law and all the Westcotts were still in Bath, celebrating family. For that was what they had been doing more and more in the last couple of years, since the great catastrophe, which might just as easily have broken them asunder into bitter disunity. For one moment she regretted having left Bath so abruptly and thus having spoiled things a bit for everyone.
This was so typical of her. So very typical. Even now, when she had made the conscious decision to do something for herself, she could not quite stop herself from looking back and fearing that she had inconvenienced or hurt others. She had hurt no one. And no one would worry unduly. She did wish she could go back and rewrite that letter to Camille and Abigail, though. She ought to have explained that she had met a friend and been persuaded to spend a couple of weeks or so at that friend’s house. They would wonder, but they would not worry. But at least she had written, and they would know that she had not just disappeared off the face of the earth.
And so she could permit herself this time of unalloyed . . . happiness. It was a rash word to use, perhaps, and a rash thing to feel. But why not? This was what she had run away for. This was what her heart had surely yearned for all her life. Just simply to be happy, however fleetingly. She was not so foolish as to believe in happily-ever-after. That did not mean happiness was to be spurned when it offered itself for brief, vivid moments, as it did now.
Oh, this really was paradise. The ferns above the mist gleamed wetly in the morning sunlight.
“Something,” a voice said from behind her, “is reminding me of winter days at school, when we were hauled from our beds at an ungodly hour each morning in order to run twenty laps about the playing fields before returning to a refreshing wash in icy water and a descent to the unheated stone chapel for half an hour of prayers and moral harangues from the headmaster. I believe it must be— Yes, indeed it is. It is the Arctic air billowing through that window.”
She turned to smile at him. He was lying naked in her bed, his fingers laced behind his head, the bedcovers bunched about his hips.
“Are you a hothouse plant, Marcel?” she asked him. “I want to go out there. I want to run in the ferns. I want to run through the mist. I want to stand in the middle of that bridge and twirl slowly about and breathe in the wonder of it all. Such a feast for the senses.”
“I perceive a compatibility problem,” he murmured, and closed his eyes. But he made no move to cover himself.
“It was you,” she reminded him, “who wanted to dance on the village green.”
“Ah, but that was a means to an end,” he said, his eyes still closed. “I hoped to lure you into bed.”
“It was a trick that worked like a dream,” she said, turning back to the window. “I hope you are proud of yourself.”
“Indeed I am.” She jumped slightly, for his voice came from just behind her, and his arms came about her and drew her back against him. “It was one of the greater successes of my life.”
“Not the greatest? I am crushed.” She rested her head on his shoulder and sighed with contentment.
“Viola,” he said, “this is a little akin to shutting the stable doors after the horse has bolted, I suppose, but do you know—and practice—ways to prevent conception?”
She was very glad he could not see her face. She had rarely been more embarrassed in her life. Women never discussed . . . even with one another. But why was prudery still dogging her footsteps when she was standing here with her naked lover in a remote love nest the morning after a night of loving?
“I stopped having my—” Oh dear. She tried putting it another way. “I stopped being fertile a couple of years ago, after all the upset. It has never come back. I will not conceive.”
“Was that not a very young age for it to happen?” he asked.
“Yes, I believe so,” she said. “I was forty.”
“Ah, so I am bedding an older woman, am I?” he said. “I will pass that dreaded landmark in a short while. At present I am still in my youthful thirties.”
She did the subtraction in her head. He had been only twenty-five, then, when he had so pointedly flirted with her and so tempted her twenty-eight-year-old self. He must have been awfully young when he married and when his wife died. He did not seem at all the sort of man to marry young. Had he been essentially the same man then as he was now? Had he married for practical reasons, perhaps, as she had? Or had he changed quite drastically? But he would not talk about his family, not even his children. Twins. A boy and a girl.
It was strange how someone she had always summed up with a single label—libertine—and the assumption that there was nothing else to know had become a person, though she still knew hardly anything about him. He was a man of mystery, of depths she suspected were dark. Though she could be wrong. But she did not need to know him, except in this way—as the lover with whom she had run away from her dreary life for a short spell. It would be as well if she did not probe deeper. The point of this idyll was not to get to know each other but to enjoy each other.
It sounded very shallow put that way.
Did it matter? Sometimes the human spirit needed the shallows. Sunshine danced on the shallows but was absorbed beyond trace by the depths.
“Those ferns are going to be wet,” he said, “and knee- high. They are going to slap about you from all directions and in all their cold wetness and splash your hands and face and cause you unutterable discomfort.”
“Coward,” she said.
“I have boots,” he said. “I will wager you do not.”
“I have stout shoes,” she told him. “They and the hems of my clothes will dry. So will my person. I am going out there. If you would prefer to remain here, nibbling on your toast—”
“Ten minutes,” he said, snatching up his dressing gown from the floor and striding toward the door. “I will meet you downstairs. Just be warned. I do not want to hear any whining or complaining for the next hour or so.”
She poked her tongue out at him, something she could never remember doing before, even as a child. But he did not turn back to see.
Ten minutes later she watched him come downstairs, all elegant practicality in a greatcoat with too many capes to count at a glance and top boots that gleamed with polish and reached almost to his knees. She hoped he would expire from the heat before they returned to the house. She hoped his boots would be ruined beyond repair. She smiled at him and felt that welling of happiness again.
“A punctual woman,” he said. “No, a woman who is early. A rarity indeed.”
“You were never a woman in my household, Mr. Lamarr,” she said.
He made her a courtly bow, unlocked and opened the door, and offered his arm.