Ashton Park (31 page)

“Look here.” He squatted.

Holly stood still and peered down. “What is it?”

“You’ll have to get down for a closer look.”

“Very well.”

She bent by him as he pointed out to her where feathers had fanned the dust and left ripples, where a small spot of dried blood meant a creature had been taken by an owl or a hawk. He seemed oblivious to her as they crouched side by side. But she could not help herself from responding to his warmth and sureness and the manner in which his fingers touched the earth and moved the soil in small circular patterns. She realized she wanted Harrison to remain in control in the best of ways…take her up in his arms, marry her on Sunday, lay her down under a canopy of leaves as if she were in a vast canopy bed. He was explaining something about the ash trees, still on his knees, sun daubing his shoulders and hat, while she remained close to him, staring at his hands as he spoke quietly, designs of yellow and green on the backs of her own hands as well as his, and she thought,
Why, I am in a state of grace.

Harrison straightened, turned around, and looked into her face. His smile left but his eyes filled with enormous amounts of light and spaciousness. She took one of his sun-browned hands and ran a finger over it again and again.

“Care for me,” she said. “Be gentle to me.”

A hint of his awkwardness around women came back to him momentarily. Then the fact he was in his woodlands with all its creatures, that he was in his kingdom, reasserted itself. She felt a force from him that made her weak. She wanted to cry but did not.

I am never weak. Not with anyone. Not with any man.

His hand was at her face without her noticing he had moved it and his rough thumb was tracing the skin around her eye.

“I’m no duke,” he said.

“I’m no duchess.”

“Heaven knows what Norah Cole will tell your brother if she’s followed us out here this morning.”

“I can handle Norah Cole and I can handle my brother. My only problem is, I thought I could handle you.”

“Miss Holly—”

“Oh, do stop that. Shall I go around calling you Mr. Harrison for the rest of my life? After the other night? After today?” She put her hand gently on his as he continued to stroke her face with his thumb, following the line of her cheekbone. “What is your Christian name?”

“I don’t use it.”

“Perhaps I’ll use it. Privately.”

“I’m Calvert.”

“Calvert. I like that. Kiss me, Calvert.”

“I want to say something first…Holly…”

“All right.”

He moved his thumb along the smooth line of her jaw, slowly and carefully, as if to be sure he broke nothing, damaged nothing. “I didn’t sleep the night you kissed me. When you had gone back to the manor I lay awake and looked into the dark. I wondered about the inside of the Castle. Who’d died in it, who’d given birth, who’d worshipped God Almighty, who’d fallen in love and married. I don’t think such thoughts normally. To think of marrying when you’re not the marrying sort, to think of the love of a man and his wife when you’ve no wife to lay down sweet and safe on white linen.”

“I’ve never heard you speak this way. So eloquently. You always play the country rustic who works the great man’s estate.”

“I keep to myself. In my room I have my Bible and
Paradise Lost
and the poems of Keats. I’ve written a few thoughts in a notebook.” He ran his fingers through her hair as if he were trailing them through the dark water of a forest stream. “I decided that night I would talk to you if you came back. Talk more than I had to anyone.” He glanced aside for a moment. “I see I have surprised you, and I don’t think you are a person who likes surprises.”

He saw that her eyes began turning softer and softer shades of blue until there was no difference between them and the summer sky emerging through the treetops.

“I have rarely been surprised,” she replied. “And it’s true I don’t like it when it happens. But there are surprises and there are surprises. Yours might be unnerving to a spinster like me, yet they are the sort I would want if I wanted any at all.”

“None of what I said is what I wanted to say.”

“Try again then.”

“Well.” He paused. “Well, when I see the pond there in the forest, that deep pond, and it’s the autumn that’s upon us, November, the leaves all gone and the air sharp—well, the water’s blue, not green, for the sky smiles right down into it then, through the bare branches, you see. And Jack Frost comes along and there’s a skin of ice on the pond. So I try and take up a piece as large as a good-sized window, without breaking it, a whole sheet in my hands. It’s hard to do because as soon as you begin to pry it up from the pond it cracks open. But some mornings I’m lucky. So then I lift up this great sheet of ice that’s clear as the air. Yes, clear as the air but it gives you a different picture of things than air and light do on their own. In front of my face I hold it.”

He brought his hands from her cheek and held them up. “I look at everything. And everything is different. Completely different. Better. It’s holy magic, isn’t it? Then I lay this window down gently into the pond and it is under the water, and the water is blue, as I said, and against the ice the blue is so light, so thin, like a windowpane made of pale blue glass, but better—if a breeze had color, or if the smallest wind did, or spirit, it would be like that fragment of ice in the pond.” He stopped. “So your eyes, Holly, they are like that.”

She saw that he was instantly afraid of what he’d said and terrified she would laugh at him and his poetry and his vision. Then she knew it was her turn to take control again, to take control without any grand design on her part, but in such a way that would bring him even more freedom. She placed her hands on either side of his face, a face with uncertain eyes now, her skin smelling of soil and growth and the green leaves she had rolled between her fingers, scented now with air that had moved all over England and had come back again.

“What a perfect man you are,” she said and drew his mouth down onto hers.

The waterfall thundered into the stream and three or four small rainbows shimmered in the white spray. Victoria kicked her feet in the current as she sat upon the bank in a green summer dress. Ben kissed her eyes and her throat and shoulders and lips.

“You know, those rainbows are in your eyes too,” he said, sitting back.

She plucked a dandelion and tossed it at him. “They are not.”

“They are.”

“You treat me as if I were some sort of Greek goddess or some sort of immortal.”

“Aren’t you?”

“I’m human, Ben. I’ll grow old one day and you won’t want me anymore.”

“Not true.”

She gazed at him. “I like seeing you in trousers and a white shirt. You’re handsome in a uniform but somehow this is more Ben.”

“I wish this were my uniform. I wish the RAF would let me fly in clothes like this.”

“What do you think about when you’re not thinking of me?”

He grinned. “There’s hardly a minute left to think of anything else. What can you do with ten or twelve seconds of free time? Sometimes I think of the repair work they put in for my left elbow and wonder whether I wouldn’t be better off with a cupboard hinge.”

She splashed him, kicking with her legs. “Stop lying. Tell me the truth.”

“I think about how I was a stable boy and now I’m on top of the world.”

“Do you?”

Ben lay back on the grass with his hands under his head. “That cloud looks like a Fokker triplane. Yes, I do wonder—I wonder how I could be a groom one day and then go from one thing to another all the way to where I am now, sitting on a stream bank in the Lake District with you—and you’re Victoria Whitecross and my wife. Look. Here comes a Sopwith Snipe underneath that Fokker triplane. Boom. All is kaput
.
Then I think about how I learned to fly and how I don’t want to give it up. But I don’t want to stay in the military. I really do want to fly in just a regular shirt and pants and leather jacket and boots.”

“So how do we resolve this dilemma? We live in a cave? You return to work for my parents?”

“No. Kipp and I and Michael Woodhaven have been talking. Aeroplanes are the coming thing. Just like motorcars. They’ll build more and more roads for cars and put up more and more airfields for planes. So we thought about opening a flying club along with a flying school. Hiring ourselves out to fly mail or important documents or important people.”

“You’d work with my brother and Libby’s beau?”

“I would.”

“And we could all live together in some town or village?”

Ben picked a long blade of grass. “We wouldn’t start up here in northern England. Not in Lancashire or Yorkshire. We’d set it up close to London. We’d get more business down there. Kipp’s already spoken to your father about it.”

Victoria stared at him. “And what did Daddy say?”

“All for it. Reckoned he’d fly back and forth between Ashton Park and London and save hours of travel time. He’s got land down by London, you know. Or you all do. All the Danforths.”

Victoria lifted her legs out of the water. “I’m quite frozen now. I need a hug.” She snuggled down beside him and he put his arm around her shoulders.

“So you’re quite serious about this?” she asked. “You three? And Dad helps you get off the ground?”

“Sir William. And Michael Woodhaven III, Michael’s old man.”

“No.”

“Michael wrote to him about it. Let him know the Danforths were interested in investing. I think his father just wanted Michael to come back to America. Then of course Libby’s name came up and that was the golden wand. The Woodhavens believe she was the one that brought Michael back from the brink. So now Old Man Woodhaven is coming over next month to meet Sir William and take a look at the possible site for the airfield himself.”

Victoria ran a hand over his chest. “It sounds like the lot of you have thought it all out. Why haven’t you told me?”

“Who wants to talk business on a honeymoon?”

“So is that what you want? An airfield? A flying school? A mail service?”

He kissed her forehead. “What I want is to fly and to love you forever.”

She traced a pattern on his chin with her finger. “I’m all for that. Well then, since the rest of our life together is settled we can get straight back to the honeymoon.”

He began to kiss her again. “Absolutely wizard.”

Dear Lady Elizabeth:

I should not trouble you again except that I think you ought to be made aware of certain matters since you are the mistress of the Danforth family. Whilst tidying Mr. Harrison’s rooms in the castle just before the wedding I came across the rosary I have placed in this envelope. Only a day or two after, I was fixing Todd Turpin’s bed in the servants’ quarters and I discovered this crucifix under his pillow. What it all means, I can’t say. I leave that up to you and Sir William. However it does seem to me that Mr. Harrison is having an unhealthy influence on old Todd who is quite impressionable. I shall pray for them both. And for you and your husband that you may see clearly to do what is just and right in the eyes of Almighty God and His Son Jesus Christ. This has never been a household that favored the heathenish practices of the Pope’s church.

Your devoted servant

Norah

The landlady, Mrs. O’Rourke, always left her door ajar so she could see who went in and out. When Catherine arrived with her suitcase and prepared to wrestle it up the staircase to the second floor, Mrs. O’Rourke came out into the hallway.

“How are you, my dear?” she asked, smiling more brightly than she ever did. “How was your visit to England?”

“It was lovely, Mrs. O’Rourke, thank you.”

“There is a priest come to see you. He’s been here three times while you were gone. Showed up an hour ago. I said I didn’t know when you would be back. He told me it was urgent and that he’d sit and wait a bit in case you arrived today.”

Catherine put her suitcase on the floor. “A priest? What is his name?”

“Oh—I’m not good with names—Father something or other. I put him in your room—I hope that’s all right.”

“My room?”