One Night for Love (19 page)

Wilma would not walk too close to the water’s edge as the salt from the sea would make her skin rough and coarsen her hair. And they must stroll very slowly across
the sand for fear of getting some of it inside their shoes. When they reached a sheltered spot suitable for the picnic tea and servants had arrived with blankets and baskets, the gentlemen were set the task—by Wilma—of building what amounted to a tent with the blankets so that they would be shielded from the wind and the ruinous airs off the sea. When they sat down, they could not see the water—or even the sand.

They might as well have stayed indoors, Lily thought.

The gentlemen had been having a far better time of it. They had walked briskly to the end of the beach and back before the ladies met them halfway. And they had done their walking down close to the water’s edge, where the gulls were flying and the wind was blowing its hardest. There had been much merry laughter from their group. Lily wished she might have walked with them.

They all sat down to tea, but as soon as the edge had been taken from their appetites, some of the younger cousins—Hal and his brothers Richard and William—were eager to be off exploring again. William winked at Miranda, who was about his own age, and beckoned, and Miranda looked anxiously at her mama, who was busy holding two glasses while her son Ralph, Viscount Sterne, filled them with wine. Then Miranda looked uncertainly at Lily.

“I long to escape too,” Lily whispered, all her good intentions, which she had kept faithfully for a day and a half, forgotten. Neville, with Elizabeth and the Duke of Portfrey, was listening politely to a monologue that his Aunt Mary had been delivering for the past five minutes or longer.

And so within moments they were off, the two of them, with the young gentlemen, running down the beach until one more step would have soaked their shoes.

“I would wager the water is cold enough to give one a heart seizure at this time of year,” Richard said.

“No,” said Lily, who was accustomed to bathing in mountain streams at all seasons of the year except the dead of winter. “It would be refreshing. Oh, the wind feels wonderful.” She lifted her face to it and to the sunshine.

“Sea bathing is all the crack in the fashionable resorts,” Hal said. “But not here, more is the pity, and not in May. I did it at Brighton last year with the Porters.”

“I would die before I would set a toe in sea water,” Miranda said. “It would quite shrivel up the skin, I daresay.”

Lily laughed. “It is just water, though not to be drunk, of course, because of the salt.” And without even thinking of what she did, she shook off her shoes and peeled off her stockings, carried them in one hand while lifting her skirt with the other, and waded into the water until it was halfway to her knees.

Miranda giggled and the young gentlemen hooted with glee.

“It
is
cold,” Lily said, laughing even more gaily. “It is lovely. Oh, do try it.”

Richard came next and then Hal and then William. Finally even Miranda was persuaded to remove her shoes and stockings and step gingerly into the water almost up to her ankles. She laughed with fear and excitement.

“Oh, Lily,” she cried, “you are so much
fun.
”

“Wilma is an old fuddy-duddy,” Richard remarked with marvelous lack of respect for his elders. “And Lauren and Gwen always have to remember that they are ladies.”

They all waded through the water, carrying their shoes and stockings, until they came to the great rock and Lily decided that a rock in just such a position and built in just such a way must have been placed there to be climbed. She scrambled to the top and sat up there, her arms clasped
about her knees, her head tipped back. She could feel her hem heavy and wet from the sea water, but it would dry soon enough. It was quite impossible, she thought, to remain for long in low spirits when one could feel the sun and the air on one’s face and hear waves rolling their way to shore and gulls screaming overhead. She took off her bonnet and set it down beside her with her shoes and stockings. She felt even better.

The other four had climbed up after her and were seated together a little below her, talking and laughing among themselves. Lily forgot them and enjoyed the familiar feeling of being alone with the universe. She had always had the gift—necessary when there had been so little actual privacy in her life—of being able to shut herself off from crowds.

“Miranda
!”

The voice, loud and shocked, made Lily jump and brought her back to her surroundings. Aunt Theodora had appeared at the base of the rock with Elizabeth and Aunt Mary. “Put your shoes and stockings and your bonnet and gloves back on
this instant
. And get down from there! Gracious me, your
hem
is wet. Have you been
wading
? You shocking, vulgar, disobedient girl. A
true lady
would never so much as dream of—” But she had looked upward and spied Lily, who was considerably more disheveled than her daughter.

Elizabeth clucked her tongue and laughed. “How provokingly clever of Lily and Miranda,” she said. “They are doing what all of us have been secretly longing to do and are enjoying the sunshine and the sea air—and even the sea.”

But her attempt to smooth over the awkwardness of the situation did not quite succeed. The whole party had come into view, Aunt Theodora had turned very red, and Miranda had burst into tears. Aunt Mary was assuring everyone
in agitated accents that she dared say her sons were entirely to blame. They were such high-spirited lads. Hal was reminding her indignantly that at the age of one-and-twenty he no longer appreciated being referred to as a lad.

Lily quietly pulled on her stockings and shoes and tied the ribbons of her new bonnet beneath her chin and turned to descend carefully back to the beach. Wilma was loudly complaining about something and Gwendoline was telling her not to be tiresome. The marquess was asking in a deliberately languid voice if anyone had heard about storms in teacups and Pauline choked on a laugh. A pair of strong arms lifted Lily down when she was still carefully picking her footholds.

He turned her and smiled at her, his hands still at her waist. “I had such a vivid memory, seeing you up there,” he said, “of watching you sitting on an outcropping of rock, looking about at the hills of Portugal.” But his smile faded even before he had finished speaking. “I am sorry. It was just before your father died.”

And just hours before their wedding. How he must regret that any of it had ever happened. How
she
regretted it.

Everyone had begun walking back toward the valley and the path up to the house amid a general atmosphere of discontent and awkwardness. Lily and Neville fell into step a short distance behind.

“I am sorry,” she said.

“No,” he told her firmly. “No, you must not be, Lily. You must not always be sorry. You must live your life your way.”

“But I got Miranda into trouble,” she said. “I did not think.”

“I will have a word with Aunt Theodora,” he told her, chuckling. “It was no very great mischief, you know.”

“No,” she said, “
I
will have a word with her. You must not always be protecting me. I am not a child.”

“Lily,” he said softly. “This is not working well, is it? Let us take a little time for ourselves, shall we? Let me show you the cottage.”

“The one in the valley?” she asked him.

He nodded. “My private retreat. My haven of peace and tranquility. I’ll take you there.”

He took her hand in his and laced his fingers with hers. He did not care that someone ahead of them might look back. They were married, after all.

“The cottage is your own, then?” she asked him. “It is very pretty.”

“My grandmother was a painter,” he explained. “She liked to be on her own, painting. My grandfather had the cottage built for her on surely the loveliest spot of the whole estate. It is furnished, and it is cleaned and aired once a month. It is there for all of us to use and enjoy, though I believe it has come to be considered my own special place. I like to be alone and quiet too at times.”

She smiled at him. Obviously such antisocial needs were quite understandable to her.

“It was the one thing I found hard about military life,” he said. “The lack of privacy. You must have felt it too, Lily. And yet there was something about you … I used to notice, you know, that you often went off on your own, though never beyond your father’s sight. You used to sit or stand alone, doing nothing except gazing about you. I always used to imagine that you had discovered a world that was closed to me and to almost everyone else. Had you?”

“There are some places,” she said, “that seem more specially graced than others. Places where one feels … God, I suppose. I have never been able to feel the presence of God inside a church. Rather, I feel closed in there, oppressed,
as I do in many buildings. But there are places of unusual beauty and peace and … holiness. They are rare, though. I did not have a valley like yours when I was growing up, or a waterfall or pool or cottage. And I did not find many of those places with the regiment, though there were some. I learned to—to …”

“To what?” He bent his head closer to hers. He had often talked with Lily in the past, sometimes for an hour or more at a time. They had always been comfortable with each other despite the differences in their gender and stations. He had felt that he knew her well. But he had never asked her about her private world, only observed it. There were depths to her character that were still unknown to him. There was great beauty there, he suspected, and wisdom too despite her youth and lack of formal education. There was nothing shallow about his Lily.

“I do not know how to say it,” she said. “I learned to be still and to stop doing and listening and even thinking. I learned
to be
. I learned that almost any place can be one of those special places if I allowed it to be. Perhaps I learned to find the place within myself.”

He gazed down at her—pretty, dainty Lily in her new primrose dress and pelisse and straw bonnet. The serenity he had always observed in her had an explanation, then. She had discovered in her short, difficult life what not many people discovered in a whole lifetime, he suspected. He had not progressed as far himself though he knew the value of solitude and silence. He wondered if Lily’s ability to find a place within, simply to
be
, as she had put it, had helped her endure her ordeal in Spain. But he would not ask her about that. He could not even bear to think about it.

They had reached the valley and walked up the path toward the cottage and the pool at the base of the waterfall. Everyone else had already disappeared up the hill and in among the trees. They stopped by unspoken assent when
they were a short distance away and feasted their eyes on the beauty of the scene and their ears on the soothing sound of rushing water.

“Ah, yes,” she said at last with a sigh, “this is one of those places. I can understand why you come here.”

He had noticed that she had not called him by any name since her return even though he had reminded her that she was his wife and might use his given name. He longed to hear it on her lips again. He could remember how it had sounded like the most intimate endearment on their wedding night. But he could not, would not press the point with her. He must give her time.

“Come and see the cottage,” he said. It occurred to him suddenly with some surprise that he had never come here with Lauren, or not at least since they were children.

There were just two rooms, both cozily furnished and both possessing fireplaces with logs piled beside them in readiness for a chilly day—or night. He occasionally spent a night here. He had done it sometimes during the past year or so, when he had been remembering his life with the Ninety-fifth and his years in the Peninsula and had been restless with a nameless yearning.

No, not nameless. He had yearned here for Lily, whom he had grown gradually to love during the years he had known her, though that love had bloomed into sexual passion only a short time before its final glorious flowering the night before he believed she’d died.

He had tried not to think of Lily at Newbury. There he had tried to think only of his new life, the life of duty for which he had been raised and educated, the life that included Lauren. He had come to the cottage to do his remembering and his leftover mourning.

It was still strange to realize that Lily had
not
died. That she was here. Now.

She peered into the bedchamber, but it was the other room that appeared to fascinate her more. There were chairs, a table, books, paper, quill pens and ink—and a view directly over the pool and the waterfall. He liked to sit here, reading or writing. He also liked to sit and merely gaze. Perhaps it was what she called
being
.

“You read here,” she said, picking up one of the books after taking off her bonnet and setting it down on one of the chairs. “You learn about other worlds and other minds. And you can go back and read them again and again.”

“Yes,” he said.

“And sometimes you write down your own thoughts,” she said, running a finger along one of the quill pens. “And you can come back and read them and remember what you thought or how you felt about something.”