The Hidden Years (68 page)

Certainly she had prepared for the baby's birth with a
vigour, an enthusiasm that had lightened his anxiety for her. Their
marriage could never be the kind of relationship he had once
idealistically hoped for, and if he could not love her with passion and
delight then he could at least cherish her and honour her both as his
wife and the mother of his children.

The outback life was a harsh one, with scant time for
introspection or idleness, and certainly he had never been tempted to
break his marriage vows even if he had had the opportunity to do so. He
had married Elaine thinking he was doing the right thing, for Woolonga,
for himself and for her. His father had hinted to him that she would
welcome the marriage, that she was in love with him, and he had only
discovered after they were married that this was not true, that she had
married him in obedience to her own father, and that if she loved any
man it was him and not her new husband.

It was nervousness and nothing more, a fear of her own
feelings, a fear of somehow revealing them, that made Liz ask as he
caught up with her, 'Have you come to England without your wife, Mr
McLaren? Doesn't she mind? I—'

'My wife is dead,' Lewis told her abruptly, and then,
seeing her face, apologised, 'I'm sorry. I was abrupt…'

'
You're
sorry.' Liz turned a white,
strained face towards the hills, unable to bring herself to look
directly at him. 'I'm the one who should apologise,' she said huskily.
'I had no idea… Vic mentioned in his letters that you were
married. He never…'

Was that why he had come to England—to try and
forget? He must have loved her very much. What had she been like? Tall,
and sun-bronzed with a wild mane of hair…?

'I didn't love her. I never loved her… I should
never have married her.'

The quiet, slow words ran through her like a shock. When
she looked at him he was standing motionless, his profile carved
against the blue arc of the sky. She hadn't realised until now how tall
he was… but then she hadn't stood so close to him the last
time they had met.

Silly, trivial thoughts passed through her head, like how
well the tweed jacket he was wearing fitted him, and how very male he
looked, how full of life and vitality. She liked the way his hair grew
on his scalp and against the tanned, taut column of his
throat…

'She killed herself… took her own life and the
life of our child…'

Again his voice was quiet and slow, the words enunciated
carefully as though they were unfamiliar to him, as though he had never
said them before, and she knew instinctively that he had
not… that she was the first person to whom he had unburdened
himself, to whom he had talked of the terrible tragedy which had
blighted his life.

'I blame myself…' He wasn't looking at her now.
'I should have, seen, should have known…'

Steadily Liz sat down on the grass and patted the earth
beside her, inviting him to join her as she asked softly, 'Tell me
about her…'

Once, the old Liz, the Liz with whom she was familiar,
would have shrunk from making such an invitation, from prying into the
life of another human being, from witnessing his anguish and pain, but
suddenly she was a new Liz, a different Liz, a Liz who saw beyond her
own fears and needs and who reached out instinctively to offer him the
succour she knew he wanted.

He sat down beside her and started to talk, slowly,
hesitantly at first, leaving nothing out, looking directly into her
eyes now and again as he told her of his guilt for his unwitting
neglect of his wife, his complacency in believing that she was content,
his culpability in assuming he had the right to decide what was best
for her.

'I thought when Alistair was conceived that she was happy.
She seemed to be… She was anxious, of course, during her
pregnancy—we all were, after her earlier miscarriage. I
wanted her to have the best medical care, and so, three months before
Alistair was due, I flew her down to Melbourne. She had an aunt there,
and I visited her as often as I could. She seemed to thrive in the
city— she seemed to be so happy. I thought…' He
swallowed.

'She had a long and difficult labour, but once Alistair
was born… She seemed to worship him. I felt quite jealous at
times—she would barely let me near him…

'When Alistair was a month old I took them both home to
Woolonga. At first everything seemed all right, but then gradually
Elaine seemed to become more and more depressed. I wanted her to
consult our doctor but she wouldn't. She said she missed Melbourne, so
I promised her that we'd go there for Christmas, but when Alistair was
six weeks old and I was out mustering, she picked him up and carried
him out to the creek. We'd dammed it to make a pool that we used for
bathing before we had a proper pool installed.

'We think she must have just walked right into it holding
the baby, because when we found them they were still
together…' His voice broke, and Liz felt her eyes sting with
sympathetic, helpless tears.

'She'd left me a note, saying that since I'd stolen her
child and killed it she was now stealing and killing mine…'

She could hear the tears in his voice and moved
instinctively towards him, putting her arms around him as naturally as
though she had been doing it all her life, cradling him to her while he
wept, knowing that somehow or other fate had decreed for both of them
this meeting place in their lives, this coming together and bonding,
and that no matter how hard she had tried she would have been powerless
to avoid it.

It was as though somewhere inside her a missing piece had
suddenly slid into place, setting in motion the eternal, soundless
music to which the whole universe moved… as though she had
found a half of herself which had previously been lost, as though for
the first time in her life she was truly complete.

She had known love before: the love of a child for her
parents and her family, the love of a mother for her
child—she had even thought she had known love for Kit,
however unwise and foolish that love had been—but as she held
Lewis to her and shared the outpouring of his grief and guilt for the
deaths of his wife and child, as she listened to his words of
contrition, pain and anger, she knew that she had never truly known
before what love was.

But, even in the moment when she acknowledged that
somehow, somewhere, by some alchemy she could not begin to understand,
fate had brought her face to face with this very special man, she also
knew that they could not be together. Her course through life was
already set. She had commitments, had made promises she could not
break, had loyalties, responsibilities, duties, all of which weighed
far heavier in the scales of life and conscience than her love for
Lewis.

When Lewis raised his head and looked at her, the look he
gave her only confirmed what she already knew.

'How has this happened?' he asked her tenderly. 'How have
we managed to find one another like this? Oh, my love, when I think how
easily we might not have met…'

'Perhaps it would have been better if we had not,' Liz
told him quietly.

For a moment he was very still.

'You can't mean that, and don't try to tell me that you
don't feel it too… That you don't
know
,
as I know…'

She had to stop him. To allow him to go on would only add
to the pain they were both going to suffer.

'I'm married,' she reminded him huskily. 'I have a
husband… a son…'

'You're mine,' Lewis contradicted her flatly. 'You're
mine, Liz, now and throughout eternity. I think I knew it the first
time I saw you… Why do you think I've been hanging around
here? Trying to tell myself I'm acting like a fool, and yet knowing
nothing on this earth could make me leave. I
knew
you'd be here today. Your shepherd told me.

'Oh, God, Liz, after everything that's happened,
everything that my life has been, I still can't believe I've been lucky
enough to find you. Don't try to send me away, because I won't go, and
don't try to tell me that you love Edward either,' he challenged her
flatly, 'because I won't believe you. Not now!'

'But I
do
love him,' Liz told him
sadly. And it was true. She did love Edward, not as she might love a
man, not in the way she now knew that a woman
did
love the one man who was her chosen mate, out of instinct and desire.
No, her love for Edward was a love born of necessity, both his and her
own. He had helped her when she needed help and she would never allow
herself to forget that.

'Liz, please.'

She turned her head automatically, unable to resist the
plea in his voice.

Because they were still sitting down on the grass the
disparity in their heights was not as noticeable, so that when she
looked at him her gaze could easily meet the steady green regard of his.

The flesh round his eyes burned from long hours in the hot
outback sunshine, was fanned with small lines, the jut of his
cheekbones hard and planed.

The hand he lifted to cover hers was tanned and calloused,
enveloping hers completely. He had removed his jacket and pushed up the
sleeves of his shirt and her stomach clenched on a dangerous ache of
need as she looked at the muscled hardness of his forearm and knew
without knowing how she came by the knowledge that to be held by those
arms, to be caressed by his hands, to be a part of his body, would
touch her so completely and so wholly that if once she allowed him to
love her she would never want to send him away.

And yet even as she held up her hand in a mute appeal to
him to stop what they had started now, before it went any further, she
couldn't help focusing on his mouth, watching the movement of his lips
as he formed words her outer ear didn't hear, because all her senses
were absorbed in taking into herself as much of the essence of him as
she could so that it could be stored deep within her memory, a panacea
for the days, the months, the years ahead when those memories of him
would be all she had to sustain her.

'Liz, my darling one… Don't deny our love.'

She heard the words, felt their agony, their desire, felt
her heart seize in unbearable pain and her eyes fill with tears as his
hands lifted to her shoulders and held her, so gently, so lightly that
she could quite easily have broken away, could quite easily have
avoided the downward descent of his mouth. And yet for some reason she
had no will to move.

When he kissed her it was with tenderness and joy, like a
man worshipping at a shrine he had long believed denied to him. Beneath
his her mouth yielded helplessly to her need. The kiss deepened, his
arms enfolding her so that she was wrapped in tenderness and love.

It would be the easiest thing now to open the doors to the
physical urgency of their love, to give herself to him here on the
downs beneath the clean wind-washed sky…

No, not the easiest thing… the most necessary,
precious and right thing; but even as her rebellious heart demanded to
know why she should not after all have this brief time of happiness, of
love, her conscience, her upbringing, her deep and strong sense of
loyalty were already closing the door on her need. She might not be
able to deny the love in her heart—that was
impossible—but she couldn't betray Edward, David and all that
their lives together were: each month and year, carefully built and
nurtured, so that she had believed she had built their marriage into
something strong and sturdy enough to withstand even the most violent
of storms. No, she couldn't do that…

Not even for this wonderful, special man, whom she knew
now she would love beyond life and time.

As she eased herself away from him, she touched his face
lingeringly, her emotions showing plainly in her eyes as she told him
quietly, 'I can't, Lewis. I can't betray Edward…'

He looked at her for a long time, still holding her, so
that she could feel their pulses beating in unison, as though their
bodies were already one.

'No,' he said despairingly. 'But can you betray our love?
And if you stay with him that is what you will be doing. Leave him,
Liz, come back to Australia with me…'

'I can't—'

'If you're thinking of your son, of David—he
will come too.'

She shook her head. 'Edward would never let me take him,
and I can't leave them, Lewis. Either of them. They need me…'

'
I
need you,' he told her. '
I
need you, Liz. Oh, God… you don't know how much I need you.'

She felt tears sting her eyes… How could she
deny him, when his need, his love were her own? But she had to. She had
no choice. She had chosen her path when she married Edward and she must
stick to it.

'I must go,' she told him quietly, standing up. 'The
shepherd will be wondering where I am. Please don't come with me,
Lewis…'

'I'm not giving up,' he told her fiercely. 'I'll never
give up, Liz. Never.'

As she climbed the rest of the hill she didn't dare turn
around. Not even when she heard the sound of a car engine firing, and
knew that he had gone.

It was only when she reached the top of the hill that she
realised she was crying.

'Are
you all right, Liz?'

She forced herself to smile at Colin Hedley, her mill
manager. The two of them had spent the morning going over the accounts,
and this afternoon she had a meeting with a buyer from one of the
larger London stores. She hadn't slept through one night for the last
three weeks. Since the day she had met Lewis McLaren out on the hill.

He was still staying in the village. She hadn't seen him.
He had called at the house a couple of times', but she had given
Chivers instructions that she didn't want to see him. Didn't want to
see him? A wan smile crossed her face. If only that were true.