by Mary Balogh
She turned sharply away from him even though she realized that he was speaking again, and darted along the riverbank and up the rocks that took her almost to the top of the falls. She stood on the top one, looking out across the fast-flowing water that rushed and bubbled downward over the steep, rocky slope to the level below. She deliberately did not turn her head, though she knew that he was still there. She wanted him to go away.
Fortunately he did not try to come after her.
Luke would have understood her explanation about her painting, she thought. He might not have approved of it, and he might well still have made his remark about witches, but he would have understood. And if he had not, he would merely have shrugged and suggested that perhaps it was time for breakfast. He would not have raved. More important, he would not have condescended. Luke treated her as if she were a real person.
And Ashley. Ashley had asked her to dance even though he knew very well she could not hear music. But she did not want to think about Ashley. Not now.
Lord Powell, she could see though she did not turn her head, had moved from in front of her easel and had gone to stand at the foot of the rock pile. She willed him not to come up. She needed to recover from her hurt before she could smile at him again. He needed to see her again as she had been for the past five days before he said more. They both needed time.
Go away, she told him silently, without looking at him. Please go away.
And finally he went. She had the feeling that he had said something first, but she had no curiosity to know what.
It was very clear to her, even clearer than it had been before, that her life would change completely on her marriage. Even if the wedding was not to take place immediately, even if there was still time here alone with Luke and Anna and the children before it, she must accept the fact that life was to change, she told herself. She must prepare for it. There must be no scenes like this after her marriage. None.
She had not really expected that the changes would have to be so very sweeping. Much would have to go. This freedom, this communion with the natural world around her. Her solitary wanderings. Her painting. Everything that she had held most dear all her life. Everything that had given her life meaning and texture. It was what was called growing up, she supposed. And it was probably about time. Anna lived very well within the bounds of convention and propriety. So did Agnes and Charlotte and Doris. So did every other woman of her acquaintance. It could be done. It would be done, even if she did have a handicap that made her situation not quite comparable to theirs.
But should it be done? she wondered. Must she sacrifice herself in order to conform, in order to achieve the respectability and relative independence of marriage? Was it in the nature of womanhood that one had to amputate oneself for the sake of a man? She rather thought it must be.
Emily clenched her hands at her sides, closed her eyes, and lifted her face to the morning sun. Yes, she would change from this moment on. Everything from the past would be gone, and she would accept the challenge of the future. She would fit in. She would be normal. She would learn to smile and nod and endlessly read lips.
But everything would be gone . . .
Ashley . . .
Even as she thought his name, before she could push it firmly away from her, she felt him. He was there. Not just at Bowden. He was there, here, close by, watching her. She had but to open her eyes and turn her head to see him.
For a few moments she hesitated. If she did not look, he would perhaps go away. And there would be an end to it. For once she left the falls, she knew, she must never come back. In many more ways than one, she must never come back. Ashley would be gone. Gone forever, even though she would see him at the house over the coming days, with his wife and his son.
And so this was the end. Or not quite. There was this now, this final moment. And she could not resist it. She was not yet strong enough in her new commitment. She opened her eyes and turned her head and looked at him.
He was dressed for riding, with the old careless elegance that had always characterized him. His long dark hair, unpowdered, was caught at the back of his neck with a black ribbon. His three-cornered hat was in one hand. He was leaning lazily against a tree, smiling at her.
And yet she was aware that beneath the relaxed, careless stance was the haggard weariness that had translated itself into frenzied gaiety the night before. His thin, haunted body pretended to a well-being this morning that might have fooled everyone but Emily.
She was not fooled for a moment.
6
SHE did not move. She stayed where she was, unsmiling. But there was nothing unwelcoming in her stance either. She merely looked at him.
He remembered then that the first time he had met her here he had been alone, hurrying toward this place to find solitude and peace. But she had been here before him. And had bounded down the rocks to take him by the hand and lead him back up to join her. They had sat side by side on the flat rock and she had asked him to talk to her—yes, she had, even though she had not been able to ask in words. And so he had talked.
There was an ache of something in the memory—of a friendship lost.
She did not come down now. Or invite him to join her. But she did not tell him to go away either, as she had just told Powell. He pushed his shoulder away from the tree and lessened the distance between them. He stopped at the foot of the rock pile.
“I should have known I would find you here,” he said. “Where else would you be so early on a lovely spring morning?”
But she was not to be amused. Her eyes, which watched him unwaveringly, gained depth, but she still did not smile.
“Emmy,” he said, reaching up one hand, “come down.”
But he wanted to go up to her. How many hours had they spent sitting together on that rock while he talked and talked, pouring out his heart to her? And yet, strangely, those monologues had felt more like conversation. Though silent, she had seemed like a participant. He longed for her friendship again. But she was no longer a child. Was friendship with this woman possible?
It was as if she had read his mind. She shook her head slowly and beckoned once—and then touched the fingers of her beckoning hand to her heart.
He felt a fluttering of memory. It had been one of their secret signals. Not just Yes, please join me, but Yes, do join me. I want your company. Without that extra sign they knew that the other was just being polite and therefore had not intruded—not that that had happened more than once or twice in the year they had known each other.
He wondered now if she remembered—if the gesture had been conscious.
He must not try to recapture the past, he told himself. She was a woman with a life of her own, not a child willing and even eager to listen while he unburdened himself of all his troubles. He grinned at her as he strode quickly up to stand beside her. “He said he would go back to the house and perhaps see you at breakfast,” he told her. “He said that the two of you must talk further. Did you wonder what he was saying, Emmy, when you would not turn your head? ’Twas nothing more significant than that.”
She looked down at her hands for a moment and then back at him.
“I did not hear it all,” he said. “You must not fear that I was eavesdropping. Was it a quarrel, Emmy?”
She did not answer him.
“Do you wish to talk about it?” he asked, smiling at her. He meant what he said. She could tell him if she would. Emmy had always been able to make herself understood to him—on some things at least. But then, that had been a long time ago. “As to an old friend, Emmy? As to a brother?”
The thought of listening sympathetically to someone else’s concerns, to her concerns, was strangely seductive. To be able to give back a little of what she had once given him so unstintingly. To forget for a few moments about his own concerns.
Her eyes went beyond him, down the slope, and back to him again. S
he raised her eyebrows.
He turned his head and looked. “The painting?” he said. “You quarreled over the painting? He did not like it? What a scoundrel he was if he said so. No gentleman would do so, Emmy. Shall I go down there and give you my judgment?”
But she caught at his arm and shook her head, and then dropped her hand quickly. He caught the look in her eye. It was one of dismay, even fear. She was afraid to let him see the painting?
She pointed in the direction of the house and then at herself. She indicated the whole of herself with hands sweeping downward from her head. And she took a step back so that he could have a good look at her. She looked at him ruefully. The truth was, he supposed, that if she had been anyone else but Emmy he might have been almost shocked. Her body was softly and revealingly feminine beneath the loose dress. Her legs were bare to well above the ankles. Her hair was displayed as no woman’s hair should be except to her husband in the privacy of their own bedchamber.
“He objected?” He chuckled. “I cannot understand why, Emmy. He must be a fool. Last evening, before I even recognized you, I was knocked over by your beauty. But this morning you are many times lovelier. Today you are yourself. Does he not know you, Emmy? Does he know only last evening’s lovely woman?”
She looked lovelier still with a blush of color in her cheeks. It was such a relief to him this morning to see that she was still the old Emmy, a creature far more suited to the wild than to a ballroom—though he really had been dazzled by her beauty there last evening before he knew it was she. But she was not as other women were. To try to make her so would only emphasize her handicap and make her feel both unhappy and inadequate. She was different, but she was not inferior. Did none of them understand that? Not even Anna—or Luke? But what did he know of her now? He had not seen or thought about her for seven years. She had undoubtedly become a woman.
“You are to marry him, Emmy?” he asked. Powell certainly understood and was willing to live with her inability to hear and speak, Ashley reassured himself. It had probably been unfair to judge him on the displeasure he had shown a few minutes ago, apparently over what was on that canvas.
She nodded.
But the man had objected to her appearance too; she had just indicated so. Yet this was Emmy, far more surely than that dazzling beauty of last evening. Powell’s disapproval did not bode well.
“You love him, little fawn?” It saddened him that the old name no longer suited her.
She would not answer him. Her feelings for her betrothed were none of his business, of course. He was a stranger to her—as she was to him. They stood there for several moments, looking at each other. He realized that he was feeling more relaxed than he had felt for days. Weeks. Months. There was something about Emmy . . . There had always been something about her.
You, she said then, holding both hands palm up and beckoning quickly with her fingers—the old gesture. Tell me about you. It was no mere polite inquiry. He could see the light of real interest and sympathy in her eyes. The temptation to do what he had done all those years ago was strong in him. He longed to open his heart, to pour out everything to her. Everything. Emmy had always understood him. He had been aware that she did not see every word that he spoke. He was never sure quite how many she had missed. But she had always understood him.
With one hand she indicated the edge of the rock where it protruded over the water. She seated herself there without waiting for his comment, and very briefly dangled one bare foot in the water. As he lowered himself beside her, she drew up her knees, clasped her arms about them, then rested one cheek on them, so that she could watch him.
Memory rushed at him again. She looked once more almost like the girl she had been. He felt almost like the very young man he had been.
“I went to India for the challenge,” he said. “I went to work to make my fortune. But most of all I went to acquire a sense of my own worth. I wanted to prove that I could make my own way in the world. You remember all this, Emmy.”
Yes. She needed neither to nod nor to smile. Yes, she told him, she remembered.
“I did it all,” he said. “’Twas like a dream come true. I was very happy. There was the war with France, of course, and it touched us in India. There was always danger and the threat of danger. But somehow it merely added to the challenge, the exhilaration. I had—I have—some close friends in the military.” Major Roderick Cunningham, for example, who had come to fetch him . . .
She gazed at him and then invited him with those beckoning fingers to tell her more. She knew there was more.
“And then I met Alice,” he said. From the way he had worded it, he had made it seem as if meeting her had put an end to the happiness, the exhilaration. “Her father, Sir Alexander Kersey, was my superior in the company. She was newly arrived in India—she had been at home with her brother until he died suddenly. I met her when I was in the middle of a raging fever. My valet had sent word to Kersey, and when I came to myself from the delirium, she was cooling my face with a damp cloth. She tended me tirelessly for a number of weeks, her old nurse always hovering in the background. She was exquisitely lovely, Emmy—small, dainty, dark, soft-spoken. Is it any wonder I tumbled head over ears in love with her?”
No, she told him with large, calm eyes and a half smile. He knew from the intentness of her gaze that she had read every word from his lips. No, it was quite understandable.
Perfectly understandable. Alice had been gentle and patient. She had been deeply grieving for her dead brother. She had responded to his sympathies and his attentions. She had fallen in love with him. And so they had married.
“And so we married, Emmy,” he said, “on a few weeks’ acquaintance, during which time I knew her as a nurse and she knew me as a patient. We set about living happily ever after.”
She reached across and touched his hand for a moment. Perhaps something of the bitterness in his voice must be visible in his face, he thought. Why are you not happy? her searching eyes and her puzzled frown asked him. Why have you come home? She did not need words or even gestures. He had never known anyone with as expressive a face as Emmy’s.
“Her father died,” he said, “and so through my wife I inherited property and another vast fortune. And then there was Thomas . . . Perhaps the challenge went, Emmy. Perhaps I was homesick and wanted to return to England. After all, I always said I would come back when I made my fortune—to settle on my own land, to live in contentment with my own family.”
She knew it was not as simple as that. She told him with her steady, intelligent eyes that she knew something was wrong, that she knew he was in pain even if she did not understand its source. Perhaps she had not even understood all he had told her. But she had sifted out essentials. She knew he had not told all.
He would tell her no more. She was a woman now with a life of her own to live. With a suitor of her own—and some sort of quarrel to patch up, it seemed. She did not need the burdens of a virtual stranger. Besides, he was no longer that boy who had selfishly loaded all his troubles onto the shoulders of a willing listener. He had learned to bear his burdens alone. Though he had come running back to Bowden, back to Luke, even back to Emmy, he had known even before his arrival that none of them could help him—partly because he would not allow any of them to do so. He was a man for whom self-reliance had been learned the hard way.
He looked over his shoulder down at her easel and then back at her. He grinned.
“May I see the painting?” he asked. “I confess myself curious, Emmy.”
She bit her lip and flushed again. She raised her cheek from her knees.
“’Tis so very dreadful?” he asked.
He could see her hesitation. She looked downright embarrassed.
“I’ll not insist,” he said, laughing. “Or keep you from your solitude, Emmy. I’ll take myself off back to the house. Perhaps I will have breakfast with Powell.”
&n
bsp; But she relented then and shook her head and bounded to her feet to move lightly past him and down the rocks to lead the way to her easel. She turned to watch with wide and wary eyes as he approached.
It was not anything he might have expected. Indeed, it was difficult to know what it was she had painted. There were greens and browns and blues, all bright. Her colors appeared to have been thrown at the canvas rather than smoothed on. He could see bold brush strokes moving up through the paint in wild swirls that drew the eye upward to where they all almost converged. He had seen nothing like it before. He could almost sympathize with Powell’s frown. Except that there was something he could see. Whatever it was she had painted, she had done it with passionate conviction. It was a painting that pulsed with feeling. It spoke—though he could not understand the language.
“Emmy?” He looked at her curiously. “Explain, if you will. I can feel the painting, if that makes sense, but I cannot understand it.”
Oh, she told him with eyes and hands, and he knew that she was spilling over with eagerness to tell him what the painting was all about. She showed him the trees around them and the sky above and stretched her arms and her hands and her fingers upward. Her head tipped back and her eyes closed. There was a look of near agony, near ecstasy, on her face. Her arms moved in small spirals.
He looked back at the canvas. Yes. Ah yes, he could see it now, though it was unlike any other painting he had ever seen. It was like music. Wild, passionate music that exalted the spirit. He could imagine himself lying on the forest floor and gazing heavenward to that point where tree trunks and branches reached up and met the sky and merged with it. Emmy had seen that in her mind? And somehow reproduced it on canvas? She had been that close to—to what? To understanding the meaning of it all? He looked back at her, intrigued, almost awed. The wary look had intensified in her eyes.
