by Mary Balogh
The visit was rather longer than it might have been. Soon after Mrs. Smith had returned from the kitchen with the tea tray, Major Cunningham remarked on the beauty of the garden behind the house, visible through the window, and asked her if she would be so good as to show it to him. She rose silently and led the way without inviting either Anna or Emily to join them.
Anna was telling Mr. Binchley about Bowden Abbey. Emily watched their conversation, though she used Anna’s presence as an excuse to allow her attention to wander. She also watched the two in the garden. She hoped Major Cunningham had not taken a fancy to Katherine Smith, that he did not imagine that because she lived here with her father in genteel poverty she was therefore fair game for seduction. The man made her flesh crawl.
“—did not dream you would come here,” Katherine Smith was saying. “And to Penshurst instead of here.” The sun was on her face, making it very easy, despite the distance, to read her lips.
The major had his back to Emily.
“How can you be his friend?” Mrs. Smith asked. Her face was still pale. Her eyes watched him intently. “Does he know?”
Major Cunningham made a gesture about the garden with one arm.
“They cannot hear,” she said. “The window is closed.” But she turned her head away and they strolled together about the carefully plotted flower beds.
Emily watched, the sitting room and its occupants forgotten. Katherine Smith and Major Cunningham knew each other. How peculiar that they had allowed Anna to present them to each other as strangers. And then the major was facing toward the window.
“’Twere better that you asked no questions,” he said. “’Twere better that you know nothing. They died acc—” He turned his head away.
Accidentally? Who had died accidentally? They moved out of sight and at the same moment Anna got to her feet and was taking her leave of Mr. Binchley. Emily did likewise, and within a very few minutes they were continuing on their way toward the village. Anna had promised Eric, after asking Mrs. Smith’s permission, that on their return journey they would call for him and he might come to Penshurst to play with the children.
Emily watched Major Cunningham comment to Anna on the charm of the cottage and the hospitality of its occupants, but she did not try to follow the conversation.
Mrs. Smith had asked him why he had come to Penshurst instead of to the cottage. How can you be his friend? His? Ashley’s? Does he know? Know what? And who had died accidentally? Why was it better for Mrs. Smith to know nothing? Major Cunningham had been in India and had become Ashley’s friend there. He had been there presumably when Ashley’s wife and son died. They had died accidentally. What was it that Ashley might or might not know? That his friend also knew Katherine Smith?
But if they knew each other, why had they been careful not to acknowledge the acquaintance to her and Anna?
Emily’s mind puzzled over the questions for the next hour, while they looked around the church and the churchyard, talked with the rector and his wife, who came out to the gate of the rectory to bid them a good morning, and purchased a few items from the village shop.
It was a relief to Emily finally to be on their way back home. When they reached the cottage and Eric came tripping out to meet them, Emily walked with him, holding his hand while he talked without pause, and allowed Major Cunningham to walk on ahead with Anna.
• • •
“Thank you.” Ashley held out his right hand to Major Cunningham. “You are a true friend, Rod. I know that a stroll to the village and a call at a neighbor’s cottage is not the way you might have expected to spend your first full morning here. But ’tis a relief to me to know that she had the company this morning not only of my sister-in-law, but also of a man well able to defend them both from any danger that might have presented itself.”
The major shook his hand, and they both stood looking out of the library window at Emily, who was patiently throwing a ball alternately to George and Eric and watching them catch it perhaps twice out of every ten attempts.
“’Twas my pleasure,” the major said. “I had a lovely lady on each arm. What more could any man ask of life?”
Ashley laughed.
“She means a great deal to you,” his friend said quietly.
“Yes.” Ashley was picturing her playing thus with her own children. His. Theirs. It was a thought that warmed him and troubled him.
“You are ready to live again, Ash. I can see it,” the major said. “Did you learn any answers from your morning visits? Did you discover what happened yesterday?”
“No,” Ashley said. “No to your second question. Yes to the first. There were some facts I needed to know. Some things from the past. Some things I needed to know if I am ever to let go of the past and move on into the future. Now I know. But the fact remains, of course, that somehow they were at home when they were not supposed to be there and that I was not there when I should have been. I might have saved them. That poor innocent baby! But I was busy satisfying my lust in the bed of a married woman.” He laughed harshly.
“There is always forgiveness,” the major said. “Even for the worst offenses, Ash. And there is always redemption. Yours is playing on the grass out there with those two little boys.”
Yes, he had come home looking for redemption, Ashley thought. From Emmy, though he had not known it at the time. But it was too simple an answer. And if he drew redemption from her, what would she gain in return? He had so little to offer beyond material things. He had nothing else to offer except a wounded soul.
“You need to marry her,” his friend said, “and have babies with her. But not here, Ash. You need to leave here, put behind you everything that would remind you of the late Lady Ashley. ’Twould not be fair to the new Lady Ashley to keep her here.”
Ashley drew a deep breath. Perhaps that was part of the problem, he thought. Perhaps he should go. Perhaps there could be happiness for both Emmy and himself if he left here, started somewhere else. And yet . . . And yet he had the deep inner conviction that this thing could not be run from. And that it should not be run from. What he would be running from was deep inside himself. He must confront it if there was to be a future. If there was to be Emmy.
“Sell Penshurst to me,” Major Cunningham said. “Sell it and go elsewhere and forget it.”
Ashley was so deeply immersed in his thoughts that it took a moment for his friend’s words to register on his consciousness. He turned his head and looked at him rather blankly.
“What?” he said. “You would buy Penshurst, Rod?”
The major looked rather embarrassed. “I like it,” he said. “And I have been giving serious thought to selling out of the army and settling at home. You know I am a gamer. I have amassed a tidy fortune and would as soon buy land with it as lose it all again at the tables. I like Penshurst. And it has occurred to me that I could do myself a favor and do my closest friend a favor at the same time by purchasing it.”
Ashley’s look was still rather blank. Roderick had come to Penshurst as his guest, and after a day he was offering to buy the place? “But it is not for sale,” he said.
The major shrugged. “I am rather impulsive,” he admitted. “I ought not to have said anything, Ash. Certainly not yet. But I will not change my mind. I am convinced of that. Think about it. And think about her.” He nodded in the direction of the window. “If you change your mind, we will talk business. I will make you a definite offer.”
Ashley laughed. “You are doing this purely out of friendship,” he said. “How extraordinary you are, Rod. You would regret it within a month—selling your commission, settling on an estate you do not know in a part of the country with which you are unfamiliar. And yet I know you would do it in a moment if I said yes. I value your friendship more highly than to say the word. Penshurst is not for sale.”
The major shrugged again. “I am going out riding,” he said
. “I want to explore this countryside, which is, as you have said, unfamiliar to me. Would you care to join me?”
“If you will forgive me, no,” Ashley said. “Luke and Anna have taken the other children out.”
“And you would not leave the Lady Emily unguarded,” his friend said. He chuckled. “’Tis commendable in you.” He slapped a friendly hand on Ashley’s shoulder and made for the door.
“Rod,” Ashley said before he reached it. “Thank you.”
He wondered how he would have coped with the tragedy and the guilt if Rod had not been there for him in India. He had always been the best of friends. He had seemed to value Ashley’s friendship, had sought after it and cultivated it. And it seemed to Ashley now that his friend had always given more than he had received, and that he was continuing to do so. There could be no other explanation than friendship for his extraordinary offer to buy Penshurst.
It was a tempting offer.
He could not accept it, though. Not ever. Somehow, he felt, if salvation was to be had, it was to be had here. He could not explain the feeling to himself. He had not even fully realized he felt this way until Roderick had offered him a way out. But it was so, he was sure. And so he was even less sure about Emily.
He turned to the window to watch her with the children. But they were coming toward the house, the boys running on ahead, looking flushed and excited. She was smiling. Ah, Emmy, always sweetly serene. Or almost always. What had happened yesterday to take away the serenity? Was it something that might recur? He would have to be very careful to see that she was properly protected for the remainder of her stay at Penshurst—perhaps forever, if she would listen to what he knew he must again say to her.
• • •
She was painting. It was not coming easily, but she persevered. It was a different scene from any she had ever tried before. Although she was on the hill and there were numerous trees to paint, she knew she could not paint any of them. Her spirit had always been uplifted by trees, but today the trees were strangely silent. It was the flat farmland below that called to her. But she did not know the message and for a long time her brush did not know how to express it.
But finally she was absorbed. So absorbed that she knew when she finally felt his presence that he had been there for some time. Leaning against a tree, his arms crossed over his chest. Far enough away not to intrude upon her privacy or her creative need to keep her work unobserved. He smiled at her when she turned her head to look at him.
She felt desire deep in her womb, though she knew it was not entirely a physical thing. It was love that put the slight unsteadiness in her legs. A love that had now manifested itself in every way. She had decided after leaving the boys in the nursery to play at highwaymen and heroes that she would no longer fight to keep her love suppressed. Not for what remained of her two weeks at least. She would accept this time as a gift. It had been a freeing decision.
“Hello, Emmy,” he said. He strolled a little closer. “May I see?” He was signing as well as speaking the words.
“No,” she told him aloud, looking briefly at her painting. And then, very daringly, “Naht yet.”
He grinned at her. “You have been learning words in my absence,” he said. “And learning them wrongly. O-o-o, not ah. Not.”
“O-o-o,” she said, obediently lifting her jaw a little higher. “Not yet.” She felt her throat quickly with one hand. Yes, the vibrations were there. It was not so difficult after all to produce sound. It was almost, she had thought when practicing before the mirror in her room, as if she remembered . . .
He sat on the grass a short distance from her easel, but in such a position that he could not see her painting. He reclined sideways on one elbow and plucked a blade of grass to set between his teeth.
She thought at first that she would not be able to concentrate with him sitting so close. She expected him to be restless, curious. But he was as he had been last night when they had stood together outside the summerhouse. He was still and relaxed. He was very like the soul partner she had always dreamed of having. After a minute or two she forgot about him again with her conscious thoughts and found that at last her brush was speaking the meaning that had been lodged deep within her.
He was gazing off down the hill when she looked at him again. He seemed peaceful. She stood gazing at him for a while, enjoying the luxury of watching unobserved.
“Now,” she said at last, forming the word carefully.
He did not correct her pronunciation this time. He merely looked up at her, smiled, and got to his feet, then looked at her painting for a long time in silence, his expression unreadable. She looked for ridicule or amusement or even simple puzzlement, but she saw none of them.
“Everything is horizontal this time,” he said, also signing with his hands—he was doing that more often, she noticed, making up new and easily interpreted signs, as if he had decided that it was unfair to expect her always to listen to and speak his language when visual communication was better attuned to the workings of her mind than verbal—“instead of vertical as in the other painting I saw. Everything stretches sideways rather than upward, with the colors of fields and sky intermingling. Not fields down here and sky up there, but all part of one another. Explain to me, Emmy. What have you seen that I have not? I envy your ability to see with an inner eye.”
She showed him with her hands and with her bare feet and with her expressive face that the earth was beneath them, the nurturing component of life. Soil and grass and crops. It was through the earth, she attempted to demonstrate, that one must learn all there was to learn about the mystery of life and growth and measureless time and patience. And love and peace too. It was not up there, as she had thought before and told him before. The meaning of it all was not up there, beyond one’s grasp, always to be yearned for, never to be attained. It was all here and now, if one only recognized it and accepted it. Not in the future, but now. Not in the distance, but here, within one’s grasp. She tried to tell him in words too because she knew she was not communicating quite clearly.
“Naht—not there,” she said, pointing upward. “Here. Now.”
“Emmy.” He took her busy hands in his finally and held them both against his heart as he closed his eyes tightly. “Emmy,” he said after a while, and she could see that there were tears in his eyes. “Is it true, then? Is peace not so very far away after all?”
“No,” she said.
They spoke to each other without words, without images. They spoke to each other in the silence. It was one of the most precious moments of her life.
He kissed her lips softly before releasing her hands and folding her easel while she cleaned her brush and tidied her paints and paper. Then they walked in silence back to the summerhouse. A silence that was both sweet and sad to Emily. She knew she was dear to him. She knew too that peace was still just beyond his grasp. She wondered if it could ever be possible to know peace after the person one had loved most in the world had died in circumstances that one might have prevented or at least shared.
She turned to him in the summerhouse after setting down her things. He was looking at her. It was the most natural thing in the world to take the couple of steps into his arms, to lift her mouth for his kiss, to set her own arms about his neck. She was not going to analyze. Not until she was away from Penshurst again. And she would not allow conscience or any notion of sin to intrude. Perhaps she was rationalizing, she thought. Perhaps this was what people did when they consciously committed one of life’s great sins. But she could not yet feel that this affair she was sharing with Ashley was wrong.
He sat down on the sofa after they had caressed each other with lips and hands and had felt the need to be closer still, and she stood before him and watched as he unbuttoned the front flap of his breeches and then lifted her skirt and drew down her undergarments.
“Come,” he said, setting his hands on her hips and draw
ing her toward him.
She knelt astride him and watched his face as he first positioned her and then returned his hands to her hips and brought her firmly down onto him. He looked at her, his head against the back of the sofa, his eyes half closed.
“Emmy,” he said.
She had learned something the night before. Two things, perhaps. She had learned that physical love was intensely pleasurable. And she had learned that it really was love, that in the physical act, which could be called sin when performed outside marriage, as now, love bonded to love and was a thing of the heart and even of the soul as well as of the body. She loved him totally as he began the already familiar rhythmic dance of physical love and as she matched her movements to his—she loved him with her body and with every part of herself enclosed by her body.
She watched his face and saw that he was watching hers. Watching each other’s pleasure. But seeing deeper than pleasure. Watching the essence of each other, deeply penetrating each other. Not just in the physical masculine-into-feminine sense, but in every way possible. Masculine, feminine; feminine, masculine—they did not matter. Each was both, and each was both giver and receiver.
He loved her during those minutes, she knew. During the intensely felt minutes of the act of love. Memory would come back to him afterward and set up the barrier again. But for now there was no barrier. Oh no, she would not fight this or see it as sin. Or ever regret it.
He drew her head down to his and set his mouth on hers, his tongue coming deep inside as his other hand held her firm and she felt the hot rush of his seed. She sighed out her own release and relaxed down onto him. It seemed so natural, so right to love him thus. She set her cheek against his shoulder and sank for a few minutes into sleep.
23
“EMMY,” he said. She had been sitting quietly beside him on the sofa, her head on his shoulder. But he could not talk to her thus. He sat forward slightly so that the weight of her head was transferred to the crook of his elbow and he could turn for her to see his face.
