“Rory—those tapestries—that room—they are not fit for a young girl’s eyes.”
“I thought—I don’t understand… That was to be my surprise for you.”
“Surprise?” he blustered, folding his hands across his bare chest but not meeting her eye. “It was that, and more!”
“You don’t like them?” she asked, disappointed, and got to her feet. “Why? What’s wrong with them?”
He looked at her then and saw only studious enquiry. It only increased his discomfort. He dug a larger metaphorical hole for himself.
“Wrong with them? You want me to say it aloud?”
“Yes. Yes, I do, because it is now obvious to me that the temple, the tapestries, the room itself, has greatly upset you and I do not understand at all why it should. Particularly to a man of your worldly experience.”
He walked away from her, hands through his dark hair, and then returned.
“And in your unworldly opinion, what did you think the naked couples in those tapestries were up to? No! Don’t answer that. The question was asinine, like me!”
“There is only one couple,” she said quietly. “One couple in many different—situations.”
“Situations?” he said doubtfully. Rory thought he looked smug. “I was in that room less than five minutes and believe me, I know an-an orgy when I see one.”
“I am sure you do. But you are wrong.”
“Rory, that’s not what I—”
She cut him off.
“You think because I am a virgin I should not look upon those tapestries. You possibly believe all females must be shielded from such expressions of love?”
His black brows contracted over his beak of a nose. “Love?”
“Yes. Love. Just because I have never made love does not mean I do not appreciate the joy physical love must bring to a couple who are in love. So please do not address me as if you are speaking to an ignorant fool—”
“I was not—”
“I am well aware, despite my lack of tangible experience, that there are those who indulge in venery for its own sake—”
“Aurora!”
“—which is altogether different from making love. And it is the latter which is represented in those tapestries. You cannot persuade me otherwise.” She looked up into his flushed face and stated bluntly, “Making love frightens you.”
When he stared at her, horrified, she knew she had prodded the raw nerve of truth.
“Oh, I know you are a wonderfully considerate lover. I have heard the stories, about your—abilities and your-your—attributes. You would be surprised what women gossip about behind their fans, particularly when they think they cannot be overheard. But those exploits are not what I am talking about, nor do I care to know more about them than I do already. What is of importance to me is this situation we now find ourselves in. It is unique to both of us.”
“It is?”
“You have never made love to the one you love, and neither have I. So in that way, we are both inexperienced and—” she smiled shyly, “—more than a little bit apprehensive.”
“I suppose when you put it like that…” His shy smile mirrored hers. “But even you cannot deny my experience puts the onus squarely on my shoulders to make you happy.”
“Oh please do not negate my responsibility, just because I am a virgin,” she responded earnestly. “I want to give you just as much pleasure as you give me, I assure you.”
He gave a deep chuckle and shook his head.
“As God is my witness, Delight, if someone had told me three months ago I would be having such a brutally frank discussion about the marriage bed, with a pretty blonde virgin whom I love and adore, I would have condemned him as a Bedlamite!”
She was momentarily concerned.
“I hope I am not being too brutal?”
“With me? No. Not at all. I like it.”
“Then you won’t mind me saying, if all that is required for you—for us—to be completely comfortable with each other is to make love, then what are we waiting for?”
He could not hide his astonishment, or stifle his laughter. But he was not shocked; there was truth in her words. When he had mastery over himself he said,
“I don’t deserve you, but I refuse to give you up. You know just what to say to make me realize I have a head full of unfounded fears and doubts, and only you are capable of banishing them.” He stroked her cheek. “I will never be able to thank you enough for rescuing me from myself.”
She dimpled. “You can but try, by letting me show you those tapestries.”
He pretended offence.
“You want me to go back in there, into that den of iniquity, with you? And here was I thinking love was unconditional.”
“Alisdair James Fitzstuart, you are a prude! For a man who can parade about a painter’s studio in a loin cloth, putting on a show for a gaggle of giggling dancers—”
“Show. It was a show. I was acting. I am good at acting.”
“Not an excuse I am willing to accept!” She pouted. “Five minutes cursory inspection of that room, you will agree, is as nothing to the hours I have spent—”
“Hours?”
“—studying and admiring those tapestries. They tell a story—”
“A story?”
“—about a marriage, a loving marriage. And because it is a loving marriage, it is quite natural for the couple to make love, many times, and on all three tapestries. Each tapestry represents a different stage in their mar—Oh! You have outwitted me!” she declared when he started to chuckle. “You are being prudish to annoy me! Admit to it.”
“I admit to nothing, only that I adore you all the more, if that is possible, when you talk so ardently on a topic that is of interest to you. I can’t wait to hear all about pineapple cultivation.”
She pouted. “Now you are mocking me.”
“Never! I am sincerely interested in pineapple cultivation.”
“I do not believe for one movement of the second hand of your pocket watch that you have the slightest interest in pineapples! Alisdair!” She squealed with fright when he suddenly scooped her up into his arms. “What—what are you doing?”
“What am I doing?” he repeated, carrying her lightly down the temple steps to the edge of the bathing pool. “It’s time we gave ourselves up to this paradise and went for a dip. And, I promised to fetch you a glass of water half an hour ago.”
The surface of the bathing pool shimmered and rippled like a length of white satin caught up by a breeze, water pouring forth from the open mouths of two large lion heads set in enormous pediments either side of a set of broad stairs that descended to the tiled bottom. Dair went down these steps without hesitation, the water refreshingly cool on such a warm sunny day, he and Rory taking a shallow intake of breath as the cold water snapped at their warm skin.
“Let me tell you just how serious I am about pineapple cultivation, wife-to-be. I have engaged Bill Chambers to design a pinery for Fitzstuart Hall.”
“Chambers? Sir William Chambers? The Swedish architect? To build a—a pinery? At your family home? For-for me?”
He waded into the middle of the pool with Rory still in his arms, the water level at its deepest rising to just above his navel.
“Soon to be our home,” he corrected. He frowned. “You do want a pinery, don’t you? I thought it would make an excellent wedding present. It may take a year or two to build, but a wedding present it shall be.”
When she clung to him, when she muffled unintelligibly into his neck, he took it as a sign she was pleased with his wedding gift. He tried to unhook her arm so that he could see her face, to reassure her and to kiss her, but she remained fastened to him. So he did the most natural thing in the world, something every good swimmer would do, but something he had not done in a large body of fresh water in many years. He slipped out from her hold on him by ducking under the water. And once underwater, and seeing how clear it was, he swam away to resurface by the steps.
> Rory waved to him from the middle of the bathing pool, and he waved back before diving once again under the water and disappearing. She followed his lead and dived underwater, too, knowing they were now engaged in a watery game of cat and mouse. She couldn’t have been happier. Her happiness had nothing to do with his wedding gift of a pinery.
TWENTY-FIVE
I T WAS INEVITABLE they would make love.
Two people deeply in love in a secluded paradise would have required the combined willpower of all the mythical Gods to resist giving in to the overwhelming need to physically communicate such love. All other considerations were unimportant. Custom, family expectations, and societal norms, dictated they wait until they were legally and spiritually one before consummating their union. And their betrothal remained a secret, and had yet to receive the blessing of either family, in particular Dair’s mother, the Countess of Strathsay, and most importantly, the sanction of Lord Shrewsbury, Rory’s grandfather.
These considerations were mere formalities. Blessings and sanctions were a foregone conclusion for two young people from within the same social circle, who were distantly related, as all the nobility were in some form or other, dating back to the Conquest. Their union would surely be seen by all as the epitome of social, political and economic acceptability. But to the happy couple, and in this place, none of that was important.
There was something about the forest clearing, its isolation, even from the rest of the island, with its tall deep curtain of trees, its fanciful temples and its enchanted bathing pool, that rendered the lovers, at that moment in time, invulnerable.
The handful of hours leading up to the couple falling asleep in each other’s arms under a coverlet in the small temple was burned into their collective memory. They made love twice in the very room Dair had railed against, but it wasn’t the first time or the only setting. The consummation of their union occurred under the shade of an ancient elm, on the picnic rug by the bathing pool. Dair had been prepared to wait, whatever his private misgivings, given his parents’ disastrous wedding night, for her sake, because he loved her. Rory had other ideas, though she’d had her heart set on the temple as the perfect setting to give herself to him. But when in the throes of an all-consuming passion, reticence and the best-laid plans are irrelevant. Nothing else mattered except their love for one another, and in this paradise, the shared experience of mutual physical pleasure.
Much later, Dair carried Rory into the small temple, built a fire in the grate and boiled water for tea. While he lit a cheroot she made tea, both silent, words unnecessary to express the joy and relief both felt at discovering they shared a healthy enjoyment of physical pleasure. It went unspoken that the bridal night now held no fears for either of them. They could go forward into their new life together, confident and full of optimism. And while they drank tea on the coverlet spread out over the thick rug in front of the fire, Rory told Dair the story of the couple woven into the three enormous tapestries covering three walls.
She confessed that the tapestries held more meaning for her having listened to Geoffrey the Hermit’s fairytale. No, not here in this room, she quickly reassured Dair. It was on her first visit to the island, when the hermit had found her trespassing in the round temple. In exchange for allowing her to come and go on the island whenever she pleased, he made her promise not to set foot in the small temple until her seventeenth summer. Despite her overwhelming curiosity she promised, and he took her at her word, though he warned her he would be watching to make sure she kept true.
And because he could see she was a good girl with a kind heart, he offered to tell her a fairytale connected with this island, about a dark-haired sprite and his golden-haired fairy nymph, and three magic carpets. How could she resist? It was only years later, when she finally viewed the tapestries (what he called magic carpets) that she realized the fairytale was true, woven in silken thread into the three large tapestries. It made the hermit’s simplistic telling of the couple’s life story that much more poignant.
Geoffrey the Hermit had been living on the island for ten years or more when one day a couple appeared at the round temple, as if by magic. They stayed two nights, and then disappeared. He had watched them from the safety of the forest, fearing they might be evil sprites, come to do him mischief. But as he watched them splashing in the bathing pool, chasing each other through the round temple, and all the while laughing and being playful with each other, he knew they would never do him a harm. Every year for the next twenty-three years they returned to the island, for two nights, to splash in the bathing pool and to chase each other through the temple.
He could tell that they loved each other beyond reason.
A week before the couple’s second visit, workmen came to prune the trees and bushes about the temples, to clean the pool of leaves, and to dust and rid the small temple of cobwebs. And so it was that the hermit knew precisely when the sprites would return to the island each year.
Just before their seventh visit, the workmen brought with them a magic carpet. This they hung on a wall of the small temple. When the men left, Geoffrey went to gaze at it, and it was truly magical, woven with brightly colored silks and gold thread and as dazzling as a sunny spring day. Woven into the carpet were his two friendly sprites, and he saw that there was a small sprite, a son. He also recognized the palace across the lake from the island, and now knew where his sprites lived for most of the year, and who they were. They were in truth the king and queen of this domain, and when they set foot on this island, magic turned them into sprites. He knew this because they wore no gold coronets, brought no servants to serve them, and cooked their own food. Their clothes, however, were of silk and velvet, when they chose to wear clothes, which, being sprites, was not often at all.
From that day forward, every year he gathered flowers and vines and wove them into crowns for the sprites to wear on this their fairy island kingdom. He left them as offerings in the small temple just before they arrived. He knew his flower crowns pleased the sprites because he saw them frolicking about in them.
The second magic carpet arrived just before the couple’s fifteenth visit to the island. This carpet was as brightly colored as the first, and was all about families. There were four panels to the carpet. The first showed the sprites being as friendly as ever with each other. In the second they were with their son who had grown tall. The third panel showed the sprite family with another couple, who also had a son, and finally, in the fourth panel a third family with a mother but no father and three children, two boys and a girl had joined the sprites and their friends with the one son. Everyone was happy and holding hands.
And on this fifteenth visit, Geoffrey was surprised to see that the female sprite was heavy with child. The couple went swimming as they always did, but they did not run about the colonnades of the round temple, but spent most of their time shut away in the little temple. He could see the smoke from the temple chimney from his cottage. And when there was no more smoke, he knew they had left the island to return to their palace.
Two days before the couple’s twenty-third visit to the island, a third magic carpet appeared on the wall of the temple. The male sprite no longer had dark hair, but a mane of pure white, and he walked with the aid of a stick. But the female sprite was just as beautiful and as full of life as the first day he had fallen under the spell of her beauty. This visit was to be different from all the others, and the most memorable for Geoffrey. On dusk of the second night, there was a knock on the door of his tiny cottage. There standing before him, much shorter than his estimation but more beautiful than he thought possible, was the fairy queen. She had the most mesmerizing green eyes, and was wearing his crown of flowers on her long golden hair that flowed past her waist.
She asked if she might enter his cottage, and he gave her his only wooden chair to sit upon near the warmth of the fireplace. He set a mug of dandelion tea before her, which she drank in tiny sips. She thanked him for the flower crowns, which were always so welco
ming upon their arrival. She thanked him, too, for being the guardian of their island paradise. She was smiling, but he could see she was inconsolable. Her green eyes told him so. He asked her what he could do to stop her sadness. She said there was nothing to be done; it was in God’s hands. She told him in a brave but halting voice that this would be the last visit to the island by her and her one true love. She told him not to concern himself, that he would always have a home on the island. And when his time came, he could be buried on the island, and she would see to it he had a headstone and his name would be carved over the mantel of his fireplace, so that he, the guardian of Swan Island, would never be forgotten.
With no smoke from the temple chimney, Geoffrey knew the sprites had returned to their kingdom and he would never see them again. Rory had asked him to describe what was on the third and last magic carpet. It was a map of the island, and it was filled with all the wondrous things to be found there, and the wonderful times enjoyed by the two sprites. They were there, the king with his white hair, the fairy queen with her flowing golden hair, both wearing his crowns made of flowers, and they were being as friendly as ever with each other. But what pleased Geoffrey the Hermit, what brought tears to his eyes in the telling of it to Rory, was that woven into the island map was his little cottage, and looking out of the only window, there he was, smiling with his long beard and whiskers and a flower behind his ear.
Dair had then gone over to stand before the third tapestry, to study it and to find the cottage. There it was, on the other side of the clearing from the temples, in a bed of wildflowers, and woven into the flowers was the hermit’s name: Geoffrey Swan. Still gazing at the tapestry, he then quietly asked about the fate of the hermit. She told him. Two years ago she visited the island as usual, but could not find Geoffrey anywhere. He often found her. She went to his cottage. It was empty, and by the cobwebs and dust it had not been lived in for some time. She found his grave not far from the cottage, in a sunny, open spot. It was marked by a fine headstone and covered with wildflowers. By the headstone was a large urn filled with beautiful, exquisitely-wrought porcelain flowers of every color and variety. Rory imagined it had been placed there so that every day Geoffrey the Hermit, guardian of Swan Island, would have flowers on his grave, whatever the weather.
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