Authors: Mary Balogh
“Quite right,” he said, frowning. “We will not be able to walk far. We will have to keep them in our sight.”
“I am quite content to sit here,” Cassandra said, “and bask in the sunshine and breathe in the fresh air and drink in the sight of so much green countryside. Why do you not walk with Mr. Golding, Alice, and Lord Merton and I will stay here.”
Miss Haytor looked suspiciously at Stephen. He smiled his best smile at her.
“I will protect Lady Paget from harm, ma’am,” he said. “The public setting of the park and the other people strolling here will be effective chaperones for both you and her.”
She was still not quite convinced, he could see. But her desire to walk—
alone
—with Golding was being weighed against caution.
“Allie,” Cassandra said, “if we have driven all this way merely to stroll together in a tight circle about the picnic basket, we might as well have stayed at home and eaten in the back garden beneath Mary’s clothesline.”
Miss Haytor was convinced. She went down the slope with Golding and then took his offered arm as they turned in the direction of the distant ponds.
“I believe,” Cassandra said, seating herself on the blanket and removing first her gloves and then her bonnet and setting them down beside her, “I have been incredibly selfish.”
“In sending them off walking while we remain here?” he asked.
“In keeping Alice with me all these years,” she said. “She started to look for other employment when I accepted Nigel’s marriage offer. She even went to one interview and was impressed with both the children and their parents. But I begged her to come with me into the country, at least for a year. I had never lived in the country and was somewhat apprehensive. She came because I was so insistent, and then she stayed, year after year. I thought only of
my
needs and told her more times than I can count that I did not know how I would live without her.”
“It is basic human need to be needed,” he said. “She very obviously loves you. I daresay she was quite content to stay with you.”
She turned her face toward him. She was sitting with her knees bent, her arms clasped around them.
“You are too kind, Stephen,” she said. “She might have met someone to marry years ago, though. She might have been happy.”
“And she might not,” he said. “Not many governesses are in a position to meet prospective husbands, are they? And her new employers might not have needed her for anything more than imparting a certain body of knowledge to their children. The children might have resented her. She might have been dismissed soon after acquiring the position. Her next one might have been worse.
Anything
might have happened, in other words.”
She was laughing, her face still turned toward him.
“You are quite right,” she said. “Perhaps after all I have been saving her for this happy reunion with the love of her life. I think Mr. Golding may well
be
that. Today is not for gloom and guilt, is it? Today is for a picnic. I have always associated that word with pure enjoyment. But there were never any picnics during my marriage. It is strange, that. I did not even realize it until today. I came here to enjoy myself, Stephen.”
He sat with one knee raised, the sole of his Hessian boot flat on the blanket, one arm draped over his knee, the other slightly behind him, bracing his weight. They were sitting in the dappled shade offered by the spreading branches of one of the oaks. His hat was on the blanket beside him.
He watched, fascinated, as she lifted her arms, drew the pins from her hair, and shook it free over her shoulders and along her back. She set the pins down on the brim of her bonnet and drew the fingers of both hands through her hair to release any tangles.
“If you have a brush in your reticule,” he said, “I will do that for you.”
“Will you?” She looked back at him. “But I removed the pins so
that I can lie back on the blanket and look at the sky. Perhaps you will brush it later, before I put it back up.”
The strange thing was that she was not flirting with him. Neither was she using her siren’s voice or eyes. Yet he felt the tension between them like a palpable thing—and doubted she did. She was as he had never seen her before, relaxed and smiling and without artifice.
He was dazzled.
She was far more attractive to him than when she was trying to attract.
She stretched out on the blanket, adjusting her clothes to make sure her dress decently covered her ankles. And she laced her hands behind her head and gazed upward. She sighed with obvious contentment.
“If only we could keep our connection with the earth,” she said, “all would be well with our lives. Do you think?”
“Sometimes,” he said, “we become so intoxicated by the strange notion that we are lords of all we survey that we forget we are creatures of the earth.”
“Just like butterflies,” she said, “and robins and kittens.”
“And lions and ravens,” he said.
“Why is the sky blue?” she asked.
“I have no idea.” He grinned down at her, and her eyes turned toward him. “But I am very glad it is. If the sun merely beamed down its light from a black sky, the world would be a gloomier place.”
“Just like before a thunderstorm,” she said.
“Worse.”
“Or like nighttime with a brighter moon. Come down here and look,” she said.
He deliberately misunderstood her. He lowered his head over hers and slowly searched her face, his eyes coming to rest finally on her green eyes. They were smiling.
“Very nice indeed,” he said. He meant it too.
“Likewise.” Her eyes were roaming over his face as well. “Stephen, you are going to have wrinkles at the outer corners of your eyes when you are older, and they are going to make you impossibly attractive.”
“When the time comes,” he said, “I’ll remember that you warned me.”
“Will you?” She lifted her hands and set two fingertips lightly over the spots where the wrinkles would be. “Will you remember me?”
“Oh, always,” he said.
“And I will remember you,” she said. “I will remember that once in my life I met a man who is perfect in every way.”
“I am not perfect,” he said.
“Allow me to dream,” she said. “To me you are perfect.
Today
you are perfect. I will not know you long enough or intimately enough to learn of your weaknesses and vices, which are doubtless legion. In memory you will always be my perfect angel. Perhaps I will have a medallion made and wear it about my neck.”
She smiled.
He did not.
“We will not know each other for long?” he asked her.
She shook her head.
“No, of course not,” she said. “But that does not matter, Stephen. There is today, and today is all that matters.”
“Yes,” he said.
As far as he knew, there were no people walking in sight of them. If there were, they must already be scandalized enough. What difference would it make if he—
He kissed her.
And she kissed him back, first cupping his face gently with her palms and then sliding her arms about his neck.
It was a warm, unhurried, quite chaste kiss that did not even
involve their tongues. It was the most dangerous kiss Stephen had ever shared. He knew that as soon as it ended and he lifted his head to look down into her face again.
Because it had been a kiss of shared affection bordering on love. Not lust. Love.
“And now,” she said, “will you do as I suggested a few minutes ago and come down here and look? Upward? At the sky?”
She spoke softly, without smiling, despite the teasing nature of her words.
He stretched out beside her and looked upward—and knew what she had meant when she spoke of connection to the earth. He could feel it, firm and eternal beneath him despite the thickness of the blanket. And above him he could see the blue, cloudless sky and—connecting the two—the leafy branches of the oak tree.
And he was a part of that connection, that gloriously spinning place, as was Cassandra.
He reached over and took her hand in his. He laced his fingers with hers.
“If you could just step off into the sky,” she said, “and be a new person,
would
you?”
He gave the question some consideration.
“And so lose myself as I know me, and everything and everyone that have helped shape me into the person I am?” he said. “No. But temporary escape would be good now and then. I am greedy and want the best of both worlds, you see. Would you?”
“I can lie here,” she said, “and dream of letting go and floating off into blueness and light. But I would have to take myself with me or the whole exercise would be pointless. And so nothing would really be changed, would it? If I had to leave myself behind in order to escape … Well, I might as well be dead. And I think I would hate that. I want to live.”
“I am glad to hear it,” he said, chuckling.
“Oh, but you do not understand,” she said. “It surprises me. For a
long time I have thought that if given the choice without actually having to take my own life, I would choose death.”
He felt a sudden chill.
“But you no longer feel that way?” he asked her.
“No,” she said. She laughed softly. “No! I want to
live
.”
He squeezed her hand more tightly, and they lay together in silence while he pondered what she had just said. What must her life have been like if she would have preferred death to life—and if the preference was so habitual that it actually surprised her now to discover that she preferred life?
Sometimes he forgot—or chose to forget—that her life had been so intolerable that she had killed.
But he would not think of that today.
He turned his head to look at her after a few minutes, and she returned the look. They both smiled.
“Happy?” he asked.
“Mmm.”
He sighed and set his free arm over his eyes. He had not stepped out into space, but he had stepped into something new after all. This was not seduction. This was not even simply friendship. This was … He did not know what it was. But he had the feeling his life would never be the same again.
And he was not sure if the thought alarmed him or exhilarated him.
After a few minutes he drifted off into that pleasant state of being asleep and yet half aware too of everything around him.
14
S
TEPHEN
was asleep. He was not exactly snoring, but he was breathing deeply in such a way that there was no doubt he was sleeping.
Cassandra closed her eyes and smiled—and felt a desperate sort of tenderness for him and for the stolen, carefree pleasure of the afternoon. She had decided to enjoy herself, and that was what she was doing. All her defenses, all her anxieties, all her mistrust of anyone outside her own tiny circle of friends, had been left at home, to be taken up again after the picnic was over.
Perhaps.
Or perhaps not.
She allowed herself the cautious belief that perhaps after all there was one good man in the world, and he was lying beside her, his fingers relaxed about her own. She knew he was not perfect. As he kept reminding her, no one was. But he seemed as close to being perfect as anyone could be.
And if he did have character flaws or even vices, she would never know. For, of course, she would not know him for long. Not beyond the end of the Season, at the latest. And if she was very fortunate, she would never hear any unsavory stories about him in the future.
She was going to live in the country again. She had decided that
just now, while lying here. It was as if this little piece of the country, the earth beneath her, the sky above, the tree branches between, had cleared her mind of a dense, dark fog that had befuddled it for a long, long time. She was going to find a little cottage in a small village somewhere in England, well off the beaten track, and she was going to live there and grow flowers and embroider bright tablecloths and handkerchiefs and go to church every Sunday and help serve teas at parish functions and dance at local assemblies and …
Well.
She swallowed against a lump in her throat. Perhaps she had stepped off into the sky, after all. But it was not an impractical dream. Or an impossible one.
For something else had just struck her with overwhelming force.
She had been a victim for ten long years. She had not been able to help the vicious beatings. Nigel had been stronger than she, and he had been her husband and had had the legal right to discipline her as he saw fit. But she had developed a victim’s mind, a cowering, abject thing intent more than anything else upon remaining hidden in every conceivable way, upon figuratively holding her breath lest someone notice her and come at her, fists flying. And her victim’s mentality she
could
help. If her mind was not under her control, then life was really not worth living.
Life had not felt worth living for almost ten years.
Today, suddenly, it did. She turned her head toward Stephen, tears in her eyes, but he was still sleeping.
Fortunately
, he was still sleeping.
Ah, how terribly beautiful he was. How achingly attractive. How she longed …
But he had no part in her new dream. How could he? She had seduced him and made him feel obligated to her. It was all quite unfair. He should be back firmly in his own world with young ladies like the one who had walked with him this morning.
But this new dream did have something to do with him. She had
him to thank for it. By being kind to her when he had absolutely no reason to be, he had reminded her of her own worth. Of her power over her own life.
Could she make such an extravagant claim for him when her acquaintance with him was so slight, when it had begun in such an ugly manner, with seduction and then ensnarement?
Was he
really
an angel?
She smiled through her tears at the fanciful thought. She would be seeing wings and a halo soon.
She was no longer going to be penniless and dependent and abject and frightened and defensive and all the horrid, cringing things she had been since Bruce had tossed her out of her home and washed his hands of her.