To Love and to Cherish (33 page)

“No, indeed,” he said huskily. “An artist needs freedom of movement.”

The skin over his flat belly was soft as a child’s, but not as soft as the light fleece of golden hair that covered it. She put her lips in the hollow of his collarbone while she stroked her hand across his chest, humming with pleasure and returning excitement. Not so patient now, he shrugged out of his shirt and waistcoat at the same time and dropped them on the floor. He bent his head and put a hot, wet kiss on her navel, making her squirm, before he slid out from under the tangle of her legs and stood up. She stretched like a cat, watching him unfasten his trousers, feeling sultry and irresistible. She shimmied out of her bunched-up nightgown and negligee, then slid down farther in the bed, admiring her husband’s tall and gloriously naked body. All that blond hair and all that lovely skin, covering all those beautiful muscles. Sometimes it didn’t seem possible that she was married to a
minister
.

Sinking down beside her, he put his hands in her hair and spread it out on the pillow, making a fan with his fingers. “Oils next,” he said, and he had that intent look again in his beautiful blue eyes. “Rich reds and golds, maybe a little florid and overdone; something after Titian, I think. Although your figure isn’t quite as . . . generous.” She pouted her bottom lip until he thought to add, “Thank heavens,” and gave her bosom a soft, appreciative squeeze. She thought of asking him if he had just thanked God for her breasts, but decided against it. He’d take the question seriously, and the last thing she wanted to get into with him right now was a theological discussion.

“I used to think of you sometimes as Man in Michelangelo’s ceiling,” she confided. He looked amused. “Because of the hair.” She reached up to touch it, and he turned his head to kiss her palm, then each of her fingertips. “And sometimes . . .” She’d never told him this before. “Sometimes I thought of you as the lion in Rubens’ painting of Daniel. The worried one with the gorgeous eyes.”

His delighted laugh tickled her; she laughed with him, admiring the faint flush of pleasure and embarrassment that crept into his fair cheeks. Raising up on one elbow, she put her lips on his throat, breathing in the clean smell of him. His strong arms came around her, supporting her. She moved her mouth to his ear and murmured a soft, frank suggestion—because he was deliberately giving her time to recover, and his laudable self-restraint wasn’t the least bit necessary.

He smiled a slow, anticipatory smile that stole her breath away and made her skin tingle. She wound her arms around his neck and let him lower her to the pillow, holding on while he stretched his long, powerful body beside her. The hair on the heavy thigh he threw over hers tickled; she parted her legs for him, wanting more of that sensation. With his mouth and his hands, he found all her secret places, and then he kissed her breathless. When he braced over her, she reached between them to guide him home herself. At the last second, she whispered, “Christy, are you sure you don’t want to finish the painting?”

For an answer, he lifted his head and growled like a lion.

***

From their balcony, Anne and Christy could see the sun come up over the canal at dawn, and at twilight they could watch it sink beyond the ruins of the basilica of Saint Apollinare. It was beginning its westward descent now. Time to dress for dinner; they were going to Paulo’s, their favorite trattoria, to eat mussels and lobster outside in the garden. But they lingered in a corner of the balcony, arms entwined, too lazy and satisfied to move. They hadn’t lit the candles in the room yet; the darkness behind and the gathering dusk all around shielded them from the view of anyone who might be passing in the courtyard below. Good thing, because they were both in their dressing gowns, barefooted on the still-warm floorboards of the balcony.

Anne popped a grape in her mouth and took a sip of Dolcetto, the wine Christy’s monsignor friend had given him this afternoon for a present. “Did you read Mrs. Ludd’s letter yet?” she asked.

“Not yet. What did she say?”

“Well, for one thing, she said Captain Carnock had a dinner party for eight people, including the mayor and Dr. Hesselius, and Miss Weedie came
unescorted
.”

Christy said, “Hmh,” in a thoughtful tone.

“He served sherry and port, and Miss Weedie drank one glass of each.”

“How does she
know
these things?” he marveled, a rhetorical question each of them had asked the other about their housekeeper any number of times.

“She says if the captain doesn’t declare himself soon, he and Miss Weedie may find themselves the target of irresponsible gossip.”

Christy nearly choked on his wine. When he stopped chuckling he asked, “What else did she say?”

“She said Sebastian Verlaine is a degenerate—but I already told you that.”

“Hmh.”

“She said Reverend Woodworth gives a nice, earnest sermon, but they’re nothing like yours and everyone misses you.” He put his arm around her and dropped a kiss on her temple. Sharing his pleasure with her—so typical of him, she thought, squeezing him back. “Oh, and Thomas Nineways told the vestry he wants to commemorate the Feast of the Holy Innocents this year with a church procession of all the male babies in the parish.”

“That would be a very
slow
procession,” Christy noted, and they chortled together, imagining it.

“Arthur’s finished planting the garden. She didn’t mention the fact that I, his employer, am not allowed to do anything but weed and water it.”

“Poor Anne. The vegicide wife.”

“Quite. And she said it’s a great shame we won’t be home for the May Day festival because the children have planted a new tree on the green, I’ve forgotten what kind, and everybody expects it to burst into flower right on schedule. That’s assuming the weather and the Blessed Virgin cooperate.”

He smiled, and she followed his gaze out over the darkening water to the lavender-gray clouds piling up in bands above the horizon, like striations of ancient granite. The color of south Devon in the spring was a rich reddish-brown, not quite like any other place she’d ever seen. The hedges bordering the fields would be greening now, creating that lovely patchwork-quilt effect the county was famous for. She could picture the cottages on the High Street with their new spring coats of daub or whitewash, the heavy thatched roofs that made them look as if they’d grown out of the ground where they stood. The sheep would be dragging their long, dirty wool around the pastures like damp mops, and at Lynton Hall Farm, William Holyoake would be hiring extra men to help with the shearing.

“I spoke to Father Croce about our trip to Rimini,” Christy mentioned. “He said we can either travel by train from Bologna or hire a diligence and go directly from here. Either way, it’s a whole day’s journey. It’ll be too cold for sea-bathing, he says, but the temple of Malatesta will keep us occupied for days.”

Anne nodded absently. The Weedies’ garden would be coming into full glory soon. Lily Hesselius had suggested at a church meeting once that the village ladies organize a spring garden contest, with the winner being allowed to display her prizewinning flora on the church altar for the entire month of May. Poor Lily, a relative newcomer, had had to be told that there was no point in that because the Weedies would win effortlessly, no one would dare compete against them, and their flowers already graced the altar for at least eleven, quite possibly all twelve months of the year. Anne could see it now, tumbling with hollyhocks and hydrangeas, sweet peas and canterbury bells. In a few weeks the honeysuckle and white jasmine would bloom, climbing the old plum trees beside the path. Peonies and heliotropes came next, tall, sweet-smelling stock, lavender and marigolds—and moss roses, banks and banks of them, spilling over everything by the end of May—

Christy had asked her a question. “What, darling?”

“I said, should we come back along the coast again, or go inland a bit and see Cesena and Forli?”

“Ohh . . . whatever you like. Or we could wait and decide later.”

“Did you read the bit about Rimini in the guidebook I left out?”

“Hm? No, I didn’t get a chance yet. I’ll look at it tonight.” That reminded her—the penny readings were starting up again at the rectory hall. Reverend Woodworth had begun with “Elements of Morality” by Mr. Whewell, which was all very well, but attendance had fallen off alarmingly after the first night and she worried about the program’s future. Last fall, she’d read
The Count of Monte Cristo
, thrilling Wyckerley, if she said so herself, to its toes. She’d tried a tactful suggestion to Reverend Woodworth that something more on the order of
The Deerslayer
might hold his listeners’ attention better, but he’d been immovable. Maybe when they got home she could suggest something to Mrs. Armstrong by Poe, or one of those Brontë women, to revive people’s spirits . . .

“Anne?”

“Hm?”

“Where are you?”

“What? Oh, sorry. Woolgathering, I guess.” She sent him a contrite smile, but when she turned to stare out over the water again, he touched her cheek and made her look at him. His hair was adorably tousled—from her fingers, a little while ago in bed; he looked wonderful in the damson-colored silk dressing gown she’d given him for a wedding present. But his brow was furrowed and his eyes looked troubled.

“Would you rather we didn’t take the trip tomorrow? We can stay here if you prefer, it doesn’t matter a bit to me.”

She opened her mouth to exclaim that of course she wanted to go to Rimini, they’d been planning it for days—and after that she wanted to go on all the other side trips they’d mapped out, to Comacchio and Lugo, the mineral springs, the Umbrian Apennines. Then she heard what he’d said—“it doesn’t matter a bit to me”—and she realized that it was the simple truth. He’d come on this trip, had suggested it himself, in fact, purely to please her.

“Darling,” she said slowly, smoothing her fingertips along the inside of his wrist, “are you having a good time?”

“Yes, of course,” he answered immediately, “the best. Aren’t you?” She hesitated, and he faced her in alarm. “Anne, what’s this? Aren’t you enjoying yourself?”

“Of course I am—it’s heaven on earth, it’s
paradise
, one would have to be mad not to love all this.” She gestured at the sky, the harbor, the lights of the city twinkling on, their beautiful, sexy bedroom in the quaint old pensione. “But . . .”

“But?”

“But . . . don’t you want to go home?”

He was floored. He couldn’t speak.

“Aren’t you the least bit homesick? Just think what it’s like now, Christy—they’re sowing barley in the fields, and the cattle have been let out to graze, it’s almost sheep-shearing. The hedges are all blooming—the flowers—oh, skylarks everywhere! And the evenings are getting longer—think of the walks we could take. Don’t you worry about everybody? I know Woodworth’s a brick, but he’s not you, and everybody misses you, Mrs. Ludd said so. What if someone has a genuine moral crisis? Where will you be? Where will
they
be? You say Nineways is harmless, but what if he pulls off some sort of
coup
while we’re gone? What if he gets them to initiate public confessions, or stonings, putting people in the old stocks and throwing rotten—” Christy was laughing, so she broke off to laugh with him. “I know you did this for me,” she resumed while he was still snickering, “and I adore you for it—”

“Did what?”

“Came on this trip. You thought it would make me happy because it’s the only place I was ever able to think of as my home. And I
am
happy, truly I am—but—I’ve found out in this beautiful city that I was wrong. I’d been making it up in my head, pretending it meant something to me so that my childhood wouldn’t seem so empty, so pitiful.” He ran his thumb very gently along the side of her neck, but she didn’t need consoling. “Christy, this is what I’ve learned: that my home is with you, and that I love it. And I can’t wait to be there with you. This has been coming over me for days, and tonight, I don’t know what’s happened, but it’s—irresistible. Next February when I can’t get warm, next March when it won’t stop raining, I’m going to kick myself for saying this, but I’m saying it anyway.” She smiled up into his amazed face. “What I’d like to do is go home.”

Christy laughed again, because his heart was making his chest tickle, and laughing seemed to be the only way to scratch it.

“You aren’t angry, are you? I guess we’d lose the deposit we gave the hotel in Rimini, and you wouldn’t get to see the Saint Francis temple or—”

“Don’t be an idiot,” he said tenderly. “I feel the same. I love it here—who wouldn’t—but frankly, we could’ve gone to Newcastle and I’d have loved that, too. Or the Hebrides in January. Anne, you are . . .” The right words eluded him. But she looked so expectant, he marshaled his wits and made an effort to say what he felt. “You are . . . my delight. When I think there’s no possibility that I could love you more or that you could be more lovable, you always surprise me. Always. You’d think I’d have learned by now, the lesson’s become so routine.”

“Oh, Christy.”

“You’ve changed my idea of how things are supposed to unfold in the world. This earthly realm.”

“How did I do that?”

“Well, this is supposed to be a vale of tears.”

“Is it?”

She was trying not to smile. He couldn’t blame her—it was impossible to be serious in this rare and blessed moment. But someday he would say it better, tell her what he really meant. “At the very least,” he plowed on, “it’s supposed to be a trial.”

“A trial? Is it really?”

“What it’s
not
supposed to be is heaven. That comes later, see? Earth now, heaven later.”

“I think I’ve got it.”

They put their arms around each other. “You scare me sometimes,” he said truthfully. “If I’m this happy now, what’s going to become of me later?”

“Christy, that is such a strange thing to say. Lucky for you, you’ve married the right woman, because I know exactly what you mean.” She gave his ear a soft kiss and pulled away. “We could stay another day or two if we want. Now that we know we’re leaving, there’s no real hurry, I guess.”