“You will want as much daylight as possible for your journey,” she said. “You must be on your way. I shall walk here for a while longer. Good-bye.”
“I have always found talking—talking from inside myself, from my heart—more difficult to do than anything else in this life,” he said. “I was taught that I must keep all emotions and all that is personal locked away from anyone else’s eyes, that it is unmanly to wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve, so to speak. I was a good pupil. Perhaps that was because my father died when I was fifteen and I became head of a large family, with responsibilities for huge properties and innumerable dependents. I was taught to be strong. But I have realized lately that there was a flaw in my education.”
He paused, but she said nothing. She stood facing away from him, her head bowed.
“I will go away,” he said, “if you still wish it after we have finished what has been started here this morning. But I know that I will forever blame myself if I do not talk to you first, if I do not do what I was taught never to do and what I find almost impossible to do.”
“I have forgotten how to talk,” she said quietly. “I knew how once. I talked too much. I revealed too much of myself. But everything of importance about myself was pushed deep inside, even beyond my awareness, so long ago that I am not sure I can ever talk again.”
“I wanted you from the moment I first saw you,” he said. “You were like the sunshine. You were everything I was not. I followed all the rules. I courted you as a man is supposed to court a woman. I expected that after a suitable time I would offer for you and be accepted and live happily ever after with you. Until Hastings came along with his charm and his seductive wiles and I saw all the sunshine and all the smiles and all the encouragement that I had expected for myself going to him instead. I suppose I was conceited. Or perhaps just woefully ignorant. I had never courted any woman before.”
Her head dipped lower.
“And then you ran away with him,” he said, “despite the fact that I had been presumptuous enough to warn you against him and despite the fact that I knew your father and brothers to be wise to his game. You went away with him.”
“I did not.” Her hands had come up to cover her face. She spoke very low. “No, I did not.”
He waited for her to continue.
“I was very foolish,” she said. “I encouraged him despite Papa and Ernest and Algie—and despite your warning. I encouraged him because you were cold and silent and I wanted to make you jealous, to goad you into doing or saying something, though I did not think it was possible. You seemed a man totally without feelings. But I had played with fire. He was angry when I refused to elope with him and when I started shunning his company. I became a little frightened of him, I believe. And then there was that evening at Vauxhall.” She paused for a moment. “A lady, a woman, came and whispered to me when everyone else in the box was distracted by something else. She told me that you were waiting beyond the dancing floor and wished to solicit my hand for a dance. I was so foolishly naive. It was something you never would have done. But I so wanted it to be you that I did not hesitate. I went.”
His eyes had widened. He stood rooted to the spot. Patch was chasing her tail somewhere to his right, he noted irrelevantly without turning his head.
“It was Lieutenant Hastings, of course,” she said. “He tried to pretend for two whole days that it was not abduction, but it was. I told him I would not marry him even when we reached Scotland, and I told him I would screech the roof down if he touched me on either of the two nights I spent in company with him. But he would not take me back. And then you came.”
He found that he had been holding his breath.
“But why did you not tell me?” he asked, breaking a long silence. “When I came up to you, why did you let me think the worst of you? My God, I would have killed him.”
“How could I tell you?” Her voice was higher-pitched than usual. “How could I admit to you that I had gone running to you when I thought you had merely sent a messenger for me in a most improper manner? You had never expressed any real interest in me. You were always very correct and very proper and very cold.”
“Katherine...” he began. He thought he might cry after all. “You should have told me. But why did you refuse me when we arrived back in London? Why? It makes no sense to me.”
“I was so happy when you came for me,” she said. “I thought that it must mean you cared. I thought you would say so. And then there were the first day and the first night. I had thought you cold before. Now you were pure ice. And then the second night. In my naivete I thought it was love. I was not really aware that that could be done without love. I thought that finally the nightmare was all over, that finally ... But the next day you were colder and more silent than ever. You cared not one jot for me when I had made a fool of myself for you. The whipping Papa had promised me and this—” she gestured about her “—were preferable to marrying you when you felt nothing for me except perhaps contempt.”
“Katherine.” He had taken a step toward her. He was whispering. “It was love. What happened that night was love. But I was so ashamed ... And I was so uncomfortable and so unhappy with the knowledge that you had preferred him but that you were going to be forced to marry me. If I had only known. Oh, God, if I had only known.”
Her hands were still over her face. He set his hands on her shoulders, passing one of them in front of her, and turned her. But she did not take her hands away or lift her head.
“It is what happens when one person sends no messages at all and the other sends all the wrong messages,” he said. “No communication takes place.”
She said nothing.
“I decided to wait three years,” he said. “I thought that perhaps in that time your love for him would have cooled and it would seem the reasonable thing to do to marry me. I was not going to try to force your feelings. I thought that perhaps you would grow to care for me if I treated you kindly. Circumstances kept me away the year before last and last year. This year I came.”
She nodded.
“I have loved you every moment of every day for five years,” he said. “I have lived for this visit. I have lived on hope. I do not know what I will do if that hope is finally killed. I will not know how to live without it.”
“You were so cold,” she said. “Always so very cold. I never understood why I loved you.”
He clasped her wrists and drew her hands away from her face. She lifted it to look into his, and now that look in her eyes was naked and unmistakable yearning.
“Not always,” he said. “You must remember that night, Katherine. You cannot have forgotten. That was the real me. I had burst past the barriers of my training. And this is the real me. I have never talked like this. It is incredibly difficult. Perhaps that is why I spent all of yesterday carving spoons, until I finally produced that sorry specimen. It still seemed easier to do than talking.” He laughed suddenly, more with nervousness than happiness.
“Oh,” she said, her eyes widening, “I have never seen you smile before.”
But he could not hold the smile. “I must ask it once again,” he said. “The last time I will ask, Katherine, I promise. Will you marry me? Please will you marry me? Not because it is the sensible thing to do. Not because it will be an escape from this place—this place is actually rather lovely. And not because you have needs or because you want children. But because I am offering my heart? Will you?”
