AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘What’s there?’ James asked. ‘A treasure?’
‘Of a sort,’ Alastair replied. ‘You’ll see.’
‘Let’s hurry!’ James cried, grabbing his hand and urging him forward.
‘Steady on, wait for your mama,’ Alastair said with a laugh. ‘Ladies must walk at a more dignified pace. Their long skirts hinder them, you see.’
‘Do they?’ Diana said. ‘Well, not this lady.’ Raising her hem above her ankles, she took off at a trot while James, giggling, sped after her.
Chuckling himself, Alastair followed.
The trail twisted and turned among the trees before, several minutes later, it opened into a clearing. As they approached, the muted gurgle of water over stone announced the presence of a brook at the far side.
James rushed over. ‘Mama, how pretty the water is! Can I go in?’
‘Not yet,’ Alastair said. ‘First we need to find the treasure, and you’ll frighten it away if you splash.’
Putting a finger to his lips to signal the child to silence, he took his hand and led him along the bank to where the stream broadened into a shallow pool. Along its edges, several frogs swam lazily.
‘Have you ever caught a frog?’ Alastair whispered.
The boy’s eyes widened. ‘No. Can you show me how?’
‘You have to be quick. Watch.’
Stealthily Alastair approached, careful not to let his shadow fall over the pool. After choosing his target, he crouched down, and with a quick lightning thrust, snatched up the unsuspecting amphibian.
The frog squirmed and wiggled, trying to escape Alastair’s grasp. ‘Do you want to hold it?’ he asked the boy.
‘Oh, yes!’ James breathed.
Alastair took the boy’s hand and wrapped it around the struggling frog. ‘Careful, he’s slippery. You must hold him firmly, but not too tight.’
‘Oooh, he’s soft—and squishy!’ James exclaimed. ‘Mama, look! I have a frog!’
‘So I see,’ she said with a smile.
‘Can I take it back to the nursery?’
‘Unlike your puppy, who would love to join you in your bed, the frog prefers his pond,’ Alastair said. ‘We’ll leave him here—so you can catch him again next time.’
‘Do you want to catch one, Mama?’ James asked, motioning towards the frog’s fellows who, while hopping a safe distance away, still remained in the shallows.
‘Ladies don’t like to get their shoes muddy—or their hands squishy,’ Alastair told him.
Diana raised her eyebrows. ‘Well, this lady isn’t so pudding-hearted. I’ll have you know that, on plant-gathering expeditions with my father—your grandpapa,’ she told James, ‘the one who taught me to draw—I’ve caught any number of frogs.’
‘Really, Mama? You know how?’ James asked, awed.
‘Really?’ Alastair echoed, grinning at her.
She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘I think I recognise a challenge when I hear one. Very well. Attention, Monsieur Grenouille!’ Pushing up the sleeves of her pelisse, she walked to the edge of the pool.
‘Don’t fall in,’ Alastair advised.
Ignoring him, she manoeuvred around a tree stump and crouched behind a big rock, eyeing her prey. Then, with a speed equal to Alastair’s, she lunged forward, capturing a fat bullfrog before he could leap away.
‘You did it, Mama!’ James shrieked, almost dropping his own frog in his excitement.
‘Bravo!’ Alastair applauded. ‘I’m impressed.’
‘Would you like to hold it?’ Diana asked Alastair in dulcet tones belied by the twinkle in her eye. When he demurred, she said, ‘Shall we put them back, James, so they may swim for a while? Being held is very tiring for a frog.’
‘Must I?’
‘You can chase another one later. Why don’t we sit here on the bank and watch them?’
With a sigh, James carefully lowered his frog to the water, where it leapt free and swam away. Diana pulled him to sit in front of her, smoothing his hair.
‘Was this like the time you told me about,’ he asked, leaning against her, ‘when you went looking for plants with your papa and fell in the brook?’
‘Yes, it was very like this.’ To Alastair’s look of enquiry, she explained, ‘We’d gone hunting marsh irises. When I found one, I got so excited I slipped and fell in. Papa came to pull me out, scolding—but he slipped and fell in, too.’ She smiled. ‘We both started laughing, splashed water at each other, and then he wrapped me in his coat and carried me home for tea.’
‘Well, if you fall in today, I promise to wrap you in my coat and carry you back,’ Alastair said.
‘Me, too?’ James asked.
‘Of course, you, too.’
‘Good.’ James snuggled back against his mother, who handed him a pebble to throw into the stream. ‘You’re Robbie’s Uncle Alastair, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Alastair answered, puzzled by the question. Surely the boy hadn’t forgotten him? ‘We went for Sally Lunn cakes in Bath, you’ll remember.’
‘Oh, yes. They were very good. I just wondered, are you anyone’s papa, too? ’Cause you’d be the bestest one. You know about cakes and soldiers and frogs and everything.’
Alastair swallowed hard. I might have been yours. ‘No, I’m not a papa...yet.’
‘Mama says my papa’s gone to Heaven and I won’t see him any more.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I imagine you miss him.’
The boy shrugged. ‘I never saw him much. Minnie said he was a great man and had much important business. He didn’t have time for soldiers or cakes or frogs.’
‘Then he missed something much more important,’ Alastair said sharply, his bitterness towards the Duke expanding to include the outrage of a little boy ignored. ‘Spending time with you.’
James gazed up at him. ‘You think I’m important?’
‘Very important.’
The boy’s face broke into a smile. ‘Good. ’Cause I think you’re important, too. Isn’t he, Mama?’
Diana looked over at him, her expression tender. ‘He is indeed.’
For an instant, the stream, the child, the bird chatter and brook gurgle faded. All Alastair could see, could feel, was Diana, smiling at him, her face no longer tense and guarded, but open, almost innocent. As he remembered it from all those years ago.
‘Mama, look!’
Startled out of his reverie, Alastair watched the boy scramble down the bank. ‘Is this the plant you found with your papa?’ he asked Diana, pointing to a wildflower covered in tiny white blossoms.
‘No, marsh irises bloom in the spring. That’s a wood aster.’
‘It’s so pretty! It looks like stars!’
The words seemed to spring from somewhere deep within him. ‘All the wonder of a starry sky/held in two small hands.’
‘Lovely,’ Diana said. ‘Is that from a poem?’
He shrugged. ‘Perhaps the beginning of one.’
‘I hadn’t thought to ask how your writing has gone. Interrupted by the army, I would imagine, but I should think you’d have completed several volumes of verse by now.’
‘Actually, I haven’t written since... Not for a long time.’
‘Well, you should. You’re a wonderful poet! If you considered it a travesty that I haven’t painted for years, it’s even more so for you not to be writing.’
‘Can we pick some of the flowers? For the bouquets?’ James was asking.
‘That would be lovely. Maybe some of those ferns, too.’
As he watched them gather the plants, Diana looking as carefree as he remembered her from long ago, he thought the day could not be more perfect.
A long-forgotten warmth and tenderness expanded his chest until he felt he might burst with the fullness of it. Thick and sweet as honey, it suffused him, seeping into every cold and bitter crevice of his soul.
The intensity of it brought tears to his eyes.
With a sudden shock, he recognised the emotion: joy. Something he had not experienced in all the years since Diana had jilted him to marry Graveston.
In another sweeping flash of insight, with the words to follow the lines he’d quoted churning and bubbling beneath the surface, he realised that he’d not given up poetry because it was juvenile, or had no place in the army. That inclination, like joy, had died when he lost Diana.
Mesmerised, he watched mother and child, awed by the wonder of it, swept away by the power of the emotion gripping him. The sun seemed warmer, the crystalline blue of the sky brighter, the breeze on his forehead softer. As if all his life, from then until now, had been lived under clouds, until Diana returned to dissipate them and bring him once again into full sunlight.
He’d known that Diana’s years with Graveston had taught her to lock away her feelings. But he saw now that without her, he, too, had bottled up or suppressed his emotions. The restlessness, the unresolved anger, the fact that in no place and with no other woman had he found fulfilment, were mute testimony to a soul in bondage, waiting for the one catalyst that could set him free.
