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“I promised myself I would leave if you didn’t answer my first call. I didn’t want to be…”
Alicia shushed him with girlish energy, charged with the ecstatic life that seemed to be Laurence’s constant gift to her. “Where are we going, exactly?”
His white teeth glittered even under the shade of the trees that lined the path. “Somewhere for a midnight snack.”
The moonlight was so brilliant, the lantern proved fully unnecessary as Alicia followed Laurence’s sure steps over hills and around bends in the path. As they continued to walk, enjoying the silence that surrounded them save the soft pads of their feet on the rough ground, Alicia thought she began to recognize where they were headed. It all seemed like a dream, though, as though they had stepped into a country she had visited within her own mind at night.
When at last she sighted dark shapes in the trees around them, though, she was sure she knew where they were. “I hope you didn’t bring me here because you need more apples picked?” Alicia said with more good humour than she really felt. “These conditions are less than ideal for farm labour, even for as skilled a worker as I.”
Laurence chuckled gamely but did not break his stride until at long last they had reached the top of a hill.
This is where it all really began,thought Alicia, looking out at the explosion of stars that winked down at the black-blue fields in the distance. She turned her gaze down to the grass at their feet.This is where we sat when Laurence and I kissed for the first time. Where it all finally started to go right.
Or wrong, she amended with a sombre swallow.
“Alicia,” said Laurence, surprising her. When she looked up at him, she gasped at the sight before her. Just as she had been convinced her picture of the man in her mind was an accurate one, she saw him in an entirely new light and wondered once again at the perfect symmetry of his pointed cheekbones, the immense breadth of his chest, the ethereal glistening of his shining blue eyes.
Whoisthis man?she marvelled. In the night like this, he seemed perfectly a creature of dreams or a faerie come to bewitch her from his wondrous realm. This image brought a brief smile to Alicia’s face—being visited by such a creature was a wonderful thing, and none the less for the fact that the faerie would inevitably have to fly away.
“I wanted to say…goodbye,” said Laurence, startling her once more with the deep resonance of his words. “Here, where we can talk without having to worry about anyone or anything else.”
Still half-lost in the sense of being in a dream, Alicia could not stop herself from raising her voice in anger. “Goodbye? As if I have just been a relation paying a visit?” She felt white-hot tears squeeze out and roll down her cheeks, but she did not stop. “What good is it to say goodbye to one another if I will never see you again?”
Laurence’s features twisted with frustration. “What would you have me say? Would you have me tell you that you no longer need to worry about your sister or your family or obligations? That we shall be together forever when you know that can’t be so?”
Alicia opened her mouth to reply, to tell him that he could ask her to stay or tell her he would come for her. But all that came out was an inhuman wail of misery, and then Laurence was all around her, holding her in his powerful arms and shaking with tears as they rocked back and forth.
“I want to tell you those things,” he said softly.
“And I want to hear them. But I understand why you can’t…why you won’t…”
Words suddenly felt as restrictive and unnecessary to her as a hair shirt, and with a powerful rush of emotion she reached up her neck just as he leaned down to her, erasing all there was in the world with a kiss.
The kiss was neither tentative like their first kiss on this hill, nor aching and languid as their kiss by the waterfall. Nor was it the hot, frantic kiss of the library. Still, as each of those kisses had been the best thing ever to befall Alicia, so too was this greater than all previous kisses.
Since Laurence had come into her life and broken the dam of “I want” within her, Alicia felt a flood of desires wash over her, now more than ever. These were strange, powerful longings, ones she had never even considered before this moment, yet they were all-consuming in their intensity. She wanted to never stop kissing him, to strip off her clothes in the pale moonlight, to push him to the ground and give herself to him as fully as any woman can be with a man. She wanted to spend all night with him, and all the nights to come, and without speaking a word she knew Laurence wanted the very same thing.
But the world was too cruel for such things. And that kiss, like all kisses, had to end.
“Do you…” Alicia sniffled, still locked tightly in his embrace on the grass. She paused to look up into his eyes, searching for comfort in their deep blue recesses. “Do you think it has all been worth it? All the hurt, all the loss… Have we been complete fools, allowing ourselves to grow to care for one another knowing we can never be together?”
He squeezed her tighter as he kissed the top of her head sweetly. “I think we may have been. But I would…even with everything that comes with losing you? I would rather be a fool than a wise man who never had the chance to spend his heart on you.”
“You mean it’s really worth it?”
Laurence only said “Yes,” before pulling her in for a tender kiss on the lips.
A crystalline tear dropped from Alicia’s eye as she kissed him back. For the first time since she had known Laurence, she was not sure she believed what he said. But she kissed him back anyway, desperate to make it true under the blanket of stars.
* * *
For the first time since arriving in Dunwood, the weather that morning was dark and grey, a blanket of clouds pulled across the sky and dampening even the calls of the birds.
Alicia blinked, trying to orient herself. Time was passing as though in a dream—she found herself standing outside amid a small circle of people, Herbert and Dennis loading the bags onto the carriage.
She flinched as she felt her hands being taken, then relaxed as she saw it was Mary-Anne, looking at her with great fondness.
“We shall miss you, Miss Ramsbury,” said Mary-Anne. “I shall certainly look you up when I return to London, and I hope we may write one another in the meantime.”
