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FOULMIRE PRIORY, SUSSEX, AUTUMN 1685
James Avery ordered his carriage to the door of Foulmire Priory when the stable clock struck twelve; rebuffed and offended. She could not have been more clear that he could not live with her at Foulmire. He would not invite her to his home in Northallerton, or even to his greathouse in London. She had laughed at the thought of his heart being buried with her. She refused to speak of love; she had grown old and heartless, she had never had an education—and now she had no wisdom either.
The servants laid out small ale and the interminable ham and bread at the parlor table. When he heard her light step on the stair, he rose from the table for courtesy to greet her and lead her to a seat at the fire. But when he saw the pallor of her face he was filled with tenderness.
“Was I wrong to come to you? Was it too much for you?”
She smiled up at him, as if she were glad of his touch on her hand, and the way he put a cushion behind her back. “Nay, I slept like a baby,” she said. “It’s such a treat to take a nap in the day, and not be up at dawn to work! Of all the things that have come to me in this life, to have a comfortable bed and good linen is the greatest!”
Every other woman he had ever known had risen late and rested before dressing for dinner. “Your life hasn’t been easy,” he said. “I will never forgive myself that it was not easier.”
“Not so, I’ve been lucky,” she said.
“I’m glad that our parting didn’t ruin your life,” he said, thinking that it had.
“It didn’t ruin my life. It took a turn, that was all.”
“Then we can part as friends?”
She nodded. “We are friends.”
“It may be that I don’t see you again before I die,” he warned her.
“I understand,” she said steadily, as if death were not a terror.
“Can we part as lovers? I will think of you on my deathbed as the only woman I ever loved, the great love of my life.”
She sighed, as if she were sorry to refuse him even this. “Not really, James. For it’s not true.”
“I loved you then, and I love you now! With all my heart!”
“It wasn’t all your heart,” she said very quietly. “In that moment, when you should have stepped forward and claimed me as your lover, and the child that I carried as your own, you did not love me then, James. In those long moments, you loved someone more than me.”
“No one!” he exclaimed, startled. “No one but you! Ever!”
“Yourself,” she pointed out. “Your honor? Your self-regard? I wentto trial by water rather than shame you. But you let them drown me, rather than own me.”
He was appalled that she had thought this of him, for all these years. “I was so wrong! I was so mistaken, Beloved. I was so young, and such a fool! But you said you forgave me? I thought I was forgiven?”
“I do forgive you; I gladly forgive you. Who am I to judge?” she asked him. “It’s not my forgiveness you need.”
“Then whose?” he cried out. “Who did I injure more than you?”
“Yourself.”
“Forgive myself?” He had always thought of her as an ignorant woman. Now he was as baffled as if she were a philosopher.
“I loved a young man who was ready to give up the world for me; but then—when it mattered—he wasn’t there,” she told him. “The young man, that day at the tide mill, wasn’t the man I loved. Perhaps he was never real at all, and I dreamed him, and put it on you.” She showed him a rueful half smile. “I’m sorry for that. It’s not fair to forge a dream of someone, and then press it—like a seal into hot wax—into another’s face.”
He shook his head; he was completely bewildered.
“Maybe that dream was one we both had?” she went on. “Perhaps you dreamed of a young man like that, dreamed of being him, dreamed that you were him? Perhaps the tragedy—the real tragedy—is that you weren’t able to be him when your trial came. When a man like him would’ve faced down shame, he wasn’t there. It was only you. And you couldn’t rise to it.”
She looked inquiringly into his face, to see if he understood her, to see if he heard the truth of what she was saying. “Perhaps you need to forgive yourself, James, for not being him. And forgive me, for asking too much of you. And when you’ve forgiven, then you can let him—the dream-him, and the dream-me, and the dream life that we didn’t have—slide away into sleep.”
“The sleep of death,” he said bitterly.
“Perhaps we shall dream of each other in the sleep of death,” sheagreed pleasantly. “Perhaps in death, we shall meet and be our dream selves, our best selves.”
