He caught her elbow and steadied her. The snow was still falling. It was deeper now than when he had first come outside. “When walking in snow or on ice, you know,” he told her, “you need to keep your center of gravity over your feet. You will slip less, and when you do, you will fall less.”
“Thank you,” she said, turning from the riverbank and moving into the trees, removing her elbow from his hand as she did so. “I can manage.”
As he had guessed, it was not a dark night. It was a good thing too since he had not thought of bringing a lantern with him.
“Now I can go back to Montreal, where I belong,” he said. “And I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I live there from choice. There will be no more fear of coming here, though I will not come again. You can live in peace here with your daughters. You need not consider remarriage unless you really wish to do so.”
“No,” she said.
“We can be free of each other.” The foolish words kept spilling from his mouth, though they seemed to have come from nowhere. Had his brain really processed them? Did it really believe them? Didhereally believe them? Did she?
“Yes,” she said.
This whole strange episode was like some sort of bizarre dream. He could scarcely believe what had just happened. There had been no thought behind it, no reasoning, no sense. The strangest thing of all, perhaps, was that the blame, or the explanation, could not even be laid at the door of passion. It had not started as a passionate encounter—though it had very quickly become that.
Had some part of his mind really believed that if he could just bed her he would then be able to forget her?
“All this might have been avoided,” he said irritably, “if one of your daughters had only been a son.”
She stopped walking suddenly, and he almost collided with her from behind. He had said and done some remarkably stupid things during the past couple of hours, but this really surpassed everything.
“Forgive me,” he said. “Your daughters are perfect. They really are, Christina.”
“I had two sons,” she said. “The one was born early and never breathed. The other was fully developed and seemed perfect. I held him for maybe an hour until he died. Strangely, Gerard, for the weeks and even months that followed the deaths of both my sons, I did not once dwell upon the annoyance of the fact that you were still Gilbert’s heir.”
Oh, hell!
He set his hands on her shoulders. She shrugged, but she did not shake him off. He knew so little of her life for the past ten and a half years. She had been a wife. She had borne four children and known the agony of losing two of them. She had been widowed.
“What I said was unpardonable,” he said. It was. He could not ask her forgiveness again.
“Gilbert never loved them,” she said softly. “Rachel and Tess, I mean. They were merelygirls.”
He squeezed her shoulders tightly and drew her back against him. She rested her head against his shoulder for a few moments. Her eyes were closed, he could see.
“I have not had much to do with children,” he said. “I do not have an easy rapport with them. But I have an affection for both of yours, Christina. You have done well with them.”
She drew away from him and trudged on ahead of him. Soon they drew clear of the trees and could walk side by side. They did so, not talking, though when he took her elbow again to help keep her feet in the soft snow, she did not withdraw it as she had earlier.
He had held her naked in his arms, he thought. He had been inside her body. Twice. That had been the maddest thing of all. Passion had driven them fast through that first encounter, the one that he had told her immediately afterward had finished everything. And then some time after that, after they had lain quietly side by side, not talking, not touching, not sleeping, he had turned to her again, and she had turned to him, and they had come together in a slow coupling, almost—almost as if they had been making love.
He knew her thoroughly in the biblical sense. And suddenly he felt that he knew her as a person far better than he had during the week and a half of being at Thornwood—or at least that therewasa person to be known, not just the girl he had once loved. Her brief mention of the two sons who had not survived had given him a powerful awareness of the fact that she hadlivedthe past ten years, just as he had. She had suffered—and perhaps in other ways than just the loss of two babies. From what he could piece together of her marriage to Gilbert, it had not been a happy union. And yet she had come through those years with her dignity intact. Margaret and his aunt loved her and deferred to her judgment. The servants respected her. And she was a warm and loving mother.
“You will be marrying Miss Campbell, then, I suppose?” she said, breaking the silence abruptly. “She will be the wise choice if you are returning to Canada. Miss Gaynor would not take kindly to being taken away from England.”
But he had realized something that perhaps she had not thought of yet. “I will not be able to sail until spring,” he said, “though I will probably return to London next week. Before I leave England, you will know if you are with child or not. If you are, then I will be marrying you, Christina.”
Even in the darkness he could see that he had startled her. She turned her head sharply in his direction. She drew breath to speak but said nothing. She skidded in the snow, and he gave her the full support of his arm. They were very close to the house, he could see.
“I will not be offering for anyone over Christmas,” he said. “You will not be trying to fix the interest of either Luttrell or Geordie Stewart. It may not be finished between us after all, Christina. It may be just beginning.”
She shook her head but still said nothing.
“It seems as if we have been gone a month,” he said as they approached a side door of the house. “In reality I suppose it is only a couple of hours. I hope at least we are not late for dinner.”
He held the door open, and she preceded him through it without a word.
It would be the final irony, he thought as she hurried on ahead of him, if he had got her with child. In Pinky’s hut, where he had spent some of his happiest hours. At Christmas time, when one’s thoughts turned to children and love and the impossible.
