“It surely is,” she said. “Impossible. More than three decades have gone by. I amold.”
“I take exception to that word,” he told her. “For if you are old, then I am older. Three months older, I seem to recall. We are not old, and even if we are, we are notdead. Only in that circumstance would I be forced to agree with you that this is impossible. Though perhaps I would be unable then either to agree or to disagree. I would be dead. We arealive, Matilda.”
“But this sort of thing is for young people,” she protested.
“Slinking into the trees to set our arms about each other’s waist?” he said. “Embracing?”
“Oh, not that,” she said hastily. “It would be most unseemly.”
And she sounded so like a prim, middle-aged spinster that he smiled into the darkness. He loved her primness. But only because there was also her passion. And passion very definitely lurked within her. It had shown itself briefly during their kiss on top of the pagoda. And in some of her looks and words since—this most wonderful of wonderful evenings, for example.
“Most,” he agreed.
“You are laughing at me,” she said.
“Yes.”
She turned her face toward his, though he doubted she could see his laughing eyes. “That is unkind.”
“Is it, my love?” he asked her.
“Charles!”Her voice seemed half agony, half outrage.
“Do you not want me to call you that?” he asked. “My love?”
“Ch-a-a-arles.”
He stopped walking. There was a little open-fronted rain shelter in a small clearing to the right of the path, a bench inside it, a lantern suspended from the branch of a tree before it to illumine the interior. He led her toward it, though he did not sit down with her. He faced her instead and laced his fingers with hers at their sides, as he had done at the pagoda. He could see her face dimly, as she would be able to see his. She was gazing wide-eyed at him.
“That was no answer,” he said. “Do you not understand that is what you are to me—my love?”
“Oh,” she said, “you cannot possibly love me, Charles.”
“I do not see why not,” he said. “And apparently it is possible. I have tested the idea and can find no flaw in it. Do you love me, Matilda?”
He watched her lick her lips, lower her gaze, first to his mouth, then to his neckcloth. “Of course I do,” she said, sounding almost cross.
“You cannot possibly,” he told her, and her eyes shot up to look accusingly into his again.
“I never stopped,” she said. “Do you think I did—or could? I followed all the events of your life from afar and lived for the few glimpses I had of you down the years. I bled a little inside every time I heard something about you that reaffirmed my conviction that I had done the right thing by refusing to have anything more to do with you. The pain dimmed as time passed until there was almost no pain at all. The memories dimmed until they became almost unconscious, lost somewhere in the recesses of my mind. But always, always, I have known that I love you, ridiculous as it seemed to be, ridiculous as it would have seemed to anyone who had ever suspected.”
He had turned very still inside. His love for her must have lain dormant in him for more than half his life, but he had given it almost no thought since a year or so after she had rejected him. He had givenherno thought, or almost none. Yet his love must not have completely died—or why had it been revived so easily now in all its intensity? Why was it that after such a brief time he was surer than he had been of anything else in his life that he loved this woman who was his age and looked it and dressed without glamour or obvious allure? Yet to him she seemed the most beautiful woman on earth. Why was it he had fallen in love only twice in his life, and with the same woman? It shook him to the core that even though she was the one who had rejected him all those years ago, she had remained true to him ever since. For he knew she must have had numerous chances of marriage to other men, at least during the ten years or so after him.
“Matilda.” He sighed and drew her to him, one arm about her waist, the other about her shoulders. “You put me to shame with your steadfast fidelity.”
“But I am the one who sent you away,” she said.
“For reasons that seemed sound to you at the time and possibly were,” he said. “How can either of us be sure I would not have turned out just as I did even if we had married? I do notbelieveI would have, but I cannot be certain. Perhaps we needed to wait until we were older. We might have had a very unhappy marriage if we had wed when we were young.”
“And we might not have,” she said, infinite sadness in her voice.
“You said earlier that regrets are pointless,” he said, resting his forehead against hers. “You were right.”
“Yes,” she agreed.
And he kissed her.
She kissed like someone who had never kissed before, with slightly pursed lips and stiffened limbs—even though they had kissed at Kew. But there he had not had his arms about her. Perhaps she felt more threatened this time. He raised his head.
