He wanted her. As he had wanted her every day since the last time. As he would surely want her every day for the rest of his life. Not just with this urgent sexual need but in every way he could imagine. God, he wanted her.
“Harry,” she murmured. A few moments later she said it again, but with more awareness. “Harry.” She had got her hands between them and was exerting enough pressure against his chest to make him aware that she wanted him to step back. Yet she was not pushing hard or looking either upset or angry. Her eyes huge and dreamy, she gazed into his, surely with a longing to match his own.
He slid his hands to her hips, took a half step back, and forced himself to smile at her.
“You see,” she said, “I thought we could be lovers and have some pleasure together. It was totally naïve of me. For when it happened there was far more than just simple pleasure. There was a whole explosion of physical sensations and powerful emotions. It was very foolish of me not to have understood that before it happened.”
But how could shenothave realized it? She had been married. For a number of years. To a man with whom she had admitted to having fallen headlong in love. Surely she had learned that any sexual relationship would bring with it more than just simple pleasure. Unless … He had been fishing earlier when he had asked why she had not had children. And for a moment, before giving him a noncommittal answer, she had frozen.
“There was all the terriblecarnality,” she added.
Terrible?Its literal meaning wasarousing terror. Did she mean it literally? Had he brought her terror rather than pleasure that night? Andcarnality? She had not expected it? She had expected only a superficial sort of pleasure?
“I want to be free, Harry,” she told him as he dropped his arms to his sides and took another half step back from her. “It is what I decided after Isaiah died, and I have not wavered in that decision since then.” Her frown deepened. “It would be foolish to waver now just because of all this turmoil. I will not be forced into doing something I do not want to do.”
He held out his arms to the sides. “You are free, Lydia,” he said, though his heart—or something else inside him— was heavy as he spoke the words. “You do not have to let yourself be bullied by Mrs. Piper and her followers. And you certainly will not be bullied by me.”
Snowball was yipping and bouncing and straining on the lead, frantic to give chase to whatever wild creature was cracking twigs somewhere among the trees on the other side of the path. Lydia turned away from him and unwound the dog’s lead from the branch and continued along the path with her.
Harry fell into step on Lydia’s other side, his hands clasped at his back. Love could not be either grasping or possessive if it was to be worthy of the name, he told himself. Yet it took every ounce of his willpower not to pour pleas and persuasion into her ears. She had chosen freedom and independence after her husband’s death, and she had remained steadfast in that choice ever since, even though she had admitted to occasional loneliness and the dream of taking a lover—him. Even though she had actually done so. Once.
They walked in silence again. But a little farther along there was a wooden seat on one side of the path, the only one on the whole walk. The gardeners always did a good job of keeping it reasonably clean and free from both rot and moss. There was a gap in the trees ahead of it and something of a view diagonally across the eastern corner of the house to the summerhouse in the near distance and an edge of the village beyond it and a bit of countryside beyond that. It was a pleasant place to sit in the summer, either with a book or without.
Lydia stopped by it, though she did not move around it to sit down. Instead she grasped the back with both hands, the dog’s lead still in one of them.
“You asked me why I do not have children,” she said.
He ought not to have asked.
“You do not owe me an explanation,” he said.
And suddenly he did not want to hear of disappointments stretching over months and years or of barrenness or—worse—of miscarriages. He was about to change the subject and point out his cousin Jessica, who was approaching the summerhouse with Gabriel and Abby and Gil. But she resumed speaking before he could do so.
“I did not have children,” she said, “because there was never any possibility of its happening. Ever.”
He closed his mouth. What the devil was that supposed to mean?It means exactly what you think it means, Harry. He had not been imagining things that night.
She was staring downward, her eyes directed at the ground in front of the seat. If she had noticed there was a view from here, she was showing no awareness of it.
“He told me he loved me,” she said. “Before we were married, that is. And after too, a number of times. All the rest of his life, in fact. I believe he meant it. Isaiah did not tell lies. It was just not the sort of love I thought he meant. He explained to me on our … on our wedding day. Wedding night, actually. He wanted me to be more than a wife, he told me, that burning ardor in his eyes and his voice that had so attracted me. He wanted me to be his helpmeet. It was the word he always used of me after that. He wanted us to be servants of the Lord together. He wanted us to devote our time and energies, the pledge we had made to each other that morning,our whole lives, in service to the Lord. If there was one thing he admired about the Roman faith, he told me, it was the celibacy of its priesthood. But he believed that actually our priesthood could be even better than that because it could have both a man and a woman, both the male and female sensibility, in service together as a married couple.”
Good God.
“He wanted us to dedicate ourselves to a celibate marriage,” she said. “In fact, he had decided that we would.”
There were a few moments of utter silence. Well, not quite. That robin, or perhaps one of its mates, was singing its heart out from somewhere among the trees not far off. A distant shriek of children at play rose from the front of the house.
“He did not discuss this with you before your marriage?” he asked. “Even though it was something that would drastically affect the whole of your life?”
“Isaiah neverdiscussedanything,” she said. “He decided and then he told. With all people and in all things. He spoke and acted out of … love and devotion to God. He spoke what he firmly and sincerely believed. But he would not brook opposition. He never had to. No one ever argued with him. It was because of his … charisma.”
“Youdid not argue?” he asked.
“No, of course not,” she said. “I was young and naïve. I had grown up under the benevolent despotism of my father and brothers. I had that very morning—on my wedding day, that is—vowed to honor and obey the man I had married. The man Ilovedwith my whole heart. And I do not think I fully grasped at the time what it would mean. When I did, I … Well, one did not argue with Isaiah. I thought he must be right. I tried to make his vision of life and service my own. I thought my … longings were mere selfishness. Even sin.”
She lowered her chin and wept.
Harry took the lead from her hand and wound it about the lower bar along the back of the seat. He took Lydia in his arms and pulled free the ribbons of her bonnet. He tossed the bonnet onto the seat and held her face against his shoulder.
