He grinned at her. “You have been learning words in my absence,” he said. “And learning them wrongly. O-o-o, not ah. Not.”
“O-o-o,” she said, obediently lifting her jaw a little higher. “Not yet.” She felt her throat quickly with one hand. Yes, the vibrations were there. It was not so difficult after all to produce sound. It was almost, she had thought when practicing before the mirror in her room, as if she remembered...
He sat on the grass a short distance from her easel, but in such a position that he could not see her painting. He reclined sideways on one elbow and plucked a blade of grass to set between his teeth.
She thought at first that she would not be able to concentrate with him sitting so close. She expected him to be restless, curious. But he was as he had been last night when they had stood together outside the summerhouse. He was still and relaxed. He was very like the soul partner she had always dreamed of having. After a minute or two she forgot about him again with her conscious thoughts and found that at last her brush was speaking the meaning that had been lodged deep within her.
He was gazing off down the hill when she looked at him again. He seemed peaceful. She stood gazing at him for a while, enjoying the luxury of watching unobserved.
“Now,” she said at last, forming the word carefully.
He did not correct her pronunciation this time. He merely looked up at her, smiled, and got to his feet, then looked at her painting for a long time in silence, his expression unreadable. She looked for ridicule or amusement or even simple puzzlement, but she saw none of them.
“Everything is horizontal this time,” he said, also signing with his hands—he was doing that more often, she noticed, making up new and easily interpreted signs, as if he had decided that it was unfair to expect her always to listen to and speak his language when visual communication was better attuned to the workings of her mind than verbal—“instead of vertical as in the other painting I saw. Everything stretches sideways rather than upward, with the colors of fields and sky intermingling. Not fields down here and sky up there, but all part of one another. Explain to me, Emmy. What have you seen that I have not? I envy your ability to see with an inner eye.”
She showed him with her hands and with her bare feet and with her expressive face that the earth was beneath them, the nurturing component of life. Soil and grass and crops. It was through the earth, she attempted to demonstrate, that one must learn all there was to learn about the mystery of life and growth and measureless time and patience. And love and peace too. It was not up there, as she had thought before and told him before. The meaning of it all was not up there, beyond one’s grasp, always to be yearned for, never to be attained. It was all here and now, if one only recognized it and accepted it. Not in the future, but now. Not in the distance, but here, within one’s grasp. She tried to tell him in words too because she knew she was not communicating quite clearly.
“Naht—not there,” she said, pointing upward. “Here. Now.”
“Emmy.” He took her busy hands in his finally and held them both against his heart as he closed his eyes tightly. “Emmy,” he said after a while, and she could see that there were tears in his eyes. “Is it true, then? Is peace not so very far away after all?”
“No,” she said.
They spoke to each other without words, without images. They spoke to each other in the silence. It was one of the most precious moments of her life.
He kissed her lips softly before releasing her hands and folding her easel while she cleaned her brush and tidied her paints and paper. Then they walked in silence back to the summerhouse. A silence that was both sweet and sad to Emily. She knew she was dear to him. She knew too that peace was still just beyond his grasp. She wondered if it could ever be possible to know peace after the person one had loved most in the world had died in circumstances that one might have prevented or at least shared.
She turned to him in the summerhouse after setting down her things. He was looking at her. It was the most natural thing in the world to take the couple of steps into his arms, to lift her mouth for his kiss, to set her own arms about his neck. She was not going to analyze. Not until she was away from Penshurst again. And she would not allow conscience or any notion of sin to intrude. Perhaps she was rationalizing, she thought. Perhaps this was what people did when they consciously committed one of life’s great sins. But she could not yet feel that this affair she was sharing with Ashley was wrong.
He sat down on the sofa after they had caressed each other with lips and hands and had felt the need to be closer still, and she stood before him and watched as he unbuttoned the front flap of his breeches and then lifted her skirt and drew down her undergarments.
“Come,” he said, setting his hands on her hips and drawing her toward him.
She knelt astride him and watched his face as he first positioned her and then returned his hands to her hips and brought her firmly down onto him. He looked at her, his head against the back of the sofa, his eyes half closed.
“Emmy,” he said.
She had learned something the night before. Two things, perhaps. She had learned that physical love was intensely pleasurable. And she had learned that it really was love, that in the physical act, which could be called sin when performed outside marriage, as now, love bonded to love and was a thing of the heart and even of the soul as well as of the body. She loved him totally as he began the already familiar rhythmic dance of physical love and as she matched her movements to his—she loved him with her body and with every part of herself enclosed by her body.
She watched his face and saw that he was watching hers. Watching each other’s pleasure. But seeing deeper than pleasure. Watching the essence of each other, deeply penetrating each other. Not just in the physical masculine-into-feminine sense, but in every way possible. Masculine, feminine; feminine, masculine—they did not matter. Each was both, and each was both giver and receiver.
He loved her during those minutes, she knew. During the intensely felt minutes of the act of love. Memory would come back to him afterward and set up the barrier again. But for now there was no barrier. Oh no, she would not fight this or see it as sin. Or ever regret it.
He drew her head down to his and set his mouth on hers, his tongue coming deep inside as his other hand held her firm and she felt the hot rush of his seed. She sighed out her own release and relaxed down onto him. It seemed so natural, so right to love him thus. She set her cheek against his shoulder and sank for a few minutes into sleep.
23
“EMMY,”he said. She had been sitting quietly beside him on the sofa, her head on his shoulder. But he could not talk to her thus. He sat forward slightly so that the weight of her head was transferred to the crook of his elbow and he could turn for her to see his face.
She looked back at him with smiling eyes and he caught his breath again at the expression in them, far deeper than the smile itself. It was the expression she had worn as he had loved her, deeper than the physical passion she had obviously felt. It was Emmy’s usual look of serenity and peace. It was her usual look of deep affection. It was the look of a woman who had just received the seed of a man who loved her body. It was—ah, it was far more than any one of those, or even of the sum total of them. He would not verbalize even in his mind what her expression told him.
“Emmy.” He touched his lips very lightly and briefly to hers. “I am not going to say the obvious—not yet. We have been lovers, last night and today. We both know what that might mean and what it should mean. You may well be with child, and even apart from that possibility we should both now do what is right and proper. But I have learned from you since last time. I have learned that there is something far more important than what society tells us is proper.”
She touched her fingertips to his lips. He was not sure there was not a tinge of sadness in her smile.
“I want to tell you some things,” he said. “I want to burden you with knowledge that should be mine alone. I want you to know the man to whom you have opened your greatest treasure as a woman. The man who will offer himself to you for life some time soon—unless you indicate that under no circumstances can you accept me. You knew me once better than anyone has ever known me, I believe, little fawn. You no longer know me. You care for me. Perhaps you believe you care enough to marry me. But you do not know me, Emmy. And so I must tell you.”
“I know you,” she said, indicating with her hand that it was heart knowledge of which she spoke. But she said the words aloud.
