“What if Ihadcome expecting to sleep with you?”
She considered her answer.
“Would you have tossed me out?” He turned his head to look at her over his shoulder.
She shook her head.
They gazed at each other for a few moments before he poked the fire again to give it more air and resumed his seat.
“Is it possible for people to change, Imogen?” he asked her.
She felt a little lurching of the stomach at the sound of her name on his lips—again.
“Yes,” she said.
“How?”
“Sometimes it takes a great calamity,” she said.
His eyes searched her face. “Like the loss of a spouse?”
She nodded slightly again.
“What were you like before?” he asked.
She spread her hands on her lap and pleated the fabric of her dress between her fingers—something she tended to do when her mind was agitated. She released the fabric and clasped her hands loosely in her lap.
“Full of life and energy and laughter,” she said. “Sociable, gregarious. Tomboyish as a girl—I was the despair of my mother. Not really ladylike even after I grew up. Eager to live my life to the full.”
His eyes roamed over her as if to see signs of that long-ago, long-gone girl she had been.
“Would you want to be that person again?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Have you read William Blake’sSongs of Innocence and Experience?” she asked him.
“Yes.”
“It is impossible to recapture innocence once it has been exposed for the illusion it is,” she said.
“Illusion?” He frowned. “Why should innocence be more unreal, moreuntrue,than cynicism?”
“I am not cynical,” she said. “But no, I could not go back.”
“Can experience and suffering not be used to enrich one’s life rather than deaden or impoverish it?” he asked.
“Yes.” She thought of her fellow Survivors. They were in a vastly different place in their lives than could have been predicted eight or nine years ago, but five of them at least had risen above the suffering and forged lives that were rich and apparently happy. Perhaps they would not be so happy now if they had not had to go through that long, dark night of pain and brokenness. Disturbing thought.
“You are in some ways fortunate, Imogen,” he said softly, and her eyes snapped to his. “How can one, at the age of thirty, learn from the experience of nothing but empty pleasure and frivolity?”
“Andlove,” she said fiercely. “Your life has been so full of love, Lord Hardford, that it is fairly bursting at the seams with it. Even thatdogloves you, and you love it. It isnotunmanly to admit it. And your life has included a period of intense learning about two of the greatest civilizations our world has known. You may have largely wasted the years since you left Oxford, but eventhatexperience does not have to be for nothing. No time isreallywasted unless one never learns the lessons that it offers.”
He had sat back in his chair and was regarding her with a half smile on his lips. “You are expending passion over a wastrel, Lady Barclay?” he said. “Whatlessons?”
She sighed. Shehadallowed herself to become rather wrought up. But he was not a wastrel. A week or so ago she might have believed it, but no longer. He might have lived the life of a wastrel, but that did not make him one. He was not defined by what he had done or not done in the past ten years.
“Perhaps in recognizing how one oughtnotto live, one can learn howtolive,” she said.
“It is that easy?” he asked her. “I should turn overnight, you think, into a worthy country gentleman, a Cornish country gentleman, and bury myself for the rest of my life in the back of beyond with my crops and my sheep and the ugly dog I have supposedly come to love? Breeding heirs and spares and hopeful daughters? Loving my wife and helpmeet and cleaving only unto her for as long as we both shall live?”
