Something alerted her even though the horse’s hooves were making no great noise on the sandy grass. She straightened up and turned their way, a small trowel in her hand. She smiled. The dog, who had been stretched out in the sun at the foot of the porch steps, was on his feet too, wagging his tail and woofing.
“I always fancied myself as a gardener,” she said as Ben rode up to the garden fence. “I used to dabble as a girl, but I never had a chance at Bramble Hall—Matthew always needed me in the sickroom. Now Idohave a chance. Mr. Rhys said that my great-aunt kept a pretty flower garden here, did he not? Well, I am going to restore it, even if I have to start with some destruction. I hate killing weeds. They are plants, after all. They are living things. And who decides what are flowers and what are weeds, anyway? I love daisies and buttercups and dandelions, but everyone banishes them from their lawns as if they carry the plague.”
“Perhaps because they would destroy those lawns if left to grow and spread unchecked,” he said. “Did you sleep well?”
She had been in the house alone since neither her maid nor Mrs. Price was to live in, at least for a while. He wondered if that fact had bothered her. He had worried about her a bit during the night.
“I slept with the window open,” she told him. “I could hear the sea and smell it, but only for a very short while, I must admit. I fell deeply asleep and did not rouse until I could smell bacon cooking. Mrs. Price put me to shame and came early. Is the inn a decent place?”
“Very comfortable,” he said. “You have a barn at the back big enough to stable the horses while I am here. I’ll go back there now with Quinn, if I may, and then come visiting.”
The apron and the gloves and trowel had disappeared by the time he walked back to the house from the barn, but she was still outside and still wore the floppy-brimmed bonnet, which was surely as old as the hills and made her look absurdly pretty. The dog was beside her, wagging his tail in clear expectation of being entertained. He really did assume that the world revolved around his large, ungainly self.
“You could never walk on the beach at Penderris Hall, I remember your saying,” she said, “because it was at the foot of a high cliff. Was there a way down?”
“There were a few steep paths,” he said. “The others went down all the time, even Vincent, despite his blindness.”
“There is nothing to stop you from walking on the beach here,” she said. “It is not far away and the slope down to it is not steep. The sand looks flat and smooth. Shall we go?”
“Now?”
It was human nature, he had realized long ago, always to want the one thing one could not have, even if one had been gifted with a superabundance of other blessings. He had always longed and longed to be able to go down onto the beach at Penderris. Hugo had once offered to carry him down, but he had declined so firmly that the offer had never been renewed. Not that Hugo could not have done it. He was as strong as any ox. But Ben would have been humiliated. He had consoled himself with the thought that there was nothing down there except sand to get in his hair and his mouth.
“I was hoping you would come early,” she said, falling into step beside him, her hands clasped at her back, while Tramp went loping ahead of them. “I have been longing to go down there myself, but I wanted you with me the first time. I want to be able to remember that.”
That? The fact that he had been with her this first time?
“I have a confession to make,” she said. “I have never, ever been on a beach. Is that not strange when my mother grew up here?”
He turned his head to look at her. Her exertions in the garden and the sea breeze had whipped a healthy color into her cheeks. Her eyes were bright.
“May I suggest,” he said, “that you remove your shoes and stockings before going out onto the sand? Otherwise you will have your shoes full of grit before you have walked any distance, and you will spend the rest of the day shaking sand out of everything and fighting blisters.”
She laughed. “And you too?”
“I am wearing boots,” he said. Besides, he was not about to expose any part of his legs in her presence.
“It sounds like a very improper suggestion, sir,” she said, “but a very sensible one nonetheless.”
She looked about and chose a flat-topped rock at the bottom of the slope on which to seat herself. She removed her shoes and stockings while he watched. Too late it occurred to him that it would have been far more gentlemanly to turn his back. She had slim legs, trim ankles, narrow, pretty feet—which he had seen before at the inn above the Wye Valley. She rolled her stockings neatly and placed them inside her shoes, and then she stood and set her shoes on the rock.
“Oh,” she said, wriggling her toes in the mixture of grass and sand on which they stood, “that feels lovely. But it does feel sinful to be unshod outdoors.”
They walked through the gap onto a wide, flat beach. Sand stretched to right and left until it met outcroppings of rock that enclosed the area into a private beach. Rocks rose behind them on either side of the gap to provide further privacy. The tide was low, though the breakers along the edge of the water indicated that it was coming in. The breeze was fresher here, though at the same time the sun was warmer. Seagulls cried overhead.
Ben’s canes sank into the sand, but he found walking here somewhat easier than on hard ground. Samantha ran ahead of him a little way and then stopped and turned, her arms stretched out to the sides.
“Freedom!” she cried, just like an exuberant child. “Oh, tell me this is no illusion, Ben.”
The dog pranced about her, barking.
“This is freedom,” Ben said obediently, grinning at her, and she tipped back her head to look at the sky and twirled about in three complete circles while he laughed. Her dress billowed to the sides, and her bonnet brim flopped about her face.
Wasthisthe austere, black-clad lady he had first met in County Durham?
“Therearesuch moments, are there not?” she said. “Oh, I had forgotten. It has beensolong. But therearemoments of pure, unalloyed happiness, and this is one of them. I amsoglad I waited for you to come, for such moments need to be shared. Tell me you feel it too—the freedom, the happiness.” She stopped spinning to direct a look at him, and he read sudden uncertainty there.
But hedidfeel it too. As if for this moment the world had stopped and they had stepped off and nothing would ever matter again except this stopping place.
