“I am delighted to hear it,” he said.
She bit her lip and proceeded to one of the main purposes ofher visit. “Do you have time to make a crib for their new baby? A bed that is practical and cozy and safe but with your distinctive touch of artistry? I cannot even give you ideas on the latter. I do not have an artistic imagination, alas, though I can appreciate it when I see it. I would love to give them the crib as my gift.”
“It would be my pleasure,” he said. He would have to give priority to Miss Wexford’s dining table, of course, and that would be time-consuming, to say the least. But most of his other, smaller jobs were nearing completion, and the crib would not be needed much before Christmas, he supposed. Making it would be a personal indulgence, since it sounded as though he would be given free rein with its design. He already had images running through his head of plump, smiling elephants and pop-eyed giraffes, of grinning, curly-tailed monkeys and perky terriers.
“Thank you.” She was beaming up at him. “I thought of it when I was in London, and I could hardly wait to come home and ask you.”
“I will make some sketches for your approval,” he said. “Will sometime within the next week suit you?”
“Perfectly,” she said. “Shall I return a week from today?”
She had got to her feet, and he felt stifled again. Her face was eager, almost with the bright radiance of her youth.
“It would be better if I came to you,” he said. “This is rather a public part of the village.”
He worried that people might believe he was compromising her, though that was absurd. He was, after all, merely the village carpenter, while she was the Dowager Countess of Stratton of Ravenswood Hall.
“Very well, then,” she said. “If it is not too much of an inconvenience to you.”
He expected her to cross the room back to the door then to takeher leave. But instead she went to stand in front of the stove to look at the candlesticks and the wood carvings on the shelf above it. She did not touch any of them.
“You did not enter anything for the wood-carving contest at the fete last year,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I won the year before and twice in a row before that.” There had been a gap of eight years when there had been no summer fete at all. “I thought it ought to be someone else’s turn.”
“That was thoughtful of you,” she said. She was still staring upward, though he had the feeling she was not really seeing the shelf. There was a tenseness about her stance. “What do you do with all your carvings?”
“Most of them are on shelves in my workroom,” he said. “A few have sold or been given as gifts.”
“And the one from two years ago?” she asked.
He winced inwardly. He should never have let anyone see that particular carving. He certainly ought not to have entered it in the contest at the village fete. That had been a rash indulgence, for it had aroused a great deal of attention and had won first prize. He had been sorry immediately after entering it, but by then it had been too late to enter something else instead.
“I believe it is in my bedchamber,” he said. It was the only one of his carvings that was there.
She turned to look at him, her cheeks slightly flushed, and they gazed at each other until he turned abruptly and went to fetch it—the wood carving of a woman standing against a tree gazing off into the distance, the carving that had seemed to create itself independent of his will, almost as if it were something that had come through him rather than from him and had simply made use of his hands and his eyes and his skills. All art was a bit like that, ofcourse, but this, more than anything else he had created, had consumed his whole being until it was finished.
He set it down in the middle of the table, and she came to stand beside him and look at it for a few long, silent moments. And of course, he realized, this was why she had come here today, the baby’s crib merely an excuse. She might have summoned him to Ravenswood for that.
She sat on the chair she had recently vacated in order to view the carving at eye level.
“Is she me?” Her voice was a mere whisper of sound.
He considered his answer. A blurtedNowas not going to sound convincing.
“She is woman,” he said carefully at last. “Or, rather, she is humanity. All of us, gazing off into…what? The future? The past? The very present moment? All three at once? She is dreams and hope and nostalgia and endurance and yearning and…”
His voice trailed off. He felt the inadequacy of language, something that had always frustrated him until he had learned to let go and simply let some things be. It worked except when he was trying to explain his ideas to another person.
She was leaning back against the tree, her hands flat against the trunk on either side of her, as though she were drawing life and energy from it and feeling her unity with all of nature. An unseen breeze was fluttering her long, loose hair and the full skirt of her dress.
“She is me,” Clarissa whispered.
He opened his mouth to protest but then shook his head slightly and closed his mouth. What was the point of denying it?
“It was a pivotal moment, a turning point in both our lives,” she said. “The day we left our childhood and youth behind and became adults.”
“Yes,” he said.
