“Oh, look!” she said when they were up on the rocks, well above the level of the small beach but not yet high enough to see over the top. She had noticed a cluster of seashells in a small sandy indentation at her feet and was stooping to examine and pick up a few of them. She set one on her palm and held it out for him to see. “Could anything possibly be more exquisite?”
“I cannot think of anything,” he admitted.
“Is not nature a marvel?” she said, sitting down on a flat-topped rock and arranging the shells on her knee.
“Always,” he agreed, “even when its effects are catastrophic to the humans who have tried to control or defy it. It is the quintessentially perfect artist and can also produce something as fragile and exquisite as these.”
He seated himself on a rock close to hers and looked down at the beach with the valley above it. Why would anyone choose to live inland when they could live close to the sea?
They sat in silence for a while, the sun warm on their heads, the breeze cool on their faces. How lovely it was, he thought, to have a companion here with him. And it struck him that though he had friends in the neighborhood, he never went walking or even riding with any of them. Whenever he came here, he was always alone—until now.
But in the future he would always remember that she had been here with him. He would remember her as she was at this moment, the brim of her bonnet fluttering slightly in the breeze, her posture graceful but relaxed, her long, slim fingers touching one of the shells almost reverently, the rocks behind one of her shoulders, the sea beyond the other, one shade darker than her dress—the same dress she had worn yesterday.
She lifted her head and met his gaze.
“How did it happen?” she asked him.
The question could have referred to any number of things. But he knew exactly what she was asking.
“I was an officer,” he said, “in the Peninsula Wars.”
“Yes,” she said. “I knew that.”
He looked away from her.
“It was torture,” he said. “I was on a special mission with my brother and we were trapped in the mountains by a French scouting party. There was the possibility that one of us could escape with the important papers we carried if the other acted as a decoy and courted certain capture. Kit was experienced while I was decidedly not.Andhe was my superior officer. I volunteered to be the decoy so that he would not have the painful duty of ordering me to do so. We were not in uniform.”
And that fact had made all the difference, of course. If he had been wearing a uniform, he would have been treated with courtesy and honor as a British officer by his captors.
One of her fingers was smoothing over the shell she had held up for his inspection.
“They wanted information about Kit and his mission,” he told her, “and they set out methodically over the next week or so to get it from me. They started with my right eye and worked their way down. Kit and a group of Spanish partisans rescued me when they had reached my knee.”
“They were still torturing you,” she said. It was not a question. “You had not given them the information they needed, then?”
“No,” he said.
Her fingers curled about all the shells and held them enclosed in a white-knuckled fist on her knee.
“You are incredibly brave,” she said.
Her praise warmed him. He had been expecting her to say something like—oh, you poor man.It was the usual reaction. It had been his family’s reaction. Kit had spent years tormenting himself and blaming himself.
“More stubborn than brave,” he said. “I was the youngest of three brothers, the quiet, sensitive one among two vigorous, boisterous siblings. I wanted to prove something when I insisted that my father buy my commission. Sometimes we get more than we wish for, Miss Jewell. I was indeed given the chance to prove something and I did—but at rather a high cost.”
“They must be proud of you,” she said. “Your family.”
“Yes,” he agreed.
“But you did not stay with them?” she asked him.
“Families are wonderful institutions,” he said. “I value mine more than I can possibly say. But each of us has an individual life to live, our own path to tread, our own destiny to forge. You can imagine, if you will, how my family wished to shelter and protect me and do my living for me so that I would never again know fear or pain or abandonment. Eventually I had to step clear of them—or I might have fallen into the temptation of allowing them to do just that.”
She opened her hand to reveal the shells again, and he reached over to take them from her and set them carefully in a pocket of his coat.
“Do you have a family?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said.
