“Then hurry up and eat.” The smile remained on his face as he packed away his camera bits.
______
The Wishing Well was a good couple of hours at the other end of the island, so first they went to the Hand Fasting Lea, a pretty clearing by the river where daisies and meadowsweet grew along the riverbank.
“Wow. I can see why couples got married here.” He looked towards the trees which surrounded the lea; green grass and bluebells covered the ground.
“Not married. Hand-fasted,” she corrected.
“How is that different?” he asked as he circled round the meadow, sometimes looking through his camera, sometimes just being there, as if trying to make friends with the place.
“I’m listening,” he said when she didn’t answer his earlier question.
“No, you’re not. Your crouching between the trees looking at the grass.”
“I can multitask.”
She tried to suppress her grin then gave up. It was a sunny, gorgeous spring day, why shouldn’t she feel happy? “Hand-fasting isn’t a Christian marriage; it’s an ancient Celtic ritual. They said prayers to the goddess and tied hands together to symbolise the binding of two lives.”
“Which goddess?” He came back, the camera still in his hand. Sometimes it seemed like the thing was a natural extension of him.
“Celtic, Norse, Saxon. It varies, but the ritual is more or less the same. And it survived into the Christian Middle Ages as an unofficial marriage.”
“Unofficial?” He looked up from where he’d hunkered down by the river.
His interest kept her going, reeling out more and more information. “If the couple couldn’t have a real, legal marriage.”
“Because…” He’d been moving slowly between tall grasses by the water’s edge but suddenly stopped. “Because one of them was already married?”
“Possibly. Don’t forget before the Reformation, there was no divorce, not even if the wife was sick. Or insane.”
She bit her lip; that was a stupid thing to say. It strayed too close to her own thoughts about the two of them. If Gabriel noticed, there was no sign of it because he turned back to watching something by the riverbank.
She rushed on, talking to take them past the awkward mention of insane wives. “In many cases, men went off with the Crusades and never came back. No one knew if they were dead or alive. So, the widow either remained alone or...”
She paused because he seemed to be intent on something along the riverbank.
“Or fasted hands?” he prompted her.
“Sometimes, yes. It was just a temporary marriage until they got word of the first husband’s death. Like an engagement, or a promise of marriage.”
“Come here.” He waved her over, voice barely audible.
After a moment’s hesitation, Pierre went down on her hands and knees, her heart beating too fast and her breathing loud in her own ears. When she reached him, he put a finger to his lips. All she could hear was the water trickling past, birds tweeting and the occasional rustle of grass stalks when a breeze hit them.
“What?” she breathed.
Gabriel pointed through the tall grasses towards the river.
“Where?” She squinted against the glare of the early morning sun low in the sky. Then she felt his arm, warm around her shoulders, pulling her close until their heads were touching.
“Follow my eyes,” he whispered.
Bright yellow gorse bushes and swaying primroses lined the opposite riverbank, and water lapped among the scattered small rocks. Then she saw it.
A bird. Blue and orange, small enough to fit in her palm, hopping from stone to stone, searching for something in the water.
“It’s a kingfisher,” he whispered. Their heads were so close, his breath fanned over her cheek.
