He knew, of course, that they had very certainly been recognized. He knew that. It was only easier to manage everything in this moment if he pretended otherwise.
Perhaps his wife had rubbed off on him.
She took a torch from the first person who offered one and held it up between them, falling into step with the movement of the procession like she had planned this activity all along. She didn’t look at him. She simply blended into the crowd, into the night, and walked with her own thoughts for a time, next to him.
Once they’d done the loop and begun to pass back the way they came, she glanced at him over the sputtering blue-white light of the fire and sighed. “Well,” she said with a resigned shrug. “I suppose that’s done with.”
He wrinkled his nose up, nodding. “Yes.”
“Not how I’d have planned it,” she commented, watching him with a softness to her face that was not the panic or anger he would have anticipated.
“Nor I,” he agreed.
She turned for a moment, offering the torch to a woman just behind them, and then dusted her hands off from whatever had settled there while she held it.
He frowned, looking at her unadorned hands, at her bare ring finger on the one she extended then for him, offering to lead him out of the throng. He took it anyway and they vanished into the dark, into the soft grass and the shadow on the outside of the procession.
“Give me my pasty,” she said, reminding him that he was holding them.
He handed it over and lifted the other one to his mouth, wondering if a rush of flavor might break the little spell of stunned horror that had settled over him. He followed her as she turned and started walking along the path through the center of the field, back toward where the cottages were.
“How would you have planned it?” he heard himself asking, his mouth apparently farther ahead in things than his mind was.
She laughed, a soft tinkling sound in the night, turning her head to wait until he could catch up and fall into step beside her. “I don’t know,” she confessed with a shrug, nibbling on her own food. “I just know it wouldn’t have been that.”
“Reasonable,” he acknowledged, taking another bite.
“How many shillings do you think Tommy will win from this?” she pondered, gathering her skirts up into her hands as they started to climb the incline of the first wold between the field and the cottage overlook. “More than three, I should hope.”
He could only stare at her, not quite able to accept how calm she was acting about all of this. “Do you think Tommy will find out?”
“Freddy,” she said dryly. “Please.”
It got a laugh out of him, just a little one, enough to scrape away some of the dread that had started clinging to his shoulders like barnacles. “Claire, wait,” he said. “Wait a moment.”
She turned, brows raised.
“I don’t want to go back to the cottage yet,” he confessed, shrugging. “But I don’t want to go back down there either. Do you want to just sit for a minute? Just sit here on the wold?”
“In the dirt?” she asked, a fondness warming her words. “Like your rocks?”
He nodded.
And she did. She didn’t hesitate. She looked for the right part of the incline and eased herself down onto it, her skirts spread around her like a picnic blanket, and she sighed, as though she appreciated the relief of it.
“Come on, then,” she said to him, waving him over with her pasty like she hadn’t just created the most perfect piece of art there in the grass, like she hadn’t just outshone both the bonfires below and the cozy homes above. “Sit with me.”
Freddy Hightower knelt in the grass and then rolled onto his backside next to his wife. He nibbled his lukewarm, partially crushed pasty. He contemplated the mess they had made.
And he thought that perhaps it was the first time in his life that he had ever experienced anything so perfect.
PART V
FOSSE WAY
CHAPTER 24
They sat for an hour. Maybe two. Long enough that the pasties were long gone and all that remained between them was the soft cushion of the grass and a comfortable silence.
