Someone tugged at his arm and pulled him up.
Someone pushed him onto the bed.
He sighed with relief as he was surrounded by warmth, and the arms around his neck were soft. There was more of that soft sweetness that sparked heat; that made his whole body thrum and burn. He took a deep breath and buried his face in a divine mass of silky hair. Then his mouth sought hers, yielding, demanding.
He burned with sweet longing, agony, and bliss.
He was lost.
As the firstrays of the morning sun crept between the curtains, Edmund felt Ellen untangle herself from his embrace and slip quietly out of bed. She tiptoed to the dressing room, as if not to awaken him. But he'd already been half-awake for the better part of the hour, pondering on the preposterous notion that maybe a real marriage wasn't as bad as he'd thought it would be. He could get used to sharing his bed with her, even though she had the tendency to mumble in her sleep and pull the entire blanket to her side.
Edmund grinned.
While she dressed, he got up, pulled on his banyan and drew aside the curtains. The sun flooded the room and a feeling of contentment, almost of peace, washed over him. It was a feeling that was all too rare, when one knew that all's right with the world.
She came out of the dressing room and stopped short when she saw him. How lovely she looked in her green walking gown. "Good morning," she stammered, and fiddled with the ribbons on her bonnet.
"Are you going out?" he enquired.
"I was thinking of going for a walk. It is quite nice outside this time of day." She hesitated. "Would you like to join me?"
An early morning walk, where he'd end up getting his hair ruffled by the wind and his boots dirtied by mud and other muck that commonly lay about in the countryside?
"Why not?" he replied, surprising himself.
She gave him a bright smile. "I found a most beautiful path that delighted me the other day. Come, let me show you."
And before he knew it, he found himself outside, his wife on his arm, taking an early morning walk.
She was so eager that it almost made him smile. She explained the park and the countryside to him as if he'd never been here before.
"And there, in the woods, is a clearing with the most charming little pavilion. There's a path that leads out of it to a little hill ... "
He walked along good-naturedly, enjoying the sound of her voice, the pressure of her hand on his arm, the heaving of her chest as she walked up her hill.
"Look," she said, "isn't the view absolutely splendid? And down there is the prettiest manor house, like something out of a fairy tale with those dainty little geometric bushes and trees, though I dare say they only look so dainty from up here.”
Edmund felt the heat in his body turn to ice as he stared at the mansion below.
And then he saw her.
Standing beside the tree, her hands clasped in front of her, she looked exactly as he'd remembered the last time he'd seen her: slender, of medium height, wearing a blue-grey promenade dress. Only her hair was streaked with more grey than he remembered, and there were fine lines around her eyes that had not been there before.
He grabbed Ellen's arm.
Ellen saw the woman at the same time as he did. "Oh! Good morning!" she said cheerfully. "As you can see, we made it after all. It was the most pleasant of walks."
But the woman ignored her. Her eyes were fixed on Edmund with a questioning, anxious look.
For a long moment, neither moved.
He pressed his lips together in a grim, tight line.
She held out a hand as if in supplication. "Edmund."
Edmund's grip on Ellen's arm tightened. He felt her flinch and look at him with a questioning gaze, but his eyes were fixed on the lady in blue.
The woman dropped her hand. "Edmund," she repeated quietly. "You look—look—" she was clearly searching for words to describe the citrus-yellow-salmon-blue splendour in which he was dressed that morning.
