“Because I am past thirty and cannot possibly still be a dreamer?” he said. “Until a couple of weeks ago my answer might well have been no. I lived by practical good sense. No longer, though.”
“No practicality and no good sense left?” she said. “But are not those qualities essential to a man with your career?”
“Decidedly,” he said. “But the career does not define the man.”
“What has changed, then?” she asked.
“The answer ought to benothing,” he said. “I am thirty-four years old, Winifred.”
“I know that,” she said. “You just said so. At least, you told me you are past thirty, but you told me on a previous occasion how far past thirty you are.”
“I was thirteen years old when you were born,” he said. “About the age of that youth who was waltzing with your sister.”
“Were you thin and uncoordinated and all elbows and self-consciousness and spots?” she said. “You must have been adorable.”
Minx. He grinned to himself in the near darkness, though none of this was funny.
“Thirteen years is too wide an age gap,” he said.
Instead of denying it, she fell silent as they walked on. “Yes, it is,” she said at last, and despite himself it felt as though his heart had dropped inside him like a leaden weight. “I am—how was it you described me this morning? Asweet young twenty-or-so.You are an old man, as I told you then. But there is nothing we can do about our relative ages. I cannot suddenly pretend that I was ten years old when I was left in a basket on the orphanage steps. It creates rather a ridiculous image in the mind and would have made menineteenwhen Mama and Papa adopted me.”
They strolled onward.
“Did you perhaps take up your military commission when you wereeight?” she asked.
He smiled rather bleakly into the darkness. “Isit a possibility, then?” he asked.
She did not pretend to misunderstand him. She shrugged. “What is the alternative?” she asked.
“Never seeing each other again after Monday?” he said, making a question of it.
She sighed. “Colonel Ware,” she said, “I am a nobody. I have no pedigree whatsoever. Even if I pretend for a moment that Mama and Papa are my birth parents, that does not make a difference. Neither was born within a legal marriage. Papa was raised at the orphanage where I was found. Mama was the product of a bigamous marriage. You, on the other hand, are the very legitimate son of the late Earl of Stratton. You were raisedhere. You are a colonel in a prestigious cavalry regiment. I daresay all the other officers are sons of the nobility too. There is far more than a thirteen-year span separating us.”
“Yes,” he said. They had reached the summerhouse at the end of the alley. “Shall we go inside and sit awhile?”
“Yes,” she said.
She sat on one of the comfortable sofas while he closed the door. After hesitating for a mere moment, he sat beside her. They were silent for a while as their eyes adjusted to the greater darkness cast by the trees on the alley and the silvered treetops and deep blue of the sky. In the distance there were the lights of lanterns in the stable block on the north side of the house.
“I asked you if you have dreams,” she said. “You told me what answer you would have given a couple of weeks ago. What are your dreams now?”
“The same ones they were before I squashed them and adopted practicality as more appropriate to my age and status,” he said. “In my career and day-to-day life, I have goals, and they have not changed. But beyond that, in my personal life, I dream of love and marriage and fatherhood. I dream of a home in the country, not too far from London and my work but far enough that my children can grow up with space and the beauties of nature surrounding them and my wife can be comfortable. But it is not just any kind of love of which I dream. There are all sorts of levels of attraction that can pass for love, but I dream of…Oh, of that one woman without whom I cannot live with any degree of happiness. That one woman who feels the same way about me. I have not expressed it well enough, though. How does one describe that kind of love? Language is quite inadequate to do it. But—”
“I know what you mean,” she said.
He smiled and they sat quietly for a while, gazing along the alley and watching the silver tips of the poplar trees swaying in a breeze that had not been apparent while they walked.
“I dream of the sort of…oh,nonsensicallove that does not recognize age and pedigree differences as being in any wayrelevant,” he said. “As a young man I was afraid to search, afraid perhaps that I would find and then destroy the purity of the love with uncontrolled, promiscuous behavior. When I was in my thirties I settled for a sensible marriage with a friend whom I liked and with whom I could enjoy a comfortable sort of affection. A woman of the right age and pedigree. Now that I have been honorably released from that obligation, the dream has revived. With the power of a mighty storm.”
He took her left hand in his and realized that she was a bit chilly—and perhaps a bit dazed? He glanced around for the lap blankets that were usually left here and got to his feet to fetch one. He wrapped it about her shoulders and kept his arm about her.
“For me?” she said, her voice high-pitched and breathless. “You feel that wayabout me? As though you had been struck by a mighty storm?”
Had he misread the signs? Was she not ready for this?
“I do,” he said, and watched her close her eyes and bite her bottom lip.
“Oh, thank you,” she said, snuggling into the blanket. He could feel her shivering.
