It was Lord Randolph who had suggested that Elizabeth bring her sketchbook. While she drew, he would sit quietly by, smoking his pipe, a man with a gift for stillness. It was not uncommon for rich tourists to hire artists to record what they saw, and Elizabeth quietly resolved to give Lord Randolph this set of drawings when they parted. When he looked at them to remember Naples, perhaps he would also think of her.
In the meantime, she utilized the governess’s skill of watching unobtrusively, memorizing the angle of his eyebrows when he was amused, the way the winter sun shimmered across his dark gold hair, and a hundred other subtle details.
Alone in her pensione in the evenings, she tried to draw Lord Randolph from memory, with frustrating results. He would have been an easier subject if he were less handsome, because his regular features looked more like an idealized Greek statue than a real man. She did her best to capture the quiet humor in his eyes, the surprising hint of underlying wistfulness, but she was never satisfied with the results.
As an escort Lord Randolph was thoughtful and impeccably polite. Elizabeth knew he enjoyed her company, but she also knew he was scarcely aware that she was a woman. Had he come to Italy because he was disappointed in love? Hard to imagine any woman turning him down. But she would never know the truth. Though their conversation flowed with ease and wit, they spoke only of impersonal things. Her companion kept his inner life to himself, as did Elizabeth.
The first few days they spent together, she was able to maintain a certain wry detachment about her growing infatuation with Lord Randolph. But the day that they visited the Fields of Fire, detachment dissolved as she fell blindly, helplessly, irrevocably in love with him.
The Campi Flegrei—Fields of Fire—lay north of Naples. The poetic name described an area of volcanic activity, a sight not to be missed by tourists. After spending the morning in the nearby town of Pozzuoli, they had driven to Solfatara, an oval crater where the earth was sometimes too hot to touch and noxious fumes oozed from the holes called fumaroles.
A local guide led half a dozen visitors into the crater. As part of his tour he held a lighted brand over a boiling mud pot. Immediately the steam issuing from the mud pot flared furiously, as if about to explode. Even though Elizabeth had seen this before, she still flinched back.
Lord Randolph touched her elbow reassuringly. “That's just an illusion, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “Yes, the fumarole doesn’t really burn hotter, but whenever I see that, I can’t help feeling that the sleeping volcano is lashing back at impudent humans who disturb its rest.”
After tossing the brand into the fumarole, the guide stamped on the ground, sending a deep, ominous echo rolling through the hollow mountain under their feet. Then he led the group away.
Having had enough demonstrations, Elizabeth and her companion wandered off in another direction.
“It’s an interesting place,” Lord Randolph remarked as they picked their way through a field of steaming fumaroles. The pungent odor of sulfur hung heavy over the sterile white soil. “Rather like one of the outer circles of hell.”
“Solfatara is a place every visitor to Naples should see, but I dislike it intensely.” Elizabeth gestured around the barren crater. “When I come here, I always think it is the loneliest, most desolate spot on earth.”
“No,” her companion said softly, his voice as bleak as the dead earth crumbling beneath their feet. “The loneliest place on earth is a bad marriage.”
That was when the fragile remnants of Elizabeth’s detachment shattered, for in that instant she came to understand Randolph. It was not a shock to learn that he was married. She had never understood why a man so attractive and amiable did not have a wife.
Nor did she feel betrayed that he had not mentioned his wife before because she'd always known there could be nothing between them but fleeting friendship. What Elizabeth did feel was a disabling flood of love and tenderness.
It was tragic that a man so kind and decent should be so unhappy, that loneliness had driven him so far from home. Even more than tenderness, she felt a sense of kinship. Impulsively she said, “You mustn’t surrender to it.”
“Surrender to what?” he asked, turning to face her, his slate eyes shadowed.
“To loneliness,” she stammered, embarrassed at her own impertinence. “To give in to it is to dance with the devil and lose your very soul.”
Under his grave gaze, she felt hot blood rise in her face. She looked away, bitterly sorry that she trespassed beyond the limits of friendship by alluding to intimate, solitary sorrows.
Quietly he said, “If you have danced with the devils of loneliness, you have escaped with your soul and learned wisdom into the bargain.”
Elizabeth took a deep, steadying breath, grateful that he had forgiven her lapse. “I think I hear our guide calling. Come, it's time we went back before he decides that we have fallen into a mud pot.”
The Via Toledo had been called the gayest and most populous street in the world, but Randolph paid little attention to the blithe people swirling around him as he strolled through the lamp-lit night. He had been walking for hours, his thoughts occupied by an alarming but deeply appealing idea.
He had enjoyed Elizabeth Walker’s company from the moment they met, but he had thought her self-sufficient, completely comfortable with her life as it was. That belief had changed in an instant that afternoon at Solfatara.
In a moment of weakness he had lowered his guard, and rather than ignoring or despising him for his lapse, Elizabeth had done the same. By the act of reaching out to him, she had revealed a loneliness as great as his own. Her blend of warmth, generosity, and vulnerability was so potent that he had very nearly said that if they joined their lives, they might banish the worst of their mutual loneliness.
He kept silent, too skeptical, too wary, to propose marriage on impulse. Yet the idea had taken hold, and now he found himself wondering what kind of wife Elizabeth would make. The more he thought, the more his conclusions agreed with his first impression of her. She would make an excellent wife.
He smiled wryly, thinking of Samuel Johnson’s remark that a second marriage was the triumph of hope over experience. Randolph had thought that life had cured him first of love, then of marriage, and he had resigned himself to spending the rest of his life alone.
Yet here he was, thinking that seeing Elizabeth Walker across a breakfast table would be a very pleasant sight indeed. Chloe had seldom risen in time for breakfast, and when she did, she was invariably irritable and self-absorbed.
Elizabeth was not a Beauty, but one Beauty was enough for a lifetime. Hard experience had taught Randolph that humor, honesty, and a tolerant mind were far more important in a marriage.
And she was far from an antidote. While her face was unremarkable, it was engagingly expressive. He found frank pleasure in the supple grace of her slim body, and a mischievous whirl of wind had revealed that her long legs were truly outstanding.
