Page 72

"Ask me again."

He looks at me. I watch his face change. I watch the light come into it, slowly, as though someone were drawing back a curtain in a dark room.

"Elizabeth," he says, very low. "Is it yet?"

"Yes," I say.

***

He does not move at first.

I think he does not believe me. He stands there in the wind with his hands at his sides and looks at me as though I were a deer that has walked out of the wood and stopped in front of him, and he is afraid that if he breathes, I will bolt.

Then he lifts one hand. Slowly. He takes the curl the wind laid across my cheek, and tucks it back behind my ear, the way he did in the shrubbery at Rosings. And this time his hand does not stop there. It goes on, along the line of my jaw, and his fingers spread and slide back into the hair at my nape, under the brim of my bonnet, and his palm comes to rest warm along the side of my face.

His hand is shaking.

I did not expect that. I thought he would be sure. He is always so sure. But his hand is trembling against my cheek, and when I look up into his face, his eyes are very dark and very bright, and he looks almost frightened.

"Elizabeth," he says again. As though it were a question. As though he were asking whether I am real.

I reach up. I put my hand over his, where it rests against my face. And I turn my head, just a little, and press my lips into his palm.

He makes a sound. Low, in his chest. It goes right through me.

And he bends his head, and kisses me.

It is very gentle, at first. So gentle I can hardly feel it. Only the warmth of his mouth against mine, and his breath, and the faint taste of the cold spring air. He holds it there for a long moment, perfectly still, as though he is learning the shape of me. As though he has been told there is only one of these to be had, and he does not mean to waste a moment of it.

Then he draws back, an inch. No more. I feel his breath against my lips, quick and uneven.

"Was that an excitement?" he says unsteadily.

"Yes," I whisper. "A very great one."

"Shall I stop?"

I take hold of his lapel.

"Do not you dare," I say.

And I pull him down to me.

The second kiss is nothing like the first.

His arm comes round my waist and gathers me in against him, close and hard, until there is no space left between us at all. My bonnet tips back and falls, and the ribbons catch at my throat, and I do not care. His hand is in my hair. Mine is in his. I have wanted to touch it since the carriage, and it is just as soft as I remembered, and I hold on to it as though I were falling. Perhaps I am. The whole of Oakham Mount seems to tilt under my feet. The larks and the wind and the green valley go spinning away somewhere very far off, and there is nothing left in the world but his mouth on mine, and the heat of him through his coat, and his heart going like a drum against my own.

I have been kissed before. Once. By a young man at the Lucases' Christmas party, behind the door of the library, very briefly and rather damply. I thought at the time it was a pleasant enough experience. I thought, if that is all kissing is, I do not see what the poets make such a fuss about.

I see now.

I see it all at once, in a great blinding rush, the way one sees a whole landscape lit up by lightning. This is what they meant. This. The way he kisses me as though I were water and he had been walking in a desert for a year. The way his arm tightens around me when I sigh against his mouth. The way I can feel him trembling, all down the length of him, this proud, cold, careful man, trembling in my arms on a hill in Hertfordshire because I said yes.

When at last he lifts his head, I am not sure how long it has been. Long enough for the wind to have pulled half my hair out of its pins. Long enough for my bonnet to have blown away down the slope into a gorse bush. Long enough for my knees to have stopped holding me entirely, so that it is only his arm around my waist keeping me upright.

He rests his forehead against mine. We are both breathing as though we had run up the hill.

"Elizabeth," he says.