One Night for Love

he had always observed in her had an explanation, then. She had discovered in her short, difficult life what not many people discovered in a whole lifetime, he suspected. He had not progressed as far himself though he knew the value of solitude and silence. He wondered if Lily's ability to find a place within, simply to be, as she had put it, had helped her endure her ordeal in Spain. But he would not ask her about that. He could not even bear to think about it.

They had reached the valley and walked up the path toward the cottage and the pool at the base of the waterfall. Everyone else had already disappeared up the hill and in among the trees. They stopped by unspoken assent when they were a short distance away and feasted their eyes on the beauty of the scene and their ears on the soothing sound of rushing water.

'Ah, yes,' she said at last with a sigh, 'this is one of those places. I can understand why you come here.'

He had noticed that she had not called him by any name since her return even though he had reminded her that she was his wife and might use his given name. He longed to hear it on her lips again. He could remember how it had sounded like the most intimate endearment on their wedding night. But he could not, would not press the point with her. He must give her time.

'Come and see the cottage,' he said. It occurred to him suddenly with some surprise that he had never come here with Lauren, or not at least since they were children.

There were just two rooms, both cozily furnished and both possessing fireplaces with logs piled beside them in readiness for a chilly day—or night. He occasionally spent a night here. He had done it sometimes during the past year or so, when he had been remembering his life with the Ninety-fifth and his years in the Peninsula and had been restless with a nameless yearning.

No, not nameless. He had yearned here for Lily, whom he had grown gradually to love during the years he had known her, though that love had bloomed into sexual passion only a short time before its final glorious flowering the night before he believed she'd died.

He had tried not to think of Lily at Newbury. There he had tried to think only of his new life, the life of duty for which he had been raised and educated, the life that included Lauren. He had come to the cottage to do his remembering and his leftover mourning.

It was still strange to realize that Lily had not died. That she was here. Now.

She peered into the bedchamber, but it was the other room that appeared to fascinate her more. There were chairs, a table, books, paper, quill pens and ink—and a view directly over the pool and the waterfall. He liked to sit here, reading or writing. He also liked to sit and merely gaze. Perhaps it was what she called being.

'You read here,' she said, picking up one of the books after taking off her bonnet and setting it down on one of the chairs. 'You learn about other worlds and other minds. And you can go back and read them again and again.'

'Yes,' he said.

'And sometimes you write down your own thoughts,' she said, running a finger along one of the quill pens. 'And you can come back and read them and remember what you thought or how you felt about something.'

'Yes.' She sounded wistful, he noticed.

'It must be the most wonderful feeling in the whole world,' she said, 'to be able to read and write.'

He took so much for granted, he realized. He had never really considered how privileged he was to have been educated. 'Perhaps,' he suggested, 'you could learn, Lily.'

'Perhaps,' she agreed. 'Though probably I am too old. I daresay I would not be an apt pupil. Papa always said learning to read was the most difficult thing he had ever done in his life. He never did find it easy.' She set the book down and went to stand at the window, looking out.

He had not meant to ask her the question whose answer he dreaded to hear—certainly not yet. He did not feel strong enough to know. But somehow the time and the place seemed right and somehow the words just came spilling out.

'Lily,' he asked her, 'what did you suffer?'

He went to stand beside her, facing her profile. He touched the backs of his fingers to her cheek. She looked so delicate, yet he knew her to be as tough in her own way as even the most hardened of veterans. But how badly had her toughness been tested? 'Are you able to talk about it?'

She turned her head and her huge blue eyes gazed back into his. Curiously, they looked both wounded and calm. Whatever she had suffered had hurt her, perhaps permanently, but it had not broken her. Or so her eyes seemed to say.

'It was war,' she said. 'I saw sufferings far worse than my own. I saw maiming and torture and death. I have not been maimed. I did not die.'

'Were you… tortured?'

She shook her head. 'Beaten a few times,' she said, 'when I—when I did not please. But only with the hand. I was never really tortured.'

He would have liked a certain Spanish partisan suddenly to materialize before him. He would have liked to break every bone in me man's body with his fists and then pluck him apart limb from limb with his bare hands. He had beaten Lily? Somehow it seemed almost as heinous a crime as the rape.

'Not tortured, then,' he said. 'Only beaten and… used.'

'Yes.' Her gaze lowered to his cravat.

It hurt to imagine another man using Lily. Not because it made her less desirable to him—he had already considered that possibility the night before and rejected it—but because she had been all innocence and light and goodness and someone had taken her as a slave and thrust darkness and bitterness into her very body with his lust. And perhaps hurt her irreparably.

How was he to know? Perhaps she did not know herself. Perhaps her calm acceptance of what had happened, her sensible explanation about its having been war, was merely a small bandage covering a large and gaping wound.