One Night for Love

'I will try,' Lily said again after a minute or two of silence. 'I am not sure I can ever be the person you want me to be. I am not sure I want to stop being myself. And I cannot see how I can be both. But I promise I will try.'

'That is all we can ask of you,' the dowager said, patting her hand once more.

But Lily, as she raced upstairs to her own apartment after their return to the house, felt like a dismal, hopeless failure who would bring nothing but ridicule upon Neville if she continued as she was.

It had been a happy day for Lily—wondrously happy. With memories of last night and this morning fresh in both her mind and her body and the hope that perhaps he would come to her again tonight, she had lived the day the way she had wished to live it—just as he had told her she might—and she had been happy. But only because she had turned away from reality. The reality was that she was not one of the servants at the abbey—she was the countess. And she was not one of the fisherfolk—they were her husband's tenants. She had avoided the people with whom she ought to have spent the day if she were a good countess. She had made no real effort to learn to be the countess she was in name.

But she was incorrigible, it seemed. Instead of ringing for Dolly and changing into another dress and going down to tea to try somehow to make amends, Lily almost tore off her pretty sprigged muslin dress as soon as she had reached her dressing room, dragged on her old cotton, grabbed her old shawl, and scurried down the back stairs to the side door. She half ran down the lawn and slipped and slid down the hill, grabbing at giant ferns to steady herself. She did not even glance at the valley—she did not want to spoil the memories in her present state of agitation—but ran out onto the beach and along it, her face turned up to the sky, her arms stretched out to the sides so that she would feel the full resistance of the wind.

She grew calm again after a few minutes. She could adjust, she told herself. It would take effort, but she could do it if she tried. She had spent most of her life adjusting to constantly changing circumstances. She forced herself to think about the greatest adjustment of all she had had to make. She had learned docility and obedience—she had even learned the Spanish language—as means to survival. If she could do that, she could certainly learn to be a lady and a countess.

The tide was on its way out. The rocks that connected the beach with the cove of Lower Newbury were half exposed. Lily clambered up onto them. Not that she had any intention of going all the way to the village again even if she could, but she needed to use up more energy than a walk or run along the beach would require. And there was a greater sense of wildness and solitude on the rocks, with the sea to one side, an almost sheer cliff wall to the other. She stood still after a while and turned her head to gaze out to sea.

But as she did so, she heard something that was neither the ocean nor the wind nor the gulls. Something unidentifiable that nevertheless almost froze her in place while panic crawled up her spine. She looked sharply to either side of her, but there was nothing. No one. She could see a good distance in both directions.

But the feeling would not go away. What was it she had heard, the crunching of stones?

She looked up.

Everything happened within so few seconds that it would have been difficult afterward to give a clear account —even with a clear head. Lily's was far from clear. She saw someone standing at the top of the cliff above her—a figure in a dark cloak. And then the figure turned into a large rock, hurtling down upon her. She twisted away from it, in toward the cliff face, and it crashed onto the very spot where she had been standing—a huge boulder that would without any doubt at all have killed her.

She stood with her back pressed to the cliff face, her hands flat against it on either side of her, clawing for something to grip on to. And she stared at the rock that would have been her death, her heart hammering in her throat and her ears, robbing her of breath and of rationality.

It had been an accident, she told herself with her first coherent thought. The stone had become dislodged through the erosion of time—that was what she had heard—and had fallen. The rocks about her, she saw when she looked, were dotted with similar boulders that must at some time have fallen from above.

No, it was not an accident. The stone had been pushed—by someone in a dark cloak. By the Duke of Portfrey? That was ridiculous. By Lauren? Ridiculous! Of course there had not been anyone up there. In that fraction of time she had seen danger to herself in the falling stone and had translated it into the danger she had been imagining ever since that afternoon up on the rhododendron walk.

But there had been someone there!

Was he there now, standing above her, waiting to see if he had succeeded in killing her? Or she?

Why would anyone want to kill her?

Was the would-be killer even now coming down the hill path into the valley to circle around onto the rocks and see for himself if he had succeeded? Or she?

Lily was mindless with panic again. If she moved a muscle, she thought, she would disintegrate. But if she did not move, she might stand here forever. If she did not move, she could be in no way mistress of her own fate. Memories came flooding back of similar moments during that long, terrifying walk through Spain and Portugal. Several times she had almost lost all nerve, imagining partisans behind every rock, imagining them not believing her story.

She stepped away from the cliff face on shaky legs and drew a slow breath. She looked upward. There was no one there—of course. There was no one down on the beach either—at least not yet. She was tempted to make her way in the opposite direction and hope that the tide was out far enough that she could reach the village and the company of other people. But she would not run from her fear. She would never conquer it if she did that. She clambered carefully back over the rocks to the beach. There was no one there. There was no one in the valley either, or on the hillside.

There was no one at all, she told herself firmly as she climbed resolutely upward. When she reached the top, she forced herself to take the wood path a short distance until she thought she must be close to the spot, and then she made her way through the trees until she came to the open land that ended with the cliff edge. Yes, she was in roughly the right place, though she did not approach the edge to make sure. There was no one there and no sign that anyone had been there.

All she had seen was a rock.

She was satisfied with the explanation until she drew closer to the abbey. Panic returned as the security of its walls drew nearer. Perhaps, she thought, she would have rushed through the front doors, demanded to know where Neville was, and gone hurtling into the safety of his arms if she had not remembered how she was dressed. But she did remember and so she went around to the side entrance and climbed the back stairs to her room. She washed