Then Comes Seduction

“It is always carpeted with snowdrops in the early spring,” he said, “as if it had suffered its own private little snowfall. And with bluebells later on as if a patch of sky had taken refuge in the forest. I wish you could have seen it in the spring.”

“I will,” she said softly. “Next year and the year after. I live here, Jasper.”

He knew somehow from the tone of her voice that she understood, and he felt foolish and grateful.

One thrush, perhaps disturbed by the sound of their voices, flew out of a high branch with a flutter of wings, and she tipped back her head to watch it soar into the sky.

“I have always had places like this of my own,” she said, “though never anywhere quite so remote or more splendid.”

He looked over to the far corner of the clearing and was surprised and relieved to discover that it was, of course, still there-a great flat slab of rock jutting out of the hillside, level with his knees when he was a boy.

“Ah,” he said, “the stone is still there. My drea-”

He stopped abruptly.

“Your drea-?” she said.

“Nothing.” He shrugged.

“Your dreaming stone?” she said.

Good Lord, she had got it exactly right. His dreaming stone.

“A foolish boyhood fancy,” he said, striding away from her to take a closer look at it. It was covered with moss and twigs and other debris, and he leaned over to brush it off. “I was captain of my own ship here and lord of my own castle and navigator of my own flying carpet. I slew dragons and enemy knights and black-hearted villains of all descriptions here. I was my own favorite, invincible hero.”

“As we all are in our childhood fantasies,” she said. “As we need to be. Our games give us the courage to grow up and live the best adult lives of which we are capable.”

Had the vicar taught her that?

He set one booted foot on the stone.

“And sometimes,” he said, “I would just lie here watching the sky.”

“Flying on the coattails of the clouds,” she said. “And yet you scorned me when I told you that I dreamed of flying close to the sun.”

“I was a child at the time,” he said, lowering his foot back to the ground, “and knew nothing. It is here we have to do our living, Katherine. And not even here in this clearing or places like it, but down there in the world, where dreams signify nothing.”

“Our lives ought to be lived in both places,” she said. “We need both our retreats, our private places and our dreams, and our lives out there, where we make a difference to one another, for good or ill.”

He must think quickly of something about which to tease her. He was not accustomed to serious conversation. And he felt too raw for one now. Why, then, had he brought her here? He might easily have got away on his own.

He had never brought anyone else here-until now.

She stepped up onto the stone, looked around the clearing from that higher vantage point, and sat down. She took off her bonnet and set it beside her, and then hugged her knees and lifted her face to the sky.

A few weeks ago she had worn lemon and blue for the lake and the sunshine. Now she wore her pale green cotton for the woods, as if she had known they would come here. A sun goddess there, a wood nymph here.

And then she looked suddenly dismayed.

“I am sorry,” she said. “Am I encroaching upon what is yours?”

“You are what is mine, are you not?” he said, grinning at her. And he stepped up there too and sat with his wrists resting on his crossed legs for a few minutes before removing his hat and coat, spreading the latter behind him, and lying back on it, leaving enough room for her if she chose to lie beside him.

It was no good. She had not responded to that provocative claim of ownership, and he could think of nothing else with which to tease or mock her.

She glanced down at him, looked into his eyes, and then came down to join him, her head beside his on the coat. He felt himself relax. It was safe here. There had always been that illusion. It was an illusion, of course. He had always had to go back to the house eventually, where he had been required to explain where he had been, why he had chosen to worry his mother so much with his long absence, why his lessons were not done or his Bible verses learned, why his clothes were dirty, why…

Well.

His body was relaxed, but his thoughts had a busy agenda of their own. He could not still them. He could not think of a single thing to say that would make her laugh or that would draw a spirited retort.

He was not himself at all. He ought to have come alone.

“He loved Rachel, you know,” he said abruptly at last and felt like an idiot when he heard the words. He had spoken aloud.

“Mr. Gooding?” she asked after a pause. “Ought that not to be present tense? It seemed to me at our wedding breakfast that-”

“My father,” he said, interrupting her. “She was more than a year old when he died, and he loved her. He adored her, in fact. He used to carry her all over the house, to the frequent consternation of her nurse.”

She did not say anything.

“And he was excited about me,” he said. “He had been out shooting with some other fellows on the day he died and was carousing with them afterward, after the rain started, when word reached him that my mother was having pains. He was riding hell bent for leather back home when he jumped that hedge instead of taking ten seconds longer to go through the gate. Perhaps he did not even notice that it was open. And so he died-and the pains were false ones. I did not put in an appearance until a month later.”

Her hand was in his. Had he taken it? Or had she taken his? Either way, he was clasping it rather tightly.

He felt like a prize idiot. He turned his head and smiled mockingly at her, loosening his grip as he did so.

“It was just as well he popped off when he did,” he said. “His second child would have been a colossal disappointment to him. You must agree with that, Katherine.”

“Why do you speak of these things as if they are new discoveries?” she asked.

“Because they are,” he said. “I had a chat with some of the servants this morning when I went down to the kitchen in search of you, and they told me all sorts of things I had never heard before. We were not allowed to mention my father’s name, you know.”

“Why?” She frowned.

“He was a rake and a libertine and the devil’s spawn,” he said. “When righteousness came into the house in the guise of my mother’s second husband, his influence was to be forgotten once and for all. For the good of every one of us, family and servants. Come to think of it, maybe he would not have been disappointed. Maybe he would have hailed me as his true successor. Do you think?”

She ignored his flippancy.

“So you were told nothing of your own father?” Her huge, fathomless eyes grew larger.

“On the contrary,” he said. “I was told something of him almost every day of my boyhood. He was the man whose seed had made me bad, irredeemable, incorrigible, and any number of other nasty things. I was as like him as two peas in a pod-as two rotten peas, that is. I would never amount to anything in life because I had his blood running in my veins. And everyone knew where I was headed after I died-downward, to be reunited with him.”

“Did your mother not have something to say?” she asked.

“My mother was a sweet lady,” he said. “Naturally placid, I believe, and very easily dominated. She needed always to have someone to tell her what was what. The servants claim that she adored my father. But after his death and my birth she collapsed into lethargy and a gloom that lifted only when Wrayburn took over her life and