side on the bed and gritting his teeth. Not yet. Not that name. Not yet. He was not ready yet.
He gazed at Ellen and knew beyond any doubt that this was no brief passion for him. He loved her. She had just given everything with no demand for anything in return. But he would give anyway. All of himself. All that he had. It was all hers. He had searched all his life for her. Now that he had found her, all he had, all he was, was hers.
Ellen.
His pain had gone. Her bare legs felt warm and smooth against his own. He could smell her fragrance again. She felt very, very good.
He closed his eyes.
Chapter 11
MADELINE CAME VISITING THREE TIMES. And Ellen went out each morning to buy food and to have some fresh air and exercise, and once she went to bid farewell to Mrs. Byng, who was going to join her husband in Paris. But apart from that they were alone together for six days. Six days and nights of magic that they both knew must come to an end but did not wish to end. Six days during which they both held at bay what both knew must be faced soon. Six days of wonder and of love.
Ellen had woken during that first night and removed herself from the bed and the room without waking him. And she had lain awake until dawn, not even trying to sleep, not wanting to sleep. There was too much wonderment to feel.
He was still sleeping the next morning when she plucked up the courage to take warm water and his shaving things in to him. But it took a great deal more courage to go back in with his breakfast tray. She could hear him moving about in his room. And she did not know how she should behave when she went in there, what she should say.
She need not have worried. He was lying in bed again, and he watched her come into the room as he always did, and he smiled as he always did and bade her good morning. And he sat up without her help, gritting his teeth so that she would not know that he was in pain-foolish man to believe that she did not know. The only thing different from usual was that when she set the tray across his lap, he took her hand and lifted it to his lips, kissed the palm, and smiled up at her. And she leaned forward, without any thought at all, and kissed him briefly on the lips.
They said nothing beyond the usual. She sat with him while he ate, and told him some of the gossip she had heard at market that morning, told him he was foolish when he announced that he was going to walk right out into the parlor that day and back again without any assistance, and said that, yes, there were more kidneys in the pan and he might have them, since all the food he had put inside himself in the last week had not yet killed him. And, no, she did not want them herself. How could he even think of eating kidneys for breakfast?
For six days they lived much as they had lived before, except that each day he sat and walked a little more than he had the day before, though each day he swore just as fiercely at his own weakness and his seemingly insatiable need of sleep.
Ellen sat with him through much of each day, sewing when he rested or slept, waiting to leap to her feet and run to his assistance when he walked, talking and listening tirelessly when he sat or lay awake. She listened avidly to stories of his childhood and boyhood, a time of great freedom and happiness, it seemed, except for the great blot of his father’s death and his mother’s near-breakdown for a year afterward. But he had had his brother-only nineteen at the time of their father’s death, but a rock of strength and cheerfulness and dependability, it seemed. And he had had his sister.
She told him more about her own girlhood, even up to the pain of that final dreadful quarrel, after which her mother had left, not to return. And during which she had told her husband that Ellen was not his daughter. Perhaps she would never have known, Ellen said, if her father-the earl, that was-had not been drunk at the time and had not come crying to her. He had told her and spent the following week drinking and crying and begging her not to leave him but to be his daughter anyway. But she had left.
Her father-her real father-had been a family acquaintance for years. He had been in London at the time, on leave from the army. She had gone to him and persuaded him to take her with him when he left again. He had never been unkind to her. He had always made sure that she had the best of care and all the necessary clothes and possessions. He had made an effort to spend time with her and to show her affection. But it had been difficult for both of them to suddenly play the role of father and daughter after so many years.
She never took her stories closer to the present than that. Neither of them told stories of the present or recent past. But the long-ago past was safe. And it drew them closer together. They came to know each other better, to like each other more.
Sometimes he held her hand as she sat beside his bed. And sometimes lifted it to his lips and kissed it, and her fingers one by one. Sometimes they smiled into each other’s eyes and let their eyes rove over each other’s faces. And never with embarrassment. Ellen even wondered about it when she was alone. Usually it was uncomfortable to look at someone without speaking. She never felt uncomfortable with Lord Eden, no matter how long the silence.
She called him that most of the time, though he always called her now by her given name. She called him by his only when he was making love to her. And they made love each night after that first. She did not know quite what to do the next night, but he called to her as she was putting out the lamp in the parlor, and she went to him, and it seemed perfectly natural to climb into the bed beside him.
She stayed with him for the whole night after that first time. And after that first time it was truly beautiful. He took her slowly and seemed to sense at each stage of their lovemaking when she was ready to move on to the next. On the second night and every night after that she came to him, shuddering and calling his name, while he still moved in her.
She had not known there could be such physical passion, such longing indistinguishable from pain, such a peace beyond the crest of her longing. She had never experienced real passion before. And yet, though the physical sensations were intensely personal, there was a meeting too of selves and emotions as well as bodies. It was true that man and woman could become one. She was always most intensely aware of him when she was being released into her own pleasure and when he was coming to his.
She loved totally. She felt cheated if she slept soundly the night through after their lovemaking. She liked to lie awake and watch him sleeping beside her. She liked to feel her love for him almost an ache in her. And she liked to feel the warmth from his body, to know that she might reach out and touch him, that she might wake him and know that his eyes would focus on her and smile.
She loved him with a totality that could come only from the unreality of the moment. Because it was unreal. And sometimes, before she firmly shuttered her mind, she knew that it was unreal, that there was a world beyond their doors, and that because of their humanity they were part of that world and at some time must go back out into it again. But not yet. Oh, please, not yet. She needed this time out of time. She needed him. She loved him.
And Lord Eden, frustrated by his great weakness and the slowness of his recovery, was nevertheless living in an enchanted time. He had been in love before, constantly, routinely, as a younger man. Painfully in love, living for one daily sight of his beloved, pining for one kindly look from her eyes. But he had never loved, he realized now; he had merely played with sentiment.
He loved Ellen Simpson. He did not think he could ever have his fill of gazing at her, of watching her about some ordinary task like her sewing, of listening to her talk and discovering her past and her background, of talking to her and watching her changing expressions that told of her interest in him.
He could never have his fill of loving her, of making love to her. It was a heady experience, a totally erotic experience, to make love with a woman rather than to her. And quite unexpected. He had never thought of such a thing, had never expected it even of his dream love. To find that Ellen wanted him, burned for him, urged him on to giving her satisfaction, and showed that satisfaction with a quite uninhibited pleasure, more than doubled his own delight in her. He could not now imagine that he had never known there could be such loving.
He loved her. It was for her that he washed and shaved himself and ate and drank and walked laboriously
