Simply Love

She would have died of embarrassment if she had.

She turned to catch Sydnam’s eye and surprised herself by exchanging a smile with him.

Had he known?

Had he minded?

Had he wanted to court her? When he had asked her to marry him at Ty Gwyn, had he meant it? Had he wanted her to say yes?

It would make all the difference in the world if he had.

But if he had, why had he asked in such a way?

If you wish, Anne, we will marry.

But she would have said no anyway, she supposed. Just as she ought to have said no in Bath. But how could she have refused then?

They were indeed going to have a new baby in their family, and that child was of far more importance than either she or Sydnam.

They did not stay long at Lindsey Hall though they were well received there. Indeed, the duchess was beside herself with delight. And even Bewcastle stayed in the morning room to take coffee with them.

They were back home in time for luncheon, and Sydnam felt that at last he could put into effect what he had made up his mind to yesterday. When he had told Anne out at the temple folly that they both needed to go back before they could move forward, he had not known just how that could apply to himself. He had thought it would mean merely allowing himself to remember-to look back upon what had excited him about painting and to try to remember exactly what it was he had tried to capture and accomplish with his brush. It would have been painful-for many years he had not allowed himself to remember.

But there was more than memories.

When they had been walking home after the rain stopped, largely in silence, he had said one thing as he made his way ahead of her through the woods and held back a branch that would have deluged her face with water as she passed, as it had just done to his.

“I wish,” he had said, “I could see just one of my old paintings. But they were all destroyed.”

“Oh, no, they were not,” she had said, taking the branch from his hand so that he could move ahead. “They were put up in the attic. Your mother told me.”

He had turned away without a word, and he had not spoken a word on the subject since. He had convinced himself when they arrived back at the house that it was too late in the day to see them properly. And this morning he had felt it necessary to make the visit to Lindsey Hall.

But now the time had come-and he would have grasped at any excuse that offered itself not to do what he must do, he thought.

Anne was sitting at the other side of the luncheon table, listening to his mother’s account of the duchess’s first visit to Alvesley, before it had dawned on any of them that Bewcastle was courting her.

“We had so given up all expectation that Bewcastle would marry,” she said, “and Christine was so very different from any bride we might have imagined him choosing that we did not dream of what was about to happen. But though he is as dour as ever, I do believe he is content with her.”

“Oh, more than content, Mother,” Lauren said. “He adores her.”

“I would have to agree,” Anne said. “One night when I was at Glandwr, I saw them from the window of my bedchamber strolling together toward the cliff top above the sea. He had his arm about her shoulders and she had hers about his waist.”

She turned her head to smile at him.

“I am going upstairs,” he told her when the meal was over, and they left the dining room together.

“To rest?” she asked him.

“No,” he said. “Not to our rooms.”

“To the nurs-” But there was sudden awareness in her eyes.

“No. Not there. You are going up to the attic, Sydnam?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think I will.”

She looked searchingly at him as they stood alone together at the foot of the stairs.

“Would you rather go alone?” she asked him. “Or may I go with you?”

He was not sure he had the courage to go alone, though that was what he had intended.

“Come with me?” he said. “Please?”

She took his hand in hers and they went up together, their fingers laced.

One half of the attic floor was taken up with servants’ rooms. The other half, in a quite separate wing from them, was used for storage. He had come up here frequently as a boy. They all had-he and Jerome and Kit. They had rummaged through old boxes and devised stories and games from what they had discovered. It was Jerome who had most frequently worn the old bag wig and skirted, brocaded coat and long, embroidered waistcoat of an ancestor from the past century, since he was the eldest. But it was Sydnam who had donned them one day after painting his face from the old pots of rouge and kohl and placing black patches in provocative places. He had minced about the attic floor in the high, red-heeled shoes they had found with the outfit, the tarnished small sword at his side. They had all agreed, after rolling about with laughter, that men in those days must have been very confident in their masculinity if they were prepared to dress with such apparent effeminacy.

But today he was going up there for a grimmer purpose.

He found what he was looking for in the third room he tried. It was, in fact, he discovered, a room devoted to him-and he wondered fleetingly if there were similar rooms for Jerome and Kit.

His military kit and his dress uniform were at one side of the small room, behind the door. The scarlet of the coat had faded somewhat to pink. But he did not pay them much attention. He could smell paint. All his old easels and supplies were arranged neatly. They were not even covered with dust, leading him to the conclusion that these rooms must be cleaned occasionally. They all looked shockingly familiar, as if he had walked into someone else’s life and made the disorienting discovery that it was his own. It all seemed so very long ago.

Unconsciously he tightened his grip on Anne’s hand and she winced almost imperceptibly. He looked down at her and released her.

“It is not easy,” he said, “to look back into one’s own past, especially when one believed that all traces had been obliterated.”

“No,” she said.

He looked at everything without touching anything. He breathed in slowly the smells of his former life.

He was terribly aware of the framed pictures and the canvases stacked against the far wall, face-in.

“Perhaps,” he said, “it is as well to leave it all in the past.”

She closed the door behind her back and he noticed that the window too was clean and was letting in a great deal of light from the sunny day outside.

“But then,” he said, “I will be haunted by it forever. I think perhaps I spoke the truth yesterday. And they are just paintings, when all is said and done.”

He walked forward, touched one of the picture frames, hesitated, drew in a breath, and lifted and turned it to set against the wall to one side.

It had been his mother’s favorite-it had hung in her boudoir. It was of the small humpbacked bridge that spanned the stream at the foot of the formal gardens to the east of the house and depicted bridge and water and overhanging trees. He turned another and set it beside the first. It was of the old gamekeeper’s hut in the woods south of the Palladian bridge, showing the weathered wood of the building, the worn path to its door, the shining, smooth old stone that formed its door sill, the trees surrounding it. He turned another.

By the time he had finished he had them all turned over, the heavier pictures in their frames at the back, the canvases propped in front of them in such a way that he could see all of them. There were the temple folly painted from across the water, one of the boats moored in the reeds, the rose arbor, and numerous other scenes, almost all of them within the park of Alvesley. There were watercolors and oils.

He had no idea how much time had passed since he began. But he became aware suddenly that Anne had not moved from her position against the door and that she had not spoken a word. He drew a deep breath and looked at her.

“They really were quite good,” he said.

“Were?” She gazed steadily at him.