Once you see one, you’ll never forget it,he’d said, when he told her she looked like a Hudson River Valley sunrise.They steal your breath.
We don’t love each other.
He didn’t say things he didn’t mean.
The clock bonged six in the morning.
Perhaps he was right about this. Perhaps this lust was so potent and consuming and messy and dangerous that one was tempted to call it something more noble in order to justify indulging again and again. Perhaps it was how addicts felt about opium, and everyone knew opium was a bad idea in the long run.
Once you know what truly matters in life, and onceyou know who and what you truly love . . . your aim will always be true.
Why would he lie to her?
Nothing is like us.
Perhaps this would all fade like a fever, once he was gone again.
Perhaps he already knew that’s exactly what would happen. Which is how he was able to let her go.
Nothing is like us.
It was too soon to imagine herself underneath Giles’s naked body. She would need to be, as that’s how the heirs would get made. It wasn’t as though the thought was distasteful. It was that she simply couldn’t form a picture of it, as if her mind kept it behind a closed door. Which is where sex ought to have been kept before she was married, if she were truly a lady. But then, she’d always been a littlemore.
She exhaled roughly, sat up, pressed her palms against her eyes, then looked about her familiar room that soon enough she’d move from and into, presumably, one day, Heatherfield. The rose and cream and green carpet and the curtains in spring green. Her wardrobe and writing desk and the portrait she’d drawn of her mother and father in pastels, the first work she’d thought good enough to frame.
How could she ever do without any of these people?
She closed her eyes.
Tentatively, reluctantly, she raised her arms before her, then curved them into a wide circle. Inside them she could conjure the heat and shape ofHugh; she could feel the rise and fall of his back. The powerful, precious feeling of knowing his breathing had steadied because he’d turned to her, and she’d held him. And with it, an ache of loss that almost gutted her.
How set free she’d felt, naked in his arms.
And just like that, he’d sent her away.
She slammed her fist down on the bed in grief and frustration, and it nearly bounced back and hit her chin. If that wasn’t a metaphor for her entire life at the moment, she didn’t know what was.
She sank back down against her pillows.
But at five o’clock she would be set free from ambiguity. And eventually, this anguish would end, because it must. She would get on with things, as Hugh had needed to do so many times after disasters befell him. That was simply the nature of life.
But she would marry Giles. There was no reason not to do it. She would have a fine life. It had been her dream, after all. How many people could say that their precise dreams had come true, even if this particular dream had expired?
And her new life—which would be more or less like her old life—would begin.
The day both crawled and raced.
She didn’t emerge from her room until noon, and she took one look at herself and realized she would need at least a few more hours to look like she hadn’t been thoroughly ravished the night before. She called for a bath. Her body stung in surprising places, yet not so surprising given howthoroughly those places had been used last night. Honestly, if she could bottle the smell of him she would.
And if she’d had a choice, she never would have bathed again, so she could smell like him forever.
But she washed herself in French milled soap. She could not meet Giles redolent of sex with another man. And perhaps she could consider this a ritual washing away of the past, because as of the moment she’d left him, Hugh was of necessity officially the past.
And then she chose a dress—the pink muslin day dress, with the spray of daisies at the waist and hem. It usually lightened her mood, that dress, and she knew she looked fresh and lovely in it. Pink slippers. With the help of her lady’s maid, her hair was braided and coiled, and two curls were allowed to trace her jaw.
Giles would be brought through to her father’s study upstairs when he arrived. And then, she supposed, he would seek her out. She refused to hide in her room.
Smelling like lavender, a feast for the eyes, she went downstairs to the little sitting room at half past four to wait by the fire, and tried not to feel a thing.