The path of moonlight lay across the lawn like a broad band of silver, except it was silver that looked alive to the touch. At the bottom of the garden trees sprang up and the moonlight played over fragile green leaves as yet unburned by summer sun. The little grove looked like a fairy city, a fairy forest, stretching up from the lawn to a sky studded with stars.
Josie blinked across the lawn. There was something she didn’t understand about those trees. That was a little hawthorn, and there an oak tree. Next to it an apple and perhaps a mock pear. It looked almost as if faint lights caught for a second in the trees and then winked out.
It should have been frightening, she thought. She never believed in fairies, after all, not even when she was small. Some part of her still didn’t believe in them, and never would, not until she was face-to-face with an elfish creature. Preferably with wings.
Yet somehow she couldn’t be frightened, and even all her worry and misery over the marriage and Thurman’s horrid groping fell away. It was warm outside, the kind of sweet spring warmness that makes you feel overdressed in a dressing gown. Josie felt suddenly comfortable in her skin and her bones and her body, the way she used to feel when she was a child, before she understood that she’d been born with the wrong shape.
She almost laughed out loud. But instead she ran forward, leaving her slippers on the threshold to the house. She hadn’t been barefoot for years, and yet it felt exactly right to curl her toes into the soft grass. Before her the moon path cast its wavering, underwater light and the grass turned to an ocean. It was intoxicating, the way the broad band of light invited one to dance. Though of course she wouldn’t dance. She was a grown lady now…
Perhaps just a swinging, running step here and there.
Across the lawn, and in the shade of a young hawthorn, she turned to look back at the house. Nothing was stirring. The house was sleeping, each window blank, and not even the dim glow of a candle could be seen.
She caught another flicker from the corner of her eye, like a fairy twinkle. So she reached up into the tree, feeling her hair catch on a branch. She had to untie her hair ribbon and shake her hair free to come away from the branch. But then she reached up again and caught hold of one of the little objects hanging from the branches, pulling it hard.
She took it back out in the moonlight to examine it.
No fairy, this.
It was a glass ball. A perfectly round glass ball that hung by a ribbon from the branch. Josie frowned over it. She couldn’t imagine why such an ornament would be hanging on a tree. Could Mayne have done such a thing?
There were etchings on the glass, but she couldn’t see them well in the moonlight. Yet how beautiful it was! When she held up the globe, it caught the moonglow and threw it back on her hand. For a moment she just held it, turning it so the watery light of the moon danced over her hands and her arms, catching the rumpled darkness of her hair. There were glass balls in all the trees, big ones and little ones, casting a lovely confusion of light and shadows over the lawn.
Josie danced a little bit farther. All her misery was gone, all the grief and self-loathing and hatred washed away in the moonlight. Tomorrow was another day. That thought felt like a blessing, as if there were indeed fairies dancing in Mayne’s woods.
The thought made her laugh. Her husband was a man known to have slept with most of the married women in the ton…was he a man to have a fairy wood in his backyard? His fairies would be small lascivious nymphs, playfellows of Bacchus.
The inside of the woods beckoned like a dark dream. There were early roses growing somewhere; she could smell their faint, rather ragged smell. Their perfume beckoned too, and so without another glance back at the sleeping house, Josie drifted into the wood, holding her drop of moonglow in her hand.
Mayne stayed on the threshold of the library until he was quite certain that Josie was finding her way to the rose bower and wouldn’t reemerge from the wood. Then he walked after her, feeling queerly as if he didn’t believe his own eyes.
Was that truly his young wife—the words echoed in his chest with an odd resonance—his young wife who had danced into the woods with a swirl of midnight hair? She held one of his glass globes up to the moonlight as if she were an ancient pagan priestess in some sort of act of moon worship.Perhaps she was a pagan goddess, a distilled intoxicating version of womanhood. He had frozen there, watching the sweet panel of her cheek, icy cream in the moonlight. Even from the other side of the lawn he could feel the force of Josie’s capacity for joy.
She was wearing nothing more than a sturdy dressing gown, tied at the waist, and yet Mayne discovered his heart beating wildly, as he watched the line of her flank, the intoxicating way that she curved in at her waist. She looked like a painting by the great Raphael, one of those he painted for his adored mistress. Josie had the same soft arms and rounded breasts as the lavishly beloved Renaissance paramour.
Every inch of Mayne’s body burned to run across the lawn and snatch her into his arms. She didn’t look like a subdued, ravished maiden any longer. She was enthrallingly sensual, with her bare feet and unbound hair.
A deep certainty settled in his chest, and with it a gladness so profound that he almost laughed aloud. Josie had not been ravished. Whatever had happened to her, his darling girl had not been thrown onto the ground and taken. More likely, she left the man in question on the ground. In fact, now that he thought about the manure story…he could hardly stop himself from laughing.
Instead he stopped for a moment on the stone portico and pulled off his boots. He hadn’t retired to bed; he had just been sitting by the fire in his bedroom, brooding over what to do with an injured wife…
Who wasn’t injured.
The joy of it flooded his body. She was his, and she wasn’t hurt. Every pulse of blood in his body was informing him exactly what to do with that exquisite nymph who just danced her way into his woods.
Mayne ran across the grass in his bare feet, feeling a hedonistic pleasure that he never experienced in all his tawdry meetings by candlelight with women tired of their marriages. When he reached the wood he cast an experienced eye over the glass balls. They all appeared to be sturdily moored to their branches, swaying a bit in the rustling wind, but just as beautiful as they’d been since Aunt Cecily first envisioned them.
He walked quietly through the few trees, heading to the rose arbor. That’s where she would be, of course. It all had a queer sense of inevitability, as if all the terror and upset of the last twenty-four hours came down to this moment of walking toward his new wife. The rose arbor was in the very back of his garden, sheltered on two sides by the ancient stone walls that separated his house from that next door. The roses had grown and grown until they hung in great tattered sheets over the walls.
Josie was sitting in the middle of the arbor, not on the stone bench, but with her back against the statue of a leaping dolphin, caught in mid-flight. Her lap was full of cascades of roses, their sweet and delicate smell strong in the night air.
“Didn’t you scratch your hands plucking those roses?” he said, drifting silently to the wall and then remembering, too late, that he should have given her some indication of his presence.
But she didn’t scream.
She just looked up and smiled. His breath burned in his chest at her wide-spaced, arched brows, tip-tilted eyes, the swirl of her hair.
“How extraordinarily odd,” she said. “For a moment I thought that Dionysus had appeared in his woods.”