“You have a morbid mind,” he told her.
“I do not,” she protested. “Graveyards remind me of the continuity of life and family and community. In this cemetery the same four or five last names keep recurring. Have you noticed? I am sure if we were to ask in the village we would find that the same names predominate even now. Is that not fascinating?”
“Wondrously so.” He favored her with a deliberately blank look. “It would certainly seem to indicate that people on the whole do not do much running away.”
“Or else they run but then return,” she said, “as we will do after a while.”
“A good long while, it is to be hoped,” he said.
He was in no hurry to think about returning. After a few days and nights in her company, he was still enchanted by her. It was a strange word to pop into his head—enchanted—but no other more appropriate word presented itself. Lusted after was too earthy and did not quite capture how he felt.
Sometimes they wandered through markets and often bought cheap frivolities that would have repelled him, and probably her too, in a more rational frame of mind. He bought her a pea green string bag to hold their purchases like the ones other women were carrying and a sky blue cotton sunbonnet with a wide, floppy brim and a neck flap. He suggested that they look for a three-legged stool to go with it and a pail and a milking cow, but she called him silly and pointed out that they would be unable to squeeze the cow into the carriage and it would be unreasonable to expect it to trot behind and still be ready to fill the pail with milk whenever they stopped. He conceded the point.
She bought him a black umbrella with hideous gold tassels all around the edge that dripped water everywhere, mainly down the neck of the holder when he tried to keep it over himself and his companion on a rainy day. She suggested that he keep it for future use as a sunshade. He suggested that he cut the tassels off but did not do so. He bought himself a gnarled and sturdy wooden staff with which to trudge about the hills of Devon like a seasoned countryman. It snapped in two with a loud crack when he put the smallest amount of weight upon it in their inn room later that evening. Fortunately for his dignity, he maintained his balance, but she collapsed into giggles anyway on the side of their bed and he shook the jagged stump at her and would perhaps have fallen in love if he had been twenty years younger and twenty times more foolish.
“I paid good money for this, madam,” he told her.
“You paid almost nothing for it,” she reminded him. “Even so, you did not get your money’s worth, and I sympathize.”
“A great deal of good your sympathy does me,” he grumbled.
“You poor dear,” she said, opening her arms wide. “Let me show you.”
Poor dear?
He cast aside the remnants of his rustic staff and let her show him.
When they were on the road, they were sometimes silent, but it was a companionable silence. They often sat hand in hand, their shoulders touching. Occasionally she dozed, her head on his shoulder. He had never been able to sleep in a moving carriage. Once he suggested they pull down the leather curtains and make love, but there were limits to what he could expect from the former Countess of Riverdale. She said a firm no and was not to be budged.
“Prude,” he said.
“Agreed,” she retorted.
There was no answer to that. Clever woman not to try besting him on the exchange of insults. He pointedly admired the countryside instead of making love to her.
“Annoyed?” she asked after some time had elapsed.
“Very,” he said.
Her head stayed facing toward him for a few moments, presumably to discover if he meant it. Then she turned and admired the countryside on her side of the carriage.
“It would be decidedly uncomfortable,” she said after a while.
“And undignified,” he added.
“And that too.”
A moment later she laughed softly and settled for sleep against his shoulder. But they never did make love in his new carriage.
Sometimes they talked. He was wary of conversation at first. He did not converse with women. Not really converse, that was. Frankly, he was not interested in women as people, though to be fair to himself, he did not expect them to be interested in him as a person either. His dealings with women were to fulfill a very specific need in their lives and his own. It was not that he disliked them or did not respect them any more than he believed they disliked or did not respect him. It was just that . . . Well, he had no interest in relationships. Again to be fair to himself, he avoided close friendships with men too. He had numerous friendly acquaintances, but no one to whom he bared his soul. The very thought was anathema to him.
They talked about their families. Or she did, anyway. She obviously felt a deep attachment to her family, though he wondered if they knew how deep her feelings ran. She could be very reserved, very cool, in manner. He had often wondered how much feeling there was behind that reserve. He had already discovered the passion. But there were genuine emotions too.
Her heart was torn in shreds with worry over her son, who was a captain with a rifle regiment in the Peninsula. She did not put her feelings into quite those words, but it was not difficult to interpret what she said that way. She spoke with hope of her elder daughter, who had been stripped of her title and place in society and robbed of her betrothal after her illegitimacy had been exposed. She had apparently taught at an orphanage school and then married a schoolmaster and artist who had just inherited a modest fortune and a home outside Bath. It all sounded very complicated to him. They had adopted two of the children from the orphanage and recently had one of their own—her reason for having been in Bath. They had opened their home as a sort of retreat/conference/concert/gallery venue that was always buzzing with activity and teeming with people. Artist types, Marcel guessed. It all sounded quite ghastly, but apparently the daughter was happy, one indication being that she went about barefoot more often than she was shod.
“I suppose,” he said, “her former self would have shuddered with horror at the mere thought of anyone except her maid seeing her feet.”
“Yes,” she said, apparently having taken his question seriously.
She was worried about her younger daughter, who had been deprived, with her title and social status, of any chance of making her come-out at a Season in London and of all hope of contracting the sort of marriage she had grown up to expect. The girl was apparently sweet and gentle and quite accepting of her lot in life—a fact that deeply worried her mother.
“Perhaps she really is,” he said. “Accepting, that is.” Were not women raised to accept whatever life cared to throw their way? The devil but he was glad all over again that he had not been born female.
She gave him a speaking glance, and he kissed her hard so that he would not have to look into her deeply wounded eyes. Good God, he did not need this. He had run away with her so that they could put all their cares behind them for a while, forget everything but each other and the pleasure they could derive from each other and their immediate surroundings. So that they could enjoy a week or three of stress-free living and lusty sex.
Yet when he had finished kissing her and had sat back beside her again, he took her hand in his and settled it on his thigh, turned his head to look into her face, and so tacitly encouraged her to go on talking. He sensed that she needed to talk, and it struck him that no one ever seemed eager to talk to him—unless they were peppering him with complaints, that is, and pleas that he do something to put matters right.