Page 93 of The Spy and the Nightingale
“Why did you remain so long in Brussels after Waterloo?” Rather than returning to a family who loved her, whom she loved in return. Surely tending the wounded had contributed to her nightmares given how she’d described the one to him in France.
Isobel drew up her knees and hugged them to her chest,resting her chin atop one as she gazed out at the water. “At the time, I could not have articulated my reasons for staying. Certainly I did not do much by way of introspection in those days. Most days I merely put one foot before the other, lived through each next breath.”
She ducked the curve of her cheek against her sleeve. “But more recently, since coming here with Lucy, I’ve had time to consider it. Among other things.” The breeze teased strands of hair from around her face and carried faint traces of her soap underlaid by the brine of the sea. It struck him like a blow, how precious those small details were.
“I suppose I found purpose in tending the wounded,” she said contemplatively. “And in that, there was comfort. Even when it was at times horribly sad. Perhaps I also needed solitude in some capacity. My grief was too fresh to share. And I also no longer knew who I was, in some fundamental way, because I couldn’t envision what came next. Perhaps I was trying to find my way to some new understanding of myself.” Her dimple showed. “Although I must say that any progress I made with regards to that was rather obliterated during my time in France. It was there that I realized I did not know myself yet at all.”
“I’ve had to learn myself anew as well,” he said. “Or rather, I’ve been somewhat adrift these past few months. I’ve told you I travelled to Kent before coming here?”
“Yes,” she said. “Although you didn’t say what you hoped to find there.”
“Truthfully, I’m not certain. Answers, I suppose.” But even then, that cold day in the churchyard, he’d not known to what.
The seeds of his dissatisfaction, however vague, were sown even before the affair with Compton fell into his hands. He’d become aware of it on some level by the early stages of the operation. Amélie had noted a change in him, had urged caution. She’d been worried that he was less attentive to his own safety even as hedid his job with diligence. Baudelaire offered cautions of his own, serious in rare moments. Quinn had remarked on it after Compton’s death.
“And were there?” Isobel prompted. “Answers?”
“Aye, maybe. It was while I was there that I decided to come here.”
Isobel turned her head so she looked more directly at him. In the sunlight sparkling off the firth, her eyes were several shades lighter than her blue dress. “And that was an answer to something?”
He let the smile creep from the corner of his mouth to something broader, rusty but genuine. “Aye.”
Her answering smile was more in her eyes set aglow than on her lips.
“Have you found the new understanding of yourself you’ve needed?” he asked, picking up the earlier conversational thread.
“I am still working on it. I suppose that is everyone’s plight though, is it not? For life never stays the same. We are presented with challenges, some we expect but some we can in no way foresee. So we must respond to them as best we can. Sometimes we come through them but little changed. But sometimes...” She shrugged. “Sometimes we are fundamentally altered. I could not have foreseen anything to do with my travel to France or with becoming entangled in your operation. With... you.” Her color was high. “As for what passed between us there—” She stopped. Shook her head.
It was the first either of them had broached it directly. He wished very much to know what she’d been about to say. “Have you regrets? About any of it?”
“Certainly not about doing what was necessary to find Lucy—for here she is, with me. I believe I could have accepted any necessity to bring that about. Although I had not conceived it possible that I was capable of intrigues or subterfuge of thatnature. But I was, and I did, and the end result is more than I’d truly dared hope possible.”
He thought at first that was all she intended to say for she fell silent. He considered his own possible conversational forays about what had passed between them when she said suddenly, “I do not in the least regret what passed between us. Between you and me, privately. That too I could not have imagined—” She broke off again, color high. “But I welcomed it. Very much. And I did not and have not regretted any of it.”
He drew a lungful of air, having a response to that, at least. “Nor have I.”
“Sometimes it has seemed almost a dream,” she said. “Going about my life here these past few months. Until the day I saw you walking towards me on the path, and I knew I had not dreamed you.”
They’d both shifted during the last minute of the conversation. Bodies closer, leaning towards one another like flowers seeking the sun’s warmth. He closed what little remained of the distance, but it was her mouth that found his first. Her lips were cool, but inside her mouth was wet heat that drew him like a bee to nectar. The soft sound she made when their tongues touched set a frisson up his spine.
She leaned further in, arms going around his shoulders. He stroked down her spine, around to her waist, drawing her in to cradle her in his arms before lowering her to the grass beneath him to kiss her more thoroughly.
This...Thiswas the truth he’d sought. One of them, anyway. And possibly also the answer.
Isobel enjoyed the evenings when local residents gathered at the Arms, sharing music and verse and community.Cèilidheanwere infrequent, particularly as daylength and sunlight became more conducive to extended hours of outdoors work, but it was always a welcome chance to socialize with neighbors outside of church, and it fostered a real sense of community. She felt more and more that she and Lucy truly had a place here.
She did not miss London. Until her return from Flanders, she’d not lived in London other than rare times when Jamie’s postings did not allow for her to join him.
Her parents and Lucy had moved from Kirkcudbright to London nearly four years after her marriage, seeking other doctors for Maman as her health worsened and the most educated doctors in Edinburgh pronounced her unlikely to ever get well. Da was unwilling to accept that. He’d made the monumental decision to relocate again. It had done Maman no good in the end, but it had at least offered Lucy a chance to study with some renowned violin instructors. She was quite gifted and had loved playing. It was all the more puzzling that she so adamantly refused to do so now.
Often Lucy did not even attend the musical nights, although to her knowledge, Lucy had never been made to feel unwelcome. She hoped each time that perhaps this time, thiscèilidh, would be the night her sister not only came but took up her fiddle once again. But it was never so.
Herself, she’d loved singing as far back as she could remember, hence Da’s pet name of nightingale.Mo spideag, he’d called her,always singing. She’d had formal lessons, but she’d most loved casual social gatherings just like the one she attended tonight.
Jamie’s family was of the peerage, as were most of the Greys’ regimental officers and their wives. It was something of an unwelcome surprise to discover that although ladies were expected to demonstrate some degree of proficiency in a musical art, and even to display it at social gatherings, it was more performative thanjoyous. During the years of her marriage, music became less pleasurable and more prescriptive.
Now she was again in a community that valued sharing music with others for the sheer joy that doing so entailed.
