Page 80 of The Spy and the Nightingale
He was considering it now, though: the future. His. That seemed to have directed him full circle to where his life had begun, here on the north Kentish coast.
The problem was he had no idea what filled the future. He’d never sought anything gentler nor had latitude for personal aspirations. He’d never permitted himself to want something, anything, purely forhimself.
Until he met Isobel Graham on a rainy street in Montmartre.
PART TWO
Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland
APRIL 1817
Chapter 24
Six months after Paris . . .
April 1817
Auchencairn, Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland
Isobel chose this spring morning to walk the coast path down along Balcary Bay where it wound past the point and up to the heugh’s summit above. Although nights were yet cool, the Solway Firth had fully thrown off winter at last, and cheerful pink blossoms of sea thrift now dotted the cliff top.
She walked slowly until she came to the large rock, more or less flat, that afforded the best view towards Heston Isle and the firth beyond. It was not wholly in direct sun yet owing to tumbled boulders around it. She sat, enjoying the breeze on her face.
She came here often. Lucy favored walking the shore itself, the dunes and the margins of mudflats when the tide was out, and was rarely coaxed to summit the heugh, but she preferred the view of the bay from above. She’d been here at all different times of day these past four months, in most any weather the firth had seen fit to deliver.
Lucy had smiled affectionately at her when she extended the invitation to walk but as usual preferred to remain home. Itwasrather windy now she’d achieved the top, but she was happy to be out.
It was so good to see Lucy beginning to smile more again. It was true that it didn’t fully reach her eyes often, but it was far more emotion than she had shown those first weeks out of France or the early months here. There were occasional brief glimpses of the spirited girl she’d been before.
Her sister never spoke of the previous year, and she did not pry. She told herself it was enough for now that Lucy was home, safe, and that any healing necessary might come in time. Too, Lucy grieved the loss of Maman and Da, for she had not known they were gone until the journey out of France.
She suspected from a few stray remarks that Lucy’s grief was underscored by internalized guilt that her disappearance had perhaps contributed to both, but Lucy did not speak of that either. Perhaps with time...
Far below, back the way she’d come, there was a man, hatless, walking where the track travelled around the point. A neighbor, perhaps. If he continued onwards in this direction, he would soon reach the part of the footpath out of sight of her current perch until it came out again at the headland. She held up a hand against the sea’s brightness but couldn’t discern the man’s features.
She was building friendly relationships within the community, but there were still people she had not met. She and Lucy had kept almost entirely to themselves when first they arrived, and they still spent much of their time with only one another for company.
She looked out again at the firth, towards the north of England where the Lake District mountains were hazy on the horizon. Years of her life were spent on English soil. Maman and Da were both buried there. In a way Jamie was too, even if hismortal remains were interred in Brussels. Most memories of him were in England.
She wished, not for the first time, that she had some small talent for sketching, but as she had once told Étienne Baudelaire in that strange week in Paris, drawing had never been an art at which she excelled. She had more skill with embroidery; perhaps she might sometime attempt to capture the spirit of this view with needle and silk.
She sat for a time, letting the tentative warmth of April and the breeze’s song and the sparkling water lull her. She’d found peace here in Kirkcudbrightshire.
The man achieved the top of the cliff path. A prickle edged up her spine. She couldn’t say why at first. It might have been the manner in which he moved: purposeful with the impression of energy tightly constrained. It could have been his height or the darkness of his hair.
And then she did know because despite the expanse of green and pink still between them, his eyes were fixed unwaveringly on her. The foundation of determined calm on which she had built her life these past months trembled and threatened to crack.
His long strides slowed as he neared her until he came to a stop some few feet away.
She’d thought of Nathaniel at times; oh, of course she had. Many days with deep gratitude for what he had done for her and for Lucy. Some days with bemusement that her previously relatively ordinary life, mundane once more and all the lovelier for it, had intersected with his. Nights... Well, nights found her sometimes sleepless in her bed, filled with a deep, restless ache. She recalled with dreamlike clarity the intensity of their bodies fitting together... but equally the comfort of his arms around her and the security she’d found there.
In sharing their bodies, they had been as intimate as two people could be, but she’d glimpsed only a fraction of his interiorworld. Nor had he known her, not really. And yet he had fundamentally altered the direction of her life, short as their acquaintance had been.
So what did one say, some five and a half months later? There was no etiquette book in existence for this sort of meeting.
For surely half an eternity they merely looked at one another. Somewhere in there she managed a lungful or two of the spring-scented air.
His hair was longer than he’d worn it last autumn, enough so that he’d tied it back with leather lacing at his nape, although the wind had loosed some of it. It suited him.
