Page 96 of The Spy and the Nightingale
He was not a broken man, but he was still working out a future he’d never allowed himself to envision. It might take him the remainder of his life, discovering what he could make of it. He could see himself doing that here, in Kirkcudbrightshire. Here, with Isobel.
All he had to truly offer her right now was his heart—but did she want it?
Isobel went to Nathaniel the second week of May, when spring was well advanced on the Solway. Did she not go to him now, she might never. Repairs on the crofter’s cottage were nearly complete, and she did not know if he would stay afterwards or leave.
I have endured so much loss already. Surely I will bear it if he leaves.But her mind blanked at that and refused to consider it further.
Heart in her throat, she noiselessly opened the door to his room.If he is asleep, I will just leave quietly...But no, there was a candle burning. He was propped on one elbow, a book spread open on the bed beneath one hand.
She moved just inside the room, silently pulling shut the door behind her and setting down her candle on the washstand. He was already motionless, but he became somehow more still yet in that particular way he had of taking the quiet into him.
Her mouth went dry.
She took a single step towards him. Carefully, without looking down, he closed the book and laid it on the floor. His eyes devoured her.
Wordless, whole body trembling, she went to him. His arms came around her as she knelt on the edge of the bed, and for a moment he only clasped her tightly to him.
And then his hands skated lightly up her thighs and along her hips to gather up her shift and draw it over her head. So difficult to breathe from that slight sweet contact of palms and fingertips along her naked flesh. She shivered, spine arching, as his mouth found the precise juncture of neck and shoulder. Just below her rib cage, bared to his touch, his hands settled, featherlight. She undressed him as quickly as her shaking hands allowed.
He pulled her down to the bed then, skin against skin, and his lips found hers.
Owing to Lucy down the hall, they did not speak, made nonoises except for stuttered breaths and the small gasps and sighs impossible to contain. Words were unnecessary in any case, with touch and taste to reacquaint them to one another. Time lost all meaning except the here and now, the shape of him in her arms.
When he at last entered her, it was without force or haste. Unhurried movements, exquisitely excruciatingly slow, a careful inch at a time, so creaking of the bed would not betray them. Resolution should have been impossibly out of reach with such caution, and yet tension built gradually, inexorably, until Nathaniel shuddered with the effort to constrain movement, and her entire body trembled head to foot until she thought she might die of it. But then she was lost over the edge, and so was he.
He lay heavily on her afterwards, still joined to her, his face turned in to her neck. She kept her arms and legs twined tight about him, holding him to her despite the chill in the room rapidly stealing heat from their damp bodies.
His mouth moved to her ear:Stay.A word breathed with little more than air.
She tightened her arms around him in response, a wordlessyes.His tongue traced her ear, teeth closing on the earlobe as he groped behind him to find the blanket.
They were still joined, still tangled length to length. She couldn’t risk speech in the silent house, so let this speak for her instead: his face cradled in her hands, kisses infused with all the longing for him that was rooted so much deeper than physical desire alone.
He was hers right now, and she would claim him, future heartache be damned.
Chapter 29
May turned to June, and Nathaniel moved into the crofter’s cottage once repairs were finished. Sometime in June, Lucy told her in no uncertain terms that it was abundantly clear what she and Nathaniel were up to, so she might as well go openly to him. As Lucy put it, it was blatantly ridiculous for a grown woman to sneak around like a thief in the night, and everyone would get more rest if she just stayed with him till morning.
Most nights she did after that. She floated through some days in distracted reverie from the night previous. The physical passion between them was natural as breathing; she could not imagine it better. It had ever been thus between them. It was so much more than that though. She loved him: wholly, irrevocably, past the point of caution.
But they never spoke of the future. She was a coward, perhaps, but she was afraid to hope for too much. For the first time in his life, his future was his own and not determined by duty or obligation, just his own free will.
June turned to July, and still he stayed. The shed and pen forthe animals were rebuilt. She’d already added a few chickens, and she hoped perhaps next spring to add a cow. Nathaniel regularly lent a hand with the stake nets out in the bay, hauling in fish. If he wanted, he would have work there come autumn and beyond.
They never discussed it in those terms. But he stayed. And she loved him, heart, mind, and body.
It was the third week of July when she admitted to herself another truth: she carried Nathaniel’s child.
They had not been cautious, nor had they ever spoken at all of consequences save for that long-ago conversation in Paris. Perhaps he assumed after what she’d said at that time that she was unable to conceive; certainly nothing had come of their lack of prudence in October. She’d thought it unlikely herself, almost impossible, even when her courses began again in January. She’d been married to Jamie almost six years without a child. She had always wanted children, sons or daughters to love in the ways her parents had her and Lucy. Jamie’s death had engendered an acute loss of hope with regard to the possibility of motherhood.
But now she had missed her monthly when it should have come twice. The last one had come between the time Nathaniel arrived and when she’d gone to his bed a month later. At first she assumed it was just another inexplicable cessation in her cycle like the one of eighteen months after Waterloo. If she was more fatigued, the long nights in Nathaniel’s bed were sufficient explanation for that. She’d had a morning or two with some very mild nausea but no lasting malaise, nothing at all like some women experienced. Her figure remained unchanged, except for a growing fullness and sensitivity in her breasts. And didn’t that latter make her blush, the ways it had revealed itself...
Finally she acknowledged to herself that beyond certainty, she carried Nathaniel’s child, although as yet she’d felt no quickening.
And she was fiercely glad for it.
Lucy, too, knew. She was unsure how long Lucy suspected orwhen she knew for sure, given she herself had not carried the certainty for long, but she’d caught Lucy looking assessingly at her. It came into the open between them one day when she rose from her embroidery and quite without conscious thought cupped her hand over her belly, invisibly shielding new life behind it.
