He felt her shoulders relax, her eyes close, as she leaned against him. “We three,” she said slowly, as though testing the words on her tongue.
Gavin ran his thumb soothingly along the long line of her neck. “A family. Our family. We’ll be happy as grigs, just you see.”
He could see her struggling with her conscience. “It won’t be legal.”
Gavin rested his hands on her waist, thicker now than it had been two months before. His child was there, under all those layers of wool and linen. The law be damned; the three of them belonged together, just as in the days of old Adam, before lawyers and clerics and the whole damnable apparatus of gentility.
“What’s the law, in matters such as these?” he demanded. “Your kind worries about parish registers and bits of paper. In the rest of the world, there’s many a marriage dissolved by a bit of shoe leather and time, and no one the worse for it.”
Imogen looked at him doubtfully, and Gavin knew that this was an idea that had never occurred to her before. She hadn’t grown up as he had, in a world where such matters were more fluid, where there wasn’t the money or energy to worry about such trivialities as legality.
Gavin redoubled his efforts. “What will they care for such things in America or Australia? If we say we’re husband and wife, we shall be. And so we shall be,” he said more forcefully, “where it matters. Can you tell me you ever felt like this about Grantham?”
The wind whistled through the bare branches around them, sere and cold. Imogen drew her heavy shawl more firmly around her. “No. It was a young girl’s fancy, an illusion, and I knew it for such within the year.” Her mouth twisted wryly. “I thought love was all high romance and courtly words. I never thought of all the days and days and days to follow.”
From the sound of it, those days had been long ones.
“I’ve little in the way of courtly words to offer you,” said Gavin honestly. “And even less in the way of high romance. Just my devotion and the work of my hands.”
Put that way, it sounded like precious little. Gavin shifted from one foot to the other, the frost crackling on the ground beneath his feet.
But Imogen didn’t turn away. Instead, she took a step forward, towards him. “You do yourself too little credit. Words can mislead, but this—” She looked up at him, her heart in her eyes. “Whenever I’m with you, I feel as though I’ve come home after a long journey. You are hearth and harbor to me.”
A cold hearth and a choppy harbor at the moment, but Gavin wasn’t about to quibble.
With a crooked smile Imogen said, “It was easier when I could tell myself that you were just another passing fancy.”
Gavin felt the world go still around him. “But now?”
“You are all I’ll ever want,” Imogen said simply. As she spoke, her voice gathered strength. “I love you, through and through, every part of you.”
Gavin could hardly speak through the lump in his throat. “Even the shabby bits?”
“Especially the shabby bits,” she said firmly, and somehow they were in each other’s arms, rocking from side to side, laughing with elation and fear, clinging to each other with all their might.
Gavin wrapped his arms firmly around her, resting his cheek against her brow, hardly daring to believe his luck, to have found the one woman in the world made just for him. “Then—you’ll come away with me?”
Imogen glanced over her shoulder at the house, the chimneys just visible through the bare branches of the trees. “Evie will be married in a month,” she said. “Once she’s married and in Lisbon, my scandal can’t touch her—or not enough to matter.”
Fairness prompted Gavin to say, “I can’t offer you anything like this, at least, not at first. You won’t miss it?”
“This house?” The curl of Imogen’s lip was answer enough. “This has never been a home to me.” Her expression lightened. “But if I had never married Arthur, I should never have met you.”
“In that case,” said Gavin, “I’ll try to think kindly of him—although it will be difficult until I have you safely to myself!”
His father always had said that the Lord worked in mysterious ways. Of course, he’d usually been in his cups when he said it and looking for someone to thrash, but the sentiment held just the same.
He wouldn’t be a father as his father had been. No matter how they had to scramble at first, he’d see his wife—for his wife she would be, in his eyes and the eyes of the world—and child safe and well, and no matter how little they had, they would always, always know how he cherished them.
“We will be happy together,” Gavin said fiercely. “I promise you that. It may not always be easy, but I will do everything in my power to make you happy.” Switching abruptly to practical matters, he said, “When is your Miss Evie’s wedding?”
“Soon,” said Imogen. “The eleventh of January.”
He hated to wait that long, but he knew better than to ask Imogen to leave before her stepdaughter was safely wed. “Then we leave on the twelfth. You’ll not need to bring much with you, just what you can fit into a portmanteau. I’ll see to all the arrangements.”
There was a faraway expression in her eyes. “A new life in a new land,” she said, testing it out. Her lips quirked in a lopsided smile. “It’s rather like something out of a Shakespeare play. Without the shipwreck.”
“Please God, no shipwrecks,” said Gavin.
He’d never had the stomach for the sea. It didn’t sing in his blood as it did with some. But it was a necessary evil to making a life with his Imogen and their child.
He placed his hand over her stomach, on the place where he assumed their child must be, beneath the wide swell of her skirts. “Whatever comes, we face it together.”
Imogen set her hand lightly over his. “Together,” she echoed. It felt like a pact. Reluctantly, she drew back. “It will most likely be safest if we don’t meet again until then.”
Gavin could see the sense of that. “We’ll have plenty of time together to make up for it.”
But he drew her in for a long kiss, nonetheless.
“Something on account,” he said, when they could speak again, “to last us through until January.” More seriously, he added, “I’ll meet you at the summerhouse at midnight on the twelfth. Can you slip out of the house unseen?”
Imogen didn’t think twice. “Down the back stairs.”
Gavin veered between exhilaration and fear. “Two flashes of light, a pause, and one more. That’s how you’ll know I’m there. Watch for the signal. I will not fail you.”
Imogen lifted her cold hand to his cheek. “I know,” she said tenderly. “You never could.”
“One last kiss,” said Gavin, “to speed me on my way.”
“And speed your way back again,” said his Imogen, and went willingly into his arms, their bodies and lips blending together in perfect harmony, in promise of all the years to come.
If, on the other side of the gate, someone slipped away, they didn’t hear it. The crunch of the frost beneath booted feet was lost in the rustling of the branches in the breeze and the weeping of the wind.
London, 2009
Julia arrived at The Grill of The Dorchester feeling confused, cranky, and emotionally raw.
She had spent the Tube ride over alternating between anger at herself, anger at Nick, and anger at the man who really ought to have put on deodorant before deciding to ride the Tube at rush hour.
No matter how she tried to convince herself that she had been in the right, she couldn’t shake the conviction that she had just behaved like a prize jerk. That realization didn’t do anything to improve her mood. Guilt, she had learned, tended to make one more defensive than conciliatory. And she was feeling pretty damned guilty right now.
But what had she been supposed to think, with Natalie talking about treasure hunting, and those damning Wall Street Journal articles? Even Nick had to admit, he didn’t exactly appear squeaky clean. Although, it was true, she could have kept readin
g instead of seeing a few damning headlines and instantly assuming that he was out to gyp her.
But what else was she supposed to think? Why else would he have taken such an interest?
It wasn’t as though she looked like Natalie.
Charity work. That phrase still stung.
“Julia?” Her father had to say her name three times before she realized he was standing there.
“Oh, sorry.” Julia gave her father the obligatory kiss on the cheek. He wasn’t a tall man. In her three-inch heels she was only an inch or two shorter than he was. “I didn’t see you there.”
“Obviously,” said her father drily.
“Did you have a good trip over?” Julia asked as the waiter led them to their table.
The walls were patterned with a mural depicting men draped in excessive amounts of tartan, a theme echoed in the upholstery of the chairs. The chair the waiter pulled out for her was covered in an aggressive red plaid.
Julia sat with more speed than grace and contemplated the usual dilemma of how to dispose of her bag: hanging off the back of her chair, where it was sure to fall just as the waiter was putting something on the table, or by her feet, where she was sure to kick it and knock out half the contents.
She tucked her bag down by her feet and accepted the menu the waiter handed her while her father pondered the wine list with the attention he usually gave to removing someone’s gallbladder.
At least, she hoped he gave that kind of attention to removing someone’s gallbladder.
“How are Helen and the boys?” she asked.
It seemed that Helen was well and the boys were enjoying camp, if “enjoying” was quite the right word. Jamie had earned some sort of swimming medal and Robbie had nearly gotten himself expelled over an incident involving a flaming marshmallow. Robbie had justified it as a scientific experiment, although the camp authorities were more inclined to label it arson.
“Are you saying I shouldn’t have bought him that chemistry set for Christmas?” asked Julia as she ran her eyes down the intricately printed menu, which ran heavily to food with place names.
“Sadly,” said her father, raising his hand to flag down the waiter, “his incendiary propensities were already well developed. You simply provided him new means.”
Her father waited until they had gotten the important matter of ordering over with before asking, “How is the ‘job hunt’?” The way he pronounced the phrase made it sound as though it were in inverted commas.
Julia tore open her bread roll. “Nonexistent.” She opened her mouth to make the usual excuses: the bad market, too many people out of work. Instead, she said baldly, “I’m thinking of applying to grad school. Art history.”
She stabbed her knife into the butter, waiting for the explosion. Instead, her father said calmly, “You’d be applying for the fall of 2010?”
“Yes.” Poised for a fight, she felt as though the stuffing had been taken out of her. “It’s too late now for this academic year, and I’ll need to take the GRE.”
She sat back as the waiter appeared with the bottle of red her father had chosen. She waited while her father went through the ritual of swirling and sipping. The waiter filled their glasses and set the bottle in a silver bucket next to the table.
Good. She might need more of that.
“Where were you thinking of applying?” her father asked.
Had aliens kidnapped her parent? Julia eyed her father over the top of her wineglass. “What, no lobbying for med school?”
“If you had wanted to attend, you would have,” he said simply, and took a tidy sip of wine.
Not his attitude ten years ago. Julia wondered how much of the change had to do with Helen and how much was just mellowing with age. “I suppose now you have Jamie and Robbie to be your future surgeons.”
Her father gave her a look. “Jamie’s sole interest appears to be exterminating alien galaxies. As for Robbie, we’ll just be pleased if he isn’t arrested for arson before he reaches the age of majority.”
It wasn’t true, Julia knew. For all his dry tone, her father was tremendously proud of both boys. As he had been of her.
“You threw a fit when I majored in art history,” she said tentatively.
“Well, yes,” said her father, as though that were the most logical thing in the world. “I didn’t want to see you throw your degree away. But this is different. You’re older now. It was also,” he added delicately, “quite clear that finance wasn’t making you happy.”
“Really?” She hadn’t thought of herself as actively unhappy. Not precisely dancing on rainbows, but okay.
“Credit me with some perception,” said her father. Julia decided to let that one ride. “You’re old enough to make your own decisions. If you feel that a career in academia is where your ambitions lie, I certainly can’t stop you. Even if there are no jobs in it.”
That was more like the father she knew and loved.
“I’d thought you didn’t want me doing art history because it reminded you too much of my mother.”
Her father raised his brows at her frankness. “Perhaps. A little. But not in the way you mean.” He set down his butter knife carefully on the side of his bread plate. “It is one of nature’s great ironies that having worked to give you the advantages I didn’t have, it never occurred to me that you would never need to go out and fight for them yourself.”
Julia contemplated her wine. “Why do I feel as though I’ve just been obliquely insulted?”
“I didn’t mean it as such.”
They both fell silent as the waiter set their plates down in front of them, the food carefully arranged for the maximum impact, little bundles of baby carrots with the stems still on tied with some sort of green, a pale sauce for her father’s fish, a rich port gravy under Julia’s beef. Around them, there was the sound of genteel conversation and the muted clink of silver against porcelain.
“I haven’t told you anything of how I grew up, have I?” asked her father abruptly as Julia cut into her filet mignon. “I’ve spent most of my life trying to get away from it.”
This was something new. Julia looked up at her father. “It was in Liverpool, wasn’t it?”
“Manchester,” her father corrected her. “Six of us in a three-room flat with the loo down the hall, shared by four families. Half the time we pissed in a pot.”
The unexpected vulgarity made Julia blink, especially delivered in her father’s usual precise tone.
“Wow,” she said weakly. Her father’s current apartment had no fewer than four bathrooms, each with carefully coordinated towels and tiles and Molton Brown soaps. “Not exactly Fifth Avenue.”
“No,” said her father drily. “Sometimes, I would look at you, in your private-school uniform, and think how very odd it was, that there you were with no idea. But that was what I wanted for you. I wanted you never to have to feel inferior to anyone, never to have to apologize for your accent, or feel awkward because there were holes in your clothes.” He stabbed his fork into his fish. “If I pushed medicine at you—well, it was because I saw a medical degree as the surest way to a decent life.”
She had never really thought of it that way before. There hadn’t been the same extras the boys had when she was little; the apartment had been on Third, not Fifth, one of those huge high-rises that always smelled vaguely of burnt grease, but her tuition alone must have cost a small fortune. She had always had the security that came of knowing that she had a gold-plated academic pedigree, from grade school straight through college.
“Are you going to tell Jamie and Robbie this, too?” she asked.
Her father devoted a great deal of attention to separating his fish from the bone. “Perhaps. It is, I think, less relevant for them.” He looked at her, across the porcelain and silver. “You bore the brunt of it. I was … more raw when you were young.”
It had taken Helen to mellow him. Or maybe it had just been time. Either way, Julia thought she knew what he meant.
; Julia pushed a piece of meat through a sticky puddle of gravy. “Speaking of that … Being back in that house, I’ve started to—well, to remember things.” It sounded pretty stupid said like that. “Just little things. Impressions. Memories I didn’t remember I had.”
Her father was silent for a long moment. “It’s to be expected.”
Julia abandoned the abused piece of meat. “You and my mother weren’t happy together, were you? I have these weird memories of hiding under the table while you shouted at each other.”
Her father’s hand stilled on his fork. “We weren’t unhappy, not at the beginning.” He made another attempt. “We were both very happy to have you.”
Julia took a swig of her wine. “That sounds like the parental equivalent of ‘it’s not you, it’s me.’”
“It was all so long ago.” Her father looked suddenly very tired and much older than his age, the silver in his hair pronounced in the lamplight. “I’m not quite sure what to tell you.”
“Anything,” said Julia. Anything would be better than nothing.
“Well, then.” Her father looked down at his hands, at the wide gold wedding band that had replaced the narrower one that Julia remembered from her youth. “I met your mother on Hampstead Heath. I’d gone with a group of medical students; your mother was there sketching. A page from her sketchbook blew away and I went after it for her. And that, as they say, was that.”
Her father’s face softened at the memory. Julia tried to imagine them as they must have been then, her father a younger, less painfully refined version of himself and her mother as she had seen her in that long-ago photo, her black hair under a kerchief, her face alight with laughter.
“Your mother was—” He sketched a helpless gesture with his hands. “I’d never met anyone like her before. She was a creature from another world. There was—a glow about her. Everything was an adventure, an opportunity. She didn’t seem to worry about mundane things like money or getting on in the world. She didn’t mind that I’d come up from muck.”