I didn’t hear his footsteps as he approached. His hand, when it touched my elbow, made me startle and whirl around.
“I’m sorry,” he said gravely, looking down at me, his face shadowed by the arriving twilight. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
He was so close, so real. Alive. Just alive. “Please,” I said.
“Kate. Brave, beautiful Kate. You’ve come all this way for me?”
“Yes.” I looked down at my shoes. I couldn’t bear the sight of his face: Julian and not-Julian, agonizing dissonance.
“To give up any hope of our meeting again one day?”
“I had to. I couldn’t just let you die. Die, and leave me forever?” I shook my head. “At least this way you have a chance. At least here you’re still alive.”
“My God,” he said, “what an extraordinary girl you are. What a lucky chap I was. Or will be, I suppose.”
“Don’t say that. You can’t go. You’ll be killed.”
“But what will happen to you, if I never go forward to your time?”
I looked back out the window. “I don’t know. I don’t… I didn’t really think about that. I just had to do something. You were dead. I couldn’t just accept that. I had to do something.” I frowned, trying to think things through. It had all seemed so simple, so obvious: keep Julian away from his doomed future. But was it? What could I change, without changing everything? My life, Julian’s life. The lives of complete strangers, probably, who had nothing to do with any of this. Did I have that right?
He picked up my left hand. His thumb and forefinger found the ring on my fourth finger and massaged it gently.
“Would you still be my wife?”
I replied without thinking. “Yes, of course. Always.”
His hand began to ease its way up my arm. “And that, I suppose, makes me your husband.”
I turned. “What? No! I didn’t mean… I wasn’t asking…”
“No, you weren’t. But I am.” His face edged closer to mine. “Rather awkwardly, I suppose, and without nearly so much eloquence as you deserve.”
The blood spread through my body, hot and relentless. “Julian, that’s just… That’s not why I’m here. I don’t expect you to… to sacrifice yourself…”
“Sacrifice? Kate, how can I look at you, so lovely and so brave, so perfectly captivating, and not want to be the man you married?”
“Julian, you met me two days ago.”
“But I’m the same man, aren’t I, who will fall in love with you one day?”
“Well, yes. But that doesn’t mean… doesn’t…” His hand had drawn up to brush my cheek, and my thoughts evaporated. “Oh, don’t. Don’t do this to me.”
“Do what?”
“Seduce me. It’s not fair. I can’t help saying yes.”
He laughed. “Is that what I’m doing?”
“Just by standing in the same room. You always did.”
“Did I?” he asked in wonder, as though he couldn’t quite believe it, couldn’t quite believe his own power. His fingers stroked again, testing me.
“Stop. Please stop. It’s not fair. I’m his.”
“Aren’t we the same man, though?”
“But you haven’t fallen in love with me yet. You haven’t married me yet.”
“According to this ring,” he said, touching it again, “I have.”
I went still under his finger. “What do you mean?”
“I mean if you want me, Kate, I’m yours.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t.”
He took each of my hands in his own. “Kate, the past thirty-six hours have been like a dream to me: an extraordinary, luminous dream. A beautiful woman approaches me in the rain, and then falls exhausted into my arms. Every moment I spend with her, I’m more intrigued, more enchanted by her. She’s utterly original, different from any other woman I’ve ever known. So fine and faithful and candid. Vibrant with natural grace. The most exquisite contrast imaginable to…” He paused delicately. “And then, by some improbable miracle, she tells me she loves me, she belongs to me, she’s sacrificed everything to save my life. And she bears a ring that tells me how to love her.”
“What, exactly, is engraved on this ring?”
“Ah, you’ll see,” he said, drawing me close to him. His voice became a breath against my temple. “Can you possibly wonder, Kate, why I feel as though I should die to lose you? To hurt you?”
“That’s impossible.”
“I’ve never been more sincere in my life.” His head bent; he lifted my hands and kissed them, one by one. “Dearest Kate. What will happen to you tomorrow, when my pass expires and I go back up the line?”
“I… I’m not sure. I guess I’ll have to find a way back to my time, if that’s possible. Or else make my way here, somehow.”
“Stay with me here. Be my wife.”
He said it quietly, hardly more than a whisper; at first I didn’t think I’d heard him properly, that my brain had rearranged the words to suit its own private longing. My lips wavered, trying to form some question or objection, some reasonable thought.
He reached out and drew his thumb along my jaw. “Kate, please. I want you to stay here, to let me take care of you. To marry you, or rather to honor the marriage already between us.”
“You can’t mean that.”
“I mean it passionately.”
“You hardly know me!”
“Ah, but that doesn’t matter, does it? I will know you. I’ll love you. And I have the luxurious confidence of knowing that for a certainty.” He eased me back into his arms, against his chest. “Stay with me, Kate. Stay here. Be my wife. After the war…”
“Julian, the war won’t end for years. There’s a battle coming this summer, a complete disaster. Even if you avoid this thing tomorrow, you’re going to be slaughtered at some point. I’m saving you from one death, only to leave you to worse.”
“Stay with me. Please stay. I’ll find a way. After all, what’s waiting for you in your own time?”
I looked up at last. “Either way, I lose you.”
“At least here we have a chance.”
It was true. I’d rather stay here, hoping he’d survive, than find a way back to my own century and face a long bleak future with no hope at all. Wasn’t that, really, the reason I’d come here at all? To lure Julian back to me, because I couldn’t bear to live in a world without him? I gazed at his face, trying to examine it all logically, trying to work past the dawning recognition of my own ignobility, but he stood so close, his scent and his touch, and I couldn’t focus on anything else.
His lips brushed against mine, a question.
I gave up then. I had no more resistance. It had always been like that for me, with him; he burnt me to a cinder just looking at me. I brought my hands up around his neck and kissed him back, savoring the touch of his lips, the familiar taste of him, exactly the same as I knew it, marking him mine. I felt tears well in my eyes, spilling onto my cheeks; he felt them too, and drew away. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think I’d ever do this again.”
His eyes wandered over me in amazement, in disbelief; his hands came up to clasp my face, brushing my tears with his thumbs. And then he kissed me in earnest, in true honest passion, not quite so skillfully as I remembered, but with such fervor my brain spun. “Wait,” I said, “stop. Stop. Before I…”
“I’m sorry,” he gasped out. “Do you not want… I’ll stop, if you want…”
“Oh God. No. Don’t stop.” I reached out and unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned his khaki wool tunic, his shirt, until he stood before me, quivering, his pale apricot skin gleaming in the dusky candlelight. “Is it all right?” I whispered.
“It’s all right.” He took my left hand and pressed it to his lips. “Mrs. Ashford.” He said it just as he once had, or would do; the sound sent a shiver all the length of my body. He turned me around and began to undo the long row of buttons, his breath on my nape and his fingers trembling against my spine, until m
y legs nearly gave way beneath me. The dress loosened and slipped downward, pooling about my feet; one by one I slid the straps of my bra—suddenly so strange and modern—over my shoulders and reached back to unhook the clasp. I turned to face him.
The look on his face was priceless: so exactly like a boy in a candy store. I laughed. “You’re just saying all this to get me in bed, aren’t you?”
“I should tell you something,” he murmured, dragging his eyes upward. “Or perhaps you already know it. You see, I haven’t the faintest idea how to proceed, at the moment.”
“That’s all right.” I took his hands into mine. “I’ll show you everything.”
23.
His hand went still on my arm.
“Julian?”
“What did you say?” His voice was an asthmatic strangle.
“Um, I’m pregnant.”
“You’re…”
“Pregnant. Yes.”
He shot upward. “But that’s impossible!”
“Well, no, it’s not. I sort of… I messed up, Julian. I don’t know what happened. I… I forgot to start the new pill cycle, and…”
“For God’s sake, Kate!” he burst out. “You what?”
“I forgot, all right? I’m sorry. It was right after Newport. I didn’t even realize it until a couple of weeks ago. I know I should have said something, but you had enough going on, I didn’t want to worry you.” I sat up and met his eyes. “I was just praying…”
I don’t know what I’d been expecting from him. A bit of shock, of course. Disbelief. And then rueful acceptance, perhaps. Sorting through it all, figuring it out together. A part of me had even been thinking he might be glad, that he’d been secretly hoping for this so I’d push the wedding forward. I certainly wasn’t prepared for the expression of undiluted horror on his face.
“Oh my God,” I said.
He ran both hands through his hair, looking wild. “You can’t be pregnant! How the devil can you be pregnant? You told me, Kate, you promised me!”
“I’m sorry! I screwed up, okay?”
“You screwed up? That’s all?”
“Don’t be an ass, Julian! I said I’m sorry! Don’t you think I’m a little more devastated than you are? I mean, it’s my body. It’s my life that’s being turned upside down here!”
He didn’t seem to hear me. He sprang off the bed and paced sinuously to the window. “For God’s sake, Kate! I thought we were safe!”
“Well, if you were so goddamn worried about it, you could have bought yourself a box of freaking condoms, you know!” I scrabbled for my robe, down on the floor next to the bed, and wrapped it around me.
“If I’d known you were simply going to forget about something so bloody important, I would have! My God! I’d never even have touched you to begin with!” he exploded, into the windowpane.
“How dare you! How dare you!” I tried to shout, but my larynx was so paralyzed with rage, it came out little better than a hiss.
He wrenched around.
I went on, forcing the words from my dry throat. “Do you think I wanted this to happen? For God’s sake! I am pregnant with your baby and all you can think about is your own damned convenience? You can just go to hell, Julian Ashford!”
In the next instant, he stood before me; his arms crushed me into his chest. I tried for an instant to struggle, but it was like pushing against a stone wall. A stone wall during an earthquake, that is: he was trembling violently. “Forgive me, Kate,” he said hoarsely. “Good God. I should be horsewhipped. Forgive me. It’s all right. It’s just the shock. Forgive me, darling, please.”
“Julian, don’t.” My voice muffled against his skin. “I saw your face! You were horrified!”
“Just…” He drew breath. “Just at myself, Kate!”
“Whatever.” I pushed off again, and this time his arms gave way and I went to curl up in the armchair in the corner. The fight in me had vaporized; I’d argued with him so much tonight. I was exhausted, my nerves blunted. “Look,” I said, tucking my feet up, “I didn’t mean to freak you out so much. I just always figured you would be the one pushing for kids, and I would be the one wanting to wait, and you would be… well, maybe even happy about it.”
“Kate.” The word whispered through the air. I felt his footsteps approach me, saw his pale skin blur along the line of my vision as he knelt before me. “Beloved. I don’t know how I could say such things, blame you for something so patently my fault.” He reached out and drew my hands into his own and bent his face into them. “You must forgive me, Kate, because I can’t forgive myself.”
“Please stop shaking. You’re scaring me.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He looked up at my face; the nightlight in the corner glowed behind him, so I couldn’t read his expression. “Are you sure, darling? You’re quite sure? There’s no possibility of mistake? Have you seen a doctor?”
“Julian,” I said, “you don’t need a doctor for that anymore.” I slid from the chair and went to the bathroom and took the wand out of the drawer.
Still blue.
I came back into the bedroom. He was sitting on the edge of the bed now, staring thoughtfully at his hands. I leaned over the nightstand to turn on the lamp and handed the evidence to him. “See that blue line?” I pointed to the screen, which shook in his hands, and sighed. “Our baby.”
“Our baby,” he repeated, staring at it for a long time, without blinking. I sat down next to him and let the silence fill in around us, the reality of it absorb into our pores, easing from shock into acceptance.
“That was probably why I was such a nut earlier,” I said. “Hormones. Just think, only seven or eight more months of that.”
At last he took a deep breath and turned to me. “I’m sorry, Kate. I’ve failed you, haven’t I? I’m so terribly sorry.”
“You’ve failed me? Julian, I forgot to take the stupid pills! It was my fault.” I paused. “Well, that, and on top of everything else you probably have a sperm count in the gazillions or something. That would just be like you.”
He looked up at the ceiling, scarlet.
“But the point is,” I continued, “I took it on. You trusted me, and I screwed up. That’s why I was so mad when you called me on it. Because you were right.”
His arms went around me. “Don’t talk rubbish. I was wrong, entirely wrong. You’re blameless, darling. I left it all on your shoulders, went on my merry way, never gave it another thought, never so much as reminded you. It was unforgivable.”
I leaned into him, craving the warmth of his body. “So we’ll deal with this? We’ll figure it out together? Because I have to say, right up front, I can’t give it up.”
“Give it up?” His body stiffened.
“I thought about it for just a split second, and… well, it’s your baby, Julian, ours, and I… how can I not love a baby of yours? We created it. It’s us.”
“Kate, Kate! I’d never ask… I’d never even think it. Oh, Kate.” His hands ran in rapid strokes along my back.
I went on huskily. “And now that it’s here, I… when I think about that, about a baby, our baby, I’m filled with such… I just want to keep it, this little piece of you. Is that okay? Can you live with that? Becoming a father so soon?”
“Live with it?” I was hauled up against him again, even more tightly than before. “What I can’t live with,” he said in my ear, “is that I’ve done this to you, made you the mother of my child, without having insisted, insisted, on making you my wife first. I’ve been living in a dream, thinking the mere promise of marriage, of feeling it in my heart, was enough. Tomorrow,” he said, with conviction. “Tomorrow. We go down to City Hall tomorrow.”
“Oh, God!” I jumped back. “Julian, you don’t need to do that! You don’t have to marry me out of duty!”
“Duty?” He looked astounded. “Duty? Sweetheart, how long have I been begging you to marry me? For months!”
“Only a few months.”
“For months,”
he said, gathering my face between his hands. “I want children with you, Kate. I want this child with you. Did you think I didn’t?”
“But your face, when I told you…”
He bent forward and kissed me, tender little kisses, all around my face. “Beloved, it’s the most precious gift you could offer me. Only I wasn’t daring to hope for it yet, before I’d properly married you, and with all the other worries so foremost in my mind.”
“You and your buttery tongue. Telling me what I want to hear.”
He smiled dimly. “And I was just thinking, a while ago”—he cupped my breast—“I was imagining things. That perhaps it was the lighting…”
I looked down. “Oh my God. Are they getting bigger?”
“Only to a minute observer,” he said, kissing each one. “Are you feeling ill yet?”
“Well, I thought I was feeling kind of sick in the car, on the way to the opera tonight, but I think that was just nerves.”
“You will soon.”
I looked at him quizzically. “What do you know about it?”
“Trust me. Now come to bed, darling. It’s frightfully late; you’re exhausted.” He pulled me backward, into the pillows, and drew the thick down comforter over us both. “Don’t worry about anything. I’ll sort it all out. I’ll take such care of you, I promise.”
I yawned. “Listen to you. You’d probably have the baby for me, if you could. What am I going to do with you?” His arms closed around me, snug and secure, and I felt a fleeting desire to rebel against the protectiveness of the gesture.
Then I laughed.
“What is it?”
“Just thinking. You at Lamaze class.”
“Christ.”
“Oh, lighten up. It’ll be good for you. Helping me breathe. Cutting the cord. I’ll bet you fifty bucks you’re one of those dads who faints on the delivery room floor.”
I thought he’d laugh at that, but he didn’t. Instead he sighed, a deep heave of his chest, and said quietly, “Kate, that’s the least of my worries.”
“DAMN IT,” I said, pounding my fist into my pillow. “What does it take, Ashford?”
Julian came out of the bathroom in a white undershirt and boxer briefs, brushing his teeth. “Whah?” he said, frowning through his toothbrush.