She lifted her face; her eyes were shining with love and the thrill of power. “It’s not wrong,” she whispered. “Do you think this is wrong?” All he could do was shake his head. She laughed her sweet, purifying laugh again, and this time he laughed with her. She made a soft, slick-walled tunnel with her hands, and pleasured him with it until he couldn’t take any more.
Sitting up, he lifted her so that she was kneeling, straddling his hips. They kissed while she guided him into the warm cleft between her legs. Her surprised gasp fired him; he wanted to take her even higher, make her wild. Pulling her head back, he trailed kisses down her neck to her breasts, and thrust deep, deep inside her while he grazed his teeth across her hard little nipples, making her cry out. She felt like liquid flame in his arms, pliant and fiery, nurturing and consuming.
Holding tight, he tumbled her backward without losing their intimate joining. The edge neared. He set his teeth and slowed his rhythmic pumping, grinding himself against her. He murmured her name as he kissed her again and again, losing himself in sensation, blind and aching, so close to bursting. And then her sweat-sleek thighs slowly clamped around him. Her head fell back. Like a starving man, he feasted his eyes on the face of his beloved while she climaxed. She made no sound except for a low grinding in the back of her throat, but her lips thinned in a pained-looking grimace and her head twisted fitfully on the pillow. To give her pleasure this intense felt like a miracle; he’d have thanked God for it then and there—but the deep, gentle pursing of feminine flesh around him banished every thought that wasn’t carnal. Crushing her to his chest, he pulsed into her in time to her slow, deceptively patient rhythm, groaning, trying not to hurt her, unable to stop until he was drained and empty.
When it was over, he couldn’t speak at first, only hold her. Her eyes were closed. The tears on her lashes didn’t surprise him; nothing so intense as that had ever happened to him, either. “My love,” he was finally able to say. “Beautiful Anne, I love you.”
“I love you,” she whispered. “Oh, Christy, so much. So much. It frightens me.”
“Why, darling?”
“Because I can’t think of anything but God that could make me feel like this. It’s not natural.” She heaved a deep, tragic sigh. “I might have to convert.”
***
“I feel so guilty.”
Anne stopped beside the banks of the Wyck, in the shadows cast by the bare alder branches in the graying dawn. Hoarfrost glimmered on the sere winter grass, and over the river a milk-white mist curled. Christy lifted one heavy wing of his greatcoat and folded her inside it, pulling her next to the warmth of his body. “Why, love?” he asked.
“Because you have to go home now and worry all morning about Mrs. Weedie, then ride to Mare’s Head and do whatever it is you have to do there—”
“Meet with the deacon.”
“Meet with the deacon—while I’m going to tell Mrs. Fruit my headache is worse, not better, and then go to bed and sleep all day long.” She barely stifled a yawn against his chest; she was drooping with fatigue. “Poor, poor Christy.”
He chuckled, kissing her temple and giving her a squeeze. “I don’t mind. How will you get inside, Anne, without being seen?”
“I left the front door unlocked. I’ll just walk in and go upstairs to my room. No one will see me, and if they do, I’ll say I’ve been out for a walk.”
“At half past five in the morning?”
“They may not believe me,” she conceded. “But they’d never in a million years guess what I have been doing.” She laughed, but he didn’t join in. She found his hand and held it. “You hate this, don’t you? All the secrecy and the lies.”
“It’s not what I’d have chosen.”
She decided to shock him with the truth. “I can’t help it—I do like it. It makes me feel alive.” He smiled at her, but a bit wanly. “I know you wouldn’t have chosen this way, and it makes me love you all the more because you did choose it, for my sake. Christy, please don’t be sorry.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
He’d said that before. She touched his cheek with her gloved fingertips. “You’re not going to suffer now, are you? To—to atone for what we did?”
He took her hand and kissed the palm through her glove. “Sweet Anne,” he murmured. “It’s possible that you can’t have everything.”
“You mean I can’t have you, and have you without your guilty conscience.” He only smiled. “But if God is truly loving, why would he mind what we did? Whom did we hurt?” He didn’t answer, and she knew it was hopeless: he was going to worry and think and ponder over everything no matter what she said. Which was another reason she loved him so much. She sighed. “You won’t stop caring for me, will you?”
“You know the answer to that.”
“And we can still be together, can’t we? You’ll come to me, won’t you, Christy? In the old caretaker’s cottage? I’ll make up some excuse for why I want it aired out, the fireplace cleaned and so on. I don’t know why I’ll say I want fresh linens and blankets on the bed, though. But leave all that to me,” she assured him hastily, seeing that the subject was making him uncomfortable. If subterfuge and little white lies were sins, she would gladly take them on for him, and suffer any consequences Christy’s God might have in store for her.
“Well,” she said on another sigh. “I guess I’d better go in now.” But she didn’t move, and he didn’t let go of her. She whispered against his throat, “I love you. Please don’t have so many second thoughts.”
His arms around her tightened. “I’ve told you, you mustn’t worry about me. I’ll find my way.”
“But—”
“You make me happy, Anne, not unhappy.”
She closed her eyes in relief. That had been her only worry. He’d gone to the heart of it, and now everything was perfect.
Except that they had to say good-bye. “Kiss me,” she begged, standing on tiptoe. “Make it last.”
He did his best, but she was already missing him a second after he let her go. “I know what ‘sweet sorrow’ means now,” he told her with a sad smile and a last caress.
She stepped out of his arms and moved reluctantly toward the bridge. There she turned, just to look at him again. “Write me a poem,” she called softly, on an impulse. “Leave it in our place.”
He cocked his head, judging her seriousness; he was suspicious of what she thought of his poetry, although she’d never told him. “What about?”
She held out her arms, telling him that was obvious. “About sweet sorrow!”
He looked arrested, then thrilled. He stood straighter and called back, “Yes—all right, I will!”
She blew him a kiss. Hurrying across the bridge, she muttered under her breath, “Good Lord, what have I done?”
XVII
2 February
It must be love: I don’t even hate the weather anymore.
I’m looking out my high sitting room window at the smoke-gray treetops and the colorless fields, the grim cloud-piles banking on the horizon, and I’m thinking there’s beauty in this dreary landscape, and an austere kind of comfort. It makes me shiver a little, but the sensation isn’t the least unpleasant. It’s all in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it? A prosaic thought that’s never seemed truer to me. I believe I could be happy today in a Dartmoor Prison cell.
If you turn a gem in your fingers and view it from another angle, all its facets change. Same stone, different perspective. All my doubts, fears, and reservations about marrying Christy remain—no miraculous broom from on high has come down and swept them away—but they don’t defeat me any longer. They’re challenges now, not obstacles.
Case in point: Wyckerley. Amazing how my impression of the village has changed now that I know it’s to be my home, probably for the rest of my life. I see the narrow streets and thatched-roof houses in a new, ge
ntler light, I admire the neat orderliness of our village green, I take pride in the blocky Norman solidity of our church, and I have a downright proprietary fondness for the rectory. My house. My garden, my sycamore tree. My front walk, my parlor. Mrs. Ludd will be my housekeeper, and her husband will be my gardener, groom, and odd-job man. I’m so delighted by this humble prospect, I don’t know what to do with myself. Lynton Hall, as much as I’ve grown to love it, has never felt like mine, not even remotely. First it was Geoffrey’s, now it’s Sebastian Verlaine’s. But the vicarage, which will always and forever be Christy’s, is by some transcendent piece of good fortune going to be mine too—because he’s so keen on sharing it with me, I suppose. I am unquestionably the luckiest woman in all of Devon. All of England, make that. Oh, hell: the world.
The other worry which hasn’t gone away but doesn’t prostrate me anymore is my agnosticism. I understand now that it’s based on nothing more solid than my father’s example (his contempt for religion was profound; he never set foot in a church except to paint it) and my own resulting prejudice and ignorance. I’ve stopped giving Christy atheistic tracts, and now I ask him about his faith, what the basic tenets are of the Church of England, etc. I learn, but my mind still resists. If faith is indeed a gift, it’s still being withheld from me.
But I’m starting to think that believers are better off than nonbelievers if only because they have something to live by besides self-interest. Then why not simply join them? If I can’t accept all of it yet, maybe I will in time, little by little. Religion doesn’t do any harm; at least Christy’s brand doesn’t, because there’s no hypocrisy and no secret motive of control or power underlying it. And so I ask myself, why not? In the absence of anything better, why not embrace it? It isn’t as if I would be relinquishing any hard-won, deeply felt principles of my own.
6 February
Christy told me the most important lesson his father taught him was not to be afraid of passion in religion. “The church needs lovers,” said old Reverend Morrell. “To be a priest is to be in love.” I’m beginning to wish I’d known this man.
8 February
Christy has just left me—I’m flush with love. But there’s still room for exasperation.
I wormed out of him why we must wait until November—November!—to announce our engagement. Stupid of me not to have guessed sooner: it’s not himself he wants to protect, never mind that he’s the one whose sterling reputation is important—vital, you might say, in his line of work. No—it’s me! He wants to avoid a scandal for my sake! And nothing I can say budges him from this noble but infuriating position. But he’s not heard the last from me on the subject, oh no, not by a long shot. If I can’t marry him for a year, I’ll torment him for a year.
14 February, Saint Valentine’s Day
Christy left me another poem. Sometimes I wonder what he takes me for.
Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely.
Thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks.
Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.
Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.
I wrote him one back:
A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.
His mouth is most sweet: yea, he is altogether lovely.
This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem.
But, of course, now I’ll never know if he meant to pass the Song of Solomon off as his own work indefinitely. Probably not. More likely, he thought to wait for me to praise his poem and then spring it on me—“Aha! It’s from the Bible!” I’m mildly irritated that he thinks me so ignorant I wouldn’t recognize it. I’m an agnostic, not an illiterate.
18 February
We argued again. (In our way; Christy’s the only man I’ve ever known who argues completely without rancor. Which is not always as estimable as it sounds; sometimes he wears me right into the ground with his infernal patience and fair-mindedness.) As usual, I had to bully him into discussing the subject at all. He wants to mull it over in private, and I want it out in the open in all its unsavory splendor: his guilty conscience. I don’t tell him how much it hurts me that he still has moral qualms about what we do—but only because I know he already knows.
He agrees that our loving each other is right; where we digress is over the rightness of the physical expression of our love. I’ve stopped calling him “provincial” (too many chances for that boomerang to come back), but it’s clear to me that it’s our very different backgrounds that make us see this issue in such different lights. Then, too, as he always points out, if he makes an exception in his own case, how can he preach chastity and continence to his congregation? How can he look an adolescent boy in the eye and counsel him it’s wrong to seduce virgins, or visit brothels, or steal away with his sweetheart and copulate in a haystack before the wedding? How can he tell Farmer So-and-So that his affair with Widow Such-and-Such is a sin?
I tell him it’s not a sin, and I don’t know why he’d want to tell them it is anyway. (This is about the time he throws up his hands and mutters things that sound like “pagan” and “godless”—always without rancor, though.) If Farmer So-and-So is married, I say, then maybe it is wrong; but if they’re both free, where’s the harm? Anyway, Christy and I will marry, eventually. Where does it say we can’t love each other with our bodies? Show me the line in the Bible! (He can’t.) Aren’t we human? Didn’t God give us our human bodies, flesh and blood and bone? He made us want each other—how could he turn around and make our loving union a sin? Et cetera, et cetera.
And I’ve been reading up to buttress my argument. I found something in Saint Augustine: “Love, and do what you will.” Exactly. Exactly.
Of course, Christy knew that quote already and countered, after a fashion, with another of Augustine’s: “Give me chastity and continency, but not yet.” He says that means the saint believed that chaste moral behavior is superior to unchaste, he just wasn’t fanatical about it. As far as I can see, that’s where Christy stands too. Or would, if his bloody conscience would let go of him. I love his conscientiousness, his rectitude, his righteousness—but sometimes I want to take him by the scruff of the neck and shake them all out of him.
22 February
Today we made a pact: no arguing, no speaking of the future at all, in fact—just enjoying each other in the too-short time we could steal to be together. Oh, what an afternoon. I could have died in his arms quite happily, and counted my life worthwhile. Blessed.
The caretaker’s cottage, the caretaker’s cottage. I love the very syllables! (I would tell Christy to write a poem about it, but I tremble to think of the consequences.) After we’re married, I think we should sneak back into the cottage on every anniversary (assuming it’s vacant), just for old time’s sake. Such happiness. Such content. When I’m an old lady, I will remember these afternoon trysts and midnight rendezvous, and no matter what my life has brought me by then, whether glad or tragic, full or empty with loss, I’ll look back and say it was enough. I had Christy, and we loved, and it was enough.
Bless him, he’s still reticent about our meetings, the secrecy, the stories we have to tell to be together. But once we are, once we’re finally alone in our snug little hideaway, he’s everything any woman could dream of in a lover. And I’m in a perpetual state of anticipation. Presumably this will pass. Presumably my body will settle down in time, as it gets used to this—this—indescribable experience. For now, though, I quite literally live for the hours when we can be together.
It’s odd. I never considered myself a particularly carnal person before. Sex has always interested, not repelled me (which sets me apart from quite a number of respectable Englishwomen), and yet I never dwelt on it much
. My only model was my father’s example (vigorous, insatiable) and that of his many mistresses, some of whom I liked, one or two of whom I even loved—briefly, before they were supplanted by new ones.
But now it’s as if I’ve turned into another person. I hardly know myself. It’s not that I’m out of control; I still have all my faculties. If anything, my mind is sharper than usual, as if a veil between the world and me has been lifted, and I’m seeing, hearing, and feeling everything clearer than usual, unfiltered. It’s my woman’s body that’s come into its own. I yearn. I long. Oh, say it—I lust. I’ve become a sexual being. I can go into a trance while reading a book, gazing out a window, eating a solitary meal, and become nothing more than a great lump of my own flesh, dying for release and fulfillment. Sexual fulfillment. Christy’s awakened me. I love him for many things, and I’m not ashamed to say that that’s one of the chief ones.
And by God, it’s no sin. And deep down, I think he agrees with me. For once I’m right. He’s smarter than I, but this time, poor man, he’s a step behind.
27 February
The second-to-last day of the shortest month of the year. Not short enough, however; I wish they all had ten days, or two, until November!
I’m invited to the Weedies’ this afternoon, for tea with the old ladies. I have it on good authority that Captain Carnock walked Miss Weedie home from church last Sunday. I wonder if the captain has also been invited for tea today; if so, I’ll be able to judge for myself the progress of this fascinating, although glacially slow, courtship.
But the real draw, as it were, is that Christy’s coming. I absolutely adore these public encounters, when we pretend we’re nothing more than cordial acquaintances, the vicar and the lady of the manor. He doesn’t like them—of course, he wouldn’t—and I suppose it’s a flaw in my character that I do. Oh, but they’re delicious! Sometimes I send him hot looks over a teacup, just to watch his beautiful cheeks burn. (Childish, I know, but I can’t help it.) And once, dining with Dr. and Mrs. Hesselius, I took my shoe off and tickled his ankle with my bare foot under the table. I thought he would spill his soup in his lap. Afterward, he gave me a stern talking-to, but I don’t really think his heart was in it. Mine certainly wasn’t when I promised never to do it again.