Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [595]
He was perfectly still. His eyes were watching her, saying nothing, giving nothing away, understanding, she sensed, everything that she might think.
How warm it was. The beer seemed to take her half a pace towards the comfortable edge of sleep.
She looked up at him again. He smiled, slightly, but did not speak.
Silence. They shared the silence, as the sun shone into the little room. She noticed the grain in the glass making a little tracery pattern on the floor and on the edge of the counterpane. She felt her own heart-beat, slow and steady as the seconds passed and still, neither of them spoke. There seemed, that afternoon, to be a special magic in the place.
And the silence. It was the silence of the bare ridges above, where the breeze hissed, that bred the numberless, tiny bright flowers and all that half-invisible wildlife, timelessly; it was the silence of the little valley, of the winter bourne waiting patiently for the November rains. It filled the village, the chalk-walled garden with its mulberry tree behind the house, the room where they were now, facing each other, to her own amazement, in the most perfect understanding.
She watched him. She looked at him with wonder. Why was it that she felt so relaxed with him, as though she had known him all her life?
Then, as she knew it must be, it was Jethro who moved.
He did so very slowly, never letting his eyes leave her, like a cat, she smiled to herself. No, not like a cat though, for their eyes had met, and this room, and everything in it, was shared. Very softly, reaching out one long arm, he pushed the door of the room slowly shut.
There was no need. There was no one else in the house. The wooden latch fell with a faint click.
Her heart missed a beat. Now she was aware of it, beating faster.
She stayed by the window. It was perfectly safe. He was not barring the door. He was standing, very quietly, where he had stood before and his expression was as calm as if they were meeting in the middle of Salisbury close. He would not stop her, she knew: she only had to leave. She stood in the sunlight by the window and did not move.
Was, at last, the completely impossible to happen – so inconceivable that never once had she troubled, needed, allowed herself to think about an idea she would otherwise have had to strike down at its birth? Was it possible that at the age of thirty she could even think of such a thing, when in the close . . .?
She stared at the blue and white counterpane and found herself half smiling, as though all her life, or rather perhaps in some former life, she had been here, known that counterpane before.
She looked up at him once more, still standing by the warm window.
He must move now. She could make no appeal.
Very slowly, as gently as she herself might have approached to feed a bird, he moved towards her.
As she turned, uncertain, looked up, and felt the warm sunlight on her back, it was as if all the rivers in the valleys had begun to run. She had not known such a thing before.
He never spoke. That was as it should be. All that happened was in the great silence of the afternoon, broken only by faint sounds that to her seemed as faint and distant as the tiny cries of the birds on the ridges above.
How was it he knew her so well?
“You are somewhat late, my dear,” her Uncle Stephen complained. “Your rides are too long.”
“Only this afternoon, uncle,” she replied.
As she sat in the hip-bath that Lizzie had prepared for her, in the familiar surroundings of the house in the close, she knew one thing with absolute certainty.
The impossible had happened. It could never happen again.
She was sure she could trust Jethro: he understood as well as she. She did not believe the boy tending the sheep above had any idea; neither the old woman nor the farmhand had been there.
For naturally, if any notion of what had taken place that afternoon reached Sarum close, then she would be finished for ever. Not a door in the place would be open to her. Her Uncle Stephen