Southampton Row - Anne Perry [40]
She smiled, sharing it with him, picturing it in his imagination. She liked to think of him on the deck of a ship. It seemed the right place for him, his element far more than a police desk. And yet she would never have met him were he still there. And if he returned to the sea she would be forever watching the weather, every time the wind blew, fearing for him; every time she heard of a ship in trouble, wondering if it were his.
He looked at her, catching her gaze and the warmth in it. “Sorry,” he apologized quickly, blushing and turning away, his neck stiff. “Daydreaming.”
“I do a lot of it,” she said quickly.
“Do you?” He swiveled back to her, looking surprised. “Where do you go . . . I mean . . . I mean, where would you like to go?”
“Anywhere with you” would have been the truth. “Somewhere I haven’t been before,” she answered. “Perhaps the Mediterranean. What about Alexandria? Or Greece, somewhere?”
“I think you’d like it,” he said softly. “The light is like nothing anywhere else, so brilliant, the sea so blue. And of course there are the Indies . . . West, I mean. As long as you don’t go too far south, the danger of fevers is not high. Jamaica, or the Bahamas.”
“Do you wish you were still at sea?” She was afraid of the answer. Perhaps that was where his heart really lay.
He looked at her, for a moment without discretion or guard in his face. “No.” It was only one word, but the passion in his voice filled it with all she was waiting to hear.
She felt the color burn up inside her, the relief dizzying. He had not changed. He had said nothing, just answered a simple question about travel, one word, but the meaning was like a huge wave buoying her up, lifting her as if into the air. She smiled back, allowing her other feelings to be unconcealed for an instant, then she turned back to the portrait. She said something meaningless, a remark about color or texture of paint. She was not listening to herself, and she knew he was not, either.
She put off going home for as long as possible. It would be the end of a dream, the return to the daily reality from which she had escaped, and the inevitable guilt because her heart was not where it ought to be, even if her body was.
Eventually, at nearly seven o’clock, she went in through the front door and as soon as she was inside, felt imprisoned in the grayness of it. That was ridiculous. It was really a very pleasant house, full of soft color and most agreeably furnished. The lack of light was inside her. She walked across the floor to the foot of the stairs and reached the bottom just as the Bishop’s study door opened and he came out, his hair a little tousled as if he had run his hand through it. His face was pale, his eyes dark-ringed.
“Where have you been?” he demanded querulously. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Five minutes before seven,” she replied, glancing at the long case clock against the farther wall.
“The question was rhetorical, Isadora!” he snapped. “I can read a dial as well as you can. And that does not answer where you have been.”
“To see the exhibition of Hogarth’s paintings at the National Gallery,” she replied blandly.
He raised his eyebrows. “Until this hour?”
“I met some acquaintances and fell into conversation,” she explained. That was true literally, if not in implication. She resented the fact that she had justified herself