The Courtship - Catherine Coulter [53]
He was beginning to feel chilled, the damp of the cave burrowing through his clothes to his flesh. “We can’t believe anything just yet, Helen. There are a number of possibilities. We will discover the truth, I swear it to you.”
“You are an excellent partner,” she said, and tried to smile.
He dismissed the lamp from his mind and lightly cupped her cheek with his palm. “Three weeks ago, Miss Mayberry, I was quite happily absorbed in doing not much of anything, simply enjoying all those delightful little pleasures of life. Then I heard you speak of discipline to Alexandra at the Sanderling’s ball, and my life flew out of my control.”
“Lord Beecham,” she said, all stern and hard, “I am the one who has been made love to six times in the past two days. Pray do not speak to me of life having flown out of control.”
He laughed deeply, a black sound in the damp darkness that echoed like chortling demons around a midnight fire. When they reached the narrow mouth of the cave and stepped into the sunlight, he turned to her and wiped the dust from her face. “When I became your partner, I had not expected such adventure.”
“I have a feeling,” she said slowly, staring at him, “that the adventure is just beginning.”
They stood together for a moment on the promontory just south of Aldeburgh and stared up the long, narrow beach. The small cave was ten feet below them, a shadowed black mouth in the side of the sliding rubble of a cliff. It was a bit treacherous getting to it because of all the strewn rocks and loose dirt.
“It’s the most beautiful place on the earth,” Helen said. The tide was rising, sending swirling waters to break and fan out higher and higher onto the dirty brown sand. Countless black rocks, piled atop each other or standing alone, were covered with sea lettuce, bright green beneath the bright morning sun overhead. There were scattered piles of driftwood with seaweed woven in and over the broken branches and stems, like tangled green ropes. Shallow tidal pools were filled with limpets, beadlet anemones, periwinkles, barnacles, and sponges, all clinging to the small rocks within the pool. Lord Beecham wondered which one Helen wanted to flow over his feet when she sketched him naked.
Marram grass stuck up in thick clumps on low sand dunes, along with lady’s bedstraw and restharrow, pink and violet blooms that looked delicate but were as tough as a man’s mother-in-law. And the pink of those dainty blooms reminded him of Helen’s mouth, and so he looked at her mouth, all softly plump and pink, and he shook.
Lord Beecham breathed in deeply and looked at the scores of birds, particularly the one sanderling who was just a bit slower than his brothers. On one of his races with the waves, he was going to lose. He watched and breathed in the smell of the sea, the drying seaweed, the scent of the wildflowers, and he didn’t look at Helen’s mouth.
“Just look at the avocets,” Helen said, pointing to several birds sitting in among the bedstraw and restharrow. “Those long, skinny, black beaks can go very deep to stab food. See how they turn up at the end? And there are so many black-headed gulls here. Most of all I love to watch the sandpipers hopping along the sand, racing the water both in and out.”
Somehow he wasn’t surprised. But he said nothing, just kept looking at all the birds. There were more kinds than he could begin to count, all of them hungry, all of them yelling, crying, squawking, yipping. He watched some small oystercatchers and gray plovers racing a fast incoming wave. The water feathered out more quickly this time than just the time before, and the sanderling he had been watching, lost the race. It got soaked and nearly tottered over.
“My family home,” Lord Beecham said, “as I told you already, is Paledowns, near the coast in North Devon. You can stand on the cliffs there and look toward Lundy Island. There are more birds mating there than you can even begin to count. They cover the sky during the spring. Puffins—my favorite