Chapter Fifteen
You are not in the world,
you are in the universe.
Blazing Trails , W.H. Jackson
Gabriel leaped up, his chair crashing to the floor, as Elodie screamed. A second later she was grabbing hold of him, attempting to climb his body.
This was not as romantic as one may suppose.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded, pulse thundering in response to her panic and, moreover, her proximity to parts of him that had only just recovered from their excitement earlier in the day.
“Mouse!” she wailed.
“Mouse,” Gabriel echoed in bemusement. From her reaction, he’d been expecting something truly dire, along the lines of fire! or there’s mold on these peaches! He put his arms around her, embracing her firmly in the hope this would stop her writhing. “A mouse won’t hurt you, Elodie.”
To which she replied with singular eloquence: “Aaaaghhhh!”
“You’re a geographer,” he pointed out, albeit with some difficulty as her hair was covering his face. “You must have seen hundreds of mice over your lifetime.”
“Field mice!” she retorted as if this made all clear. Tightening her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist, she clung to him desperately. “Outside! Hurry! Now!”
“It’s still raining. Let me just set you down on this—”
“Aaaaagghhhh!”
Thus persuaded, Gabriel walked them to the front door and, with some angling, some painful twisting of his arm, managed to open it. The rain had eased, but still they were going to get wet. Torn between delight at her seeking his protection and an equal dismay at the miserable discomfort of the night outside, he hesitated. “Are you sure you—”
“Oh God, it’s looking at me!” Elodie wailed. “Hurry! Go!”
So Gabriel took his coat from the hook beside the door, glanced at the fireplace to ensure it was completely cold, and stepped into the night. At this point he expected Elodie to get down, but she continued clinging with a tenacity that really was quite endearing. It made him feel strong, heroic, and just a little strained, but he wasn’t about to admit that. Indeed, he found himself having to wrestle a rather foolish smile into his more habitual frown. Draping the coat over her, he headed for a nearby oak tree as quickly as possible under the circumstances.
But as soon as they reached its shelter, Elodie declared it was too close to the mouse. And so Gabriel continued on through the sodden darkness, risking possible tripping hazards, pneumonia, and worst of all, a hopeless lovesickness creating havoc in his stomach, as if he’d swallowed a swarm of magical vampire butterflies. At last an elm tree was pronounced safe, and with a rather tired exhalation he stopped.
Elodie loosened her grip on him and slid down until she was standing. This had the unfortunate consequence of shifting Gabriel’s internal havoc several inches below his stomach, and he’d have immediately stepped back were not Elodie still holding him captive. Oh, she’d removed her arms from around him—but her eyes , they were merciless. In the dark Gabriel could not see the sea green shade of their beauty, but he didn’t need to. It had long ago colored his soul.
“Sorry,” she said, the word a tremble that might have been laughter or the precursor to tears. “I know, ‘girl who catches lightning is scared of mice’—it’s ridiculous.”
“It’s a relief,” Gabriel answered. “At least now I know you have some sense of caution within you, which hopefully can one day be applied to such things as, well, catching lightning.”
Elodie was quiet as she tried to work through whether he’d just insulted her, and Gabriel took the opportunity to brush a strand of hair away from her face, his fingers warming with exultation as they glided across her skin.
The air seemed to gasp excitedly and clamp a hand over its mouth. Elodie went very still. He brushed a raindrop from her cheek next, then another from her temple. He could not seem to stop touching her, taking care of her in this small way. He would do more—he would do anything she asked of him. He was at her service forever. And he wished with all his heart that she’d cling to him once more, for he knew now he was physically incomplete without her.
But he also knew that if they stood there staring at each other, they’d catch a chill and end up in separate graves. So he stepped back, although it hurt all through his body to do so.
“Sit down,” he said gruffly. And once she had done so, making herself comfortable in the soft, red-gold leaves fallen from the tree, he added, “Have this,” handing her his coat. She took it automatically. With a brisk nod, Gabriel turned to leave.
“Wait!” Elodie said with some alarm. “Where are you going?”
He looked down at her dispassionately, never mind the butterflies now fluttering around his heart. “To sleep under another tree, so you’ll have privacy.”
“Oh.” She sounded forlorn, and Gabriel hesitated, not sure what she wanted. “You’ll freeze without your coat,” she said. “Stay here, we can share it.”
“Under only one tree?” He looked around as if faculty secretaries were lurking in the darkness, hoping to witness something they could gossip about.
“It’s a logical solution,” Elodie said.
She had him there. With an inarticulate grumble as his nerves trembled, he sat beside her, keeping a polite and safe fifteen inches’ gap between them.
(Thirteen inches, after he shifted to avoid a stone, then shifted again to avoid an itchy leaf.)
(Ten inches, after Elodie moved to cross her legs.)
(Five inches, after Gabriel spread the coat over them both like a blanket, requiring them to shuffle closer so it fit across their laps.)
(Half an inch, when they both placed their hands down in the intervening gap beneath the coat, where it was warm and insular like a cave. Their smallest fingers drifted across the last tiny distance, meeting in the secret dark.) They sat like that, quiet, goosebumps rising along their arms as they stared out into the slow-dripping night.
“I’m sorry,” Elodie said after a while.
“It’s fine, I didn’t want to stay in that place anyway.”
“I know. That’s why I’m sorry.” She looked at him, her eyes big and soft and full of feeling. “I should have listened to you instead of insisting that you ought to feel comfortable.”
Blindsided by this statement, Gabriel could do no more than shrug. He’d never received such an apology in all his life and didn’t know how one properly responded. Thank you seemed paltry; taking off her clothes and kissing her from brow to toes seemed possibly excessive (although enjoyable).
“The second I was upset, you helped me,” she went on. “Thank you. I wish I had been kind like that to you.”
Gabriel stared at her. Say something, he urged his brain. But the traitorous organ had transformed itself into a loveheart and was no longer aware of anything but the beautiful woman at his side.
“It’s too easy for me to get caught up in the moment,” she said, “and not think more carefully. I’m so truly sorry if I hurt you.”
“You didn’t hurt me,” Gabriel answered gruffly. Of course she hadn’t. He didn’t get hurt by things like that. He was a persnickety curmudgeon; a need for comfort was the last thing people would associate with him, therefore they never considered it. And his extended family, half of whom were academics, the other half civil servants, could have taken “Keep a Stiff Upper Lip” as their official motto. For them, comfort was something that happened only in the nursery, and generally consisted of firm pats on the back by a starchy woman in an even starchier uniform. When a child dared to become more emotional than a stern look could quell, they were packed off—to America, in the case of his cousin Devon, who’d failed to recover swiftly enough from his mother’s death—or to boarding school, as happened with Amelia, after which she returned only during the summer holidays, a guest in the family house, no longer quite belonging.
Gabriel had learned better, quicker, than Devon and Amelia, perhaps because quiet had always been his natural instinct. He protected himself from the risk of needing comfort by expressing no more than a grumpy frown, even though in truth everything hurt, the whole noisy, itchy, crooked world, all the fucking time.
But Elodie continued gazing at him as if she saw right through that defense to where an aching boy huddled inside, just wishing for…not a hug, exactly, but perhaps a look that was like a hug…the type of look that Elodie was giving him now, in fact.
Damn, she was going to make him cry.
“The hovel supplied us with a meal,” he said, “and so it all worked out for the best.”
“I don’t know that I’d ever equate tinned corned beef with ‘the best,’?” Elodie remarked, sardonic but smiling gently.
Damn again, now she was going to make him laugh. Determined to control himself, Gabriel nodded tersely. And Elodie, wise woman, understanding that the topic was closed, nodded also. They looked away from each other, into the hollow night.
Silence fell again.
Altogether it was as awkward as an eighteen-year-old boy trying not to blush when a gorgeous, pale-haired girl smiled at him. Then the moon emerged from behind a cloud, gossamer-thin and wry, its light transforming the elm’s canopy into a roof of lambent gold that sparkled with raindrops like diamonds. Elodie gave one of her dreamy sighs.
“This reminds me of when George Lowbridge and I were studying the effects of thaumaturgic silver deposits on apple growth in North Yorkshire. It rained the entire time, despite being summer.”
George Lowbridge? The perpetually sniffing junior professor from Cambridge?
“Oh?” Gabriel inquired with all the cool disinterest of someone who was in fact interested to the point of near combustion but determined not to show it.
“We sheltered under a tree very similar to this.”
“Indeed?”
She laughed at some memory that made her eyes shine, and Gabriel felt several large, sharp boulders locate themselves to inside his respiratory system, in defiance of all geographic science. He knew perfectly well that Elodie had the right to sit under any tree she pleased with another man, but he also had the right to absolutely hate the very thought of it . She was his . Granted, only in legal terms, and he would never dare to state the claim aloud to her face. She was her own woman, and he believed that implicitly . He just also believed, deep down, where decency turned into a wild jungle, that she belonged to him . Indeed, he felt this so vehemently , he could not save himself from the alarming bout of italics.
Nevertheless, he remained outwardly dispassionate as he said, “So…where might I find Professor Lowbridge these days? I’d quite like to have a little chat with him.”
“Oh, George went to Australia,” Elodie said, oblivious to his spiking emotions.
Hopefully George would get eaten along the way by crocodiles.
“That’s fine,” Gabriel said. “I can go to Australia.” On the other hand, he wouldn’t shift his gaze just slightly to the left and see the warm, teasing smile he could feel her directing at him. “Why is he there, of all places?”
“My uncle is doing in-depth research on the songlines—Australian natives’ method of navigation,” Elodie said, drawing up her knees, wrapping her arms around her legs as she gazed out into the whispering night. “George went to study with him.”
Her voice was…melancholy? Wishful? Showing signs of a chill? “That makes you sad,” Gabriel hazarded. If he was right, then forget crocodiles. Poisonous spiders. Large, black poisonous spiders with incurable venom. Even better, he’d toss George into a pit of crocodiles for making Elodie sad, and then toss poisonous spiders in after him for daring to even think of Elodie at all.
“I’m only sad insofar as I wish I could study in Australia myself, and South America, and really the whole world,” she replied. “But I’ll never leave Oxford. I love…teaching.” She shook her head. “It was better that George took the position Uncle Jasper had to offer, rather than me. And Clifford was happy about it too.”
“Clifford?” Gabriel had been with her for half that speech, but all the human names at the end bamboozled him.
“George’s particular friend.”
Oh. He knew what that meant. Well then, perhaps this George wasn’t so bad after all. In fact, one might even call him an excellent fellow for ensuring Elodie had shelter from the rain. Gabriel would buy him and Clifford coffee, should they ever meet.
“Goodness, aren’t the stars so beautiful,” Elodie murmured complacently, even while Gabriel strove to regain the inner balance that jealousy had so profoundly rocked. He considered the inky vista with mild skepticism. The rain had stopped while they’d been talking, and the sky stretched clear into forever, blue-black, littered with stars.
“I suppose if I point out a constellation, you’ll insist on telling me the whole mythology behind it,” he grumbled.
Elodie tipped her head against her knees so that she was smiling at him. “You know me well.”
Bloody hell, could a man cope with any more temptation? Kiss her, his body exhorted. His mind, however, began supplying reasons why such an action was inadvisable, from (1) she might reject him to (12) he hadn’t been able to clean his teeth after eating the corned beef.
Kiss her anyway, fool! his body insisted.
His mind muttered and writhed and finally decided fine , he could attempt one small kiss…
And she looked away.
Everything inside Gabriel slumped. Scowling at himself, he pointed skyward. “Pleiades,” he said.
“The seven sisters,” Elodie responded as he expected. She began to unfurl one, then another tale, her voice warming Gabriel until he forgot he was sitting damp-haired and cold beneath a tree, lulling him until he felt half-inside a dream. Gradually her voice slowed and she began to sway with tiredness. So Gabriel grunted at her that he’d had enough, and she came back to reality with a quiet sigh.
“Do you think the village is safe tonight?” she asked.
“I see no fires,” Gabriel replied.
“We need to establish a baseline for—”
“Tomorrow,” he interrupted. Even if Elodie weren’t half-asleep, he himself felt utterly exhausted by all the feelings he’d suffered this evening.
Elodie murmured something grim beneath her breath. Hearing his own name, Gabriel turned his head to ask her what she was saying. At the same moment, she turned hers, no doubt to tell him.
And somehow, completely by accident, or perhaps some conspiracy between fate and physics, their lips met.
Could he call it a kiss? It was barely more than the soft touching of mouths. Even so, a powerful sensation rushed from his lips to the pit of his stomach, where it set off a number of small explosions. He watched Elodie’s eyes widen. He felt his heart do the same. With tender gentleness, the kiss began to warm…
And they pulled away, both of them blinking wildly in panic.
“Sorry,” Elodie said, peering up at the leaves.
“Sorry,” Gabriel said, glaring at the horizon. He heard Elodie’s breath hitch. His pulse raced. From the corner of his eye he noticed her glance toward him. He lifted a hand…
And the panic slammed through them again. Nine years of shyness, and of watching the woman run away from him again and again, pushed Gabriel’s hand down so hard, it smacked against the ground. He wanted her so much, his heart cringed and his eyes grew heavy, forcing him to employ an emergency scowl. Elodie, for her part, was looking so far in the opposite direction from him that her neck must be hurting with the effort.
“It’s been a frazzly day,” she suggested.
“Our nerves are overexcited,” Gabriel contributed.
“We should sleep.”
“Yes.”
They lay down, back-to-back, in the leaves.
“This is really quite snug,” Elodie said with a cheerfulness that sounded like it might at any moment snap from overstraining.
Gabriel dared not reply. He was being scratched against every inch of his body that touched the ground, even through his clothes. The coat lay crooked over his legs, and the corned beef churned in his stomach. But it was fine, all fine, so long as there was no more conversation…
“Are you terribly uncomfortable?” Elodie asked.
“No, I’m snug too,” he replied gallantly. A stick jabbed him in the ribs, and he swallowed down a curse.
“You’re lying.”
“I am not.”
“I can tell when you lie, Gabriel.”
“I don’t lie, Elodie.”
“You’ve never used the word ‘snug’ in all the time I’ve known you.”
“That’s because you’ve never seen me sleep in a pile of leaves.”
“All right. Good night, then.”
“Hm.”
Thank God, Elodie didn’t reply. Sleeping in company was difficult under any circumstances; Gabriel hated being vulnerable like that. But sleeping with his wife (who smelled like violets despite her muddy clothes, and who had no drawers on beneath her skirt, and who was moreover the most beautiful woman in all existence) felt almost impossible. She was wriggling in the leaf pile, making herself even cozier, and Gabriel had to silently chant mathematical formulae just to stop himself from envisioning her wriggling naked beneath him.
But his lips burned from their sweet, accidental kiss, and his stomach continued to clench, making him feel literally lovesick. At least they weren’t touching, their backs to each other and five inches of safety between them. Gabriel closed his eyes…
“Happy dreams,” Elodie said, like a lovely line of music.
And Gabriel opened his eyes again, staring out into the dark, utterly lost inside his own heart.
—
“What the blimmin’ heck?!”
Elodie woke in a tumble of confusion and alarm as the exclamation broke through her dreams. One minute she was strolling Lyonnesse, mapping its shores, the next a man was shouting at her. Opening her eyes, she found herself cuddled up with Gabriel beneath the elm tree. He blinked at her dazedly, as half-awake as she. Together they came into focused awareness, their eyes growing increasingly large as they realized that his arms were holding her close while one of her bare legs hooked over his thigh. At least, this was the case for approximately 1.3 seconds before the information filtered through their brains and they flung themselves up in a tangle of limbs and apologies.
“Vagrants!”
At this point, they realized a man stood in front of them. Or, to be more precise, they noticed a broom being shaken at them, behind which was the man, snarling as he wielded it furiously. Gabriel leaped to his feet, pulling Elodie up and behind him in a display of chivalry that would have made her swoon were they not under immediate threat of being bashed by dirty, cobwebby rushes.
“Are you the blighters who messed up my house?” the man demanded.
They stared at him in amazement. “You—you actually live in that cottage?” Elodie asked.
“Of course!” the man sputtered. “I go away one night and come back to find I’ve been looted!”
“We shall of course pay for the food we consumed,” Gabriel said.
“Too right you will! And what about the table?”
“Uh…” Elodie and Gabriel said in bemused unison.
“You did something to it!” The broom was rattled violently at them.
“We…cleaned it?” Elodie suggested.
“Blighters!” the man roared.
“Now, now, my good fellow.” Gabriel’s voice took on the polite, mollifying tone of a geographer who, having inadvertently trespassed on both property and sensitivities, has only the dignity of Her Majesty’s service to help him escape the predicament. This was, of course, the exact way one should manage such a situation. Elodie had been taught the same by her parents, mentors, and professors, and knew how well it worked. So she took half a step forward, smiling nicely.
Then—“Oh my gosh, look!” she gasped, pointing to behind the man. “What on earth is that?!”
The man turned to see what she meant, his broom lowering as he did so. At once, Elodie grabbed it with both hands and twisted.
The man stumbled to his knees, and Elodie caught Gabriel by the shirtsleeve. “Run!” she urged, tugging him.
Gabriel stared at her with an incredulousness that wavered between disapproval and admiration. Elodie tugged him again. “Come on,” she hissed.
“Hooligans!” the man shouted, clambering to his feet.
They ran.
—
After a quarter of a mile’s dash down a muddy slope, they finally stopped. Not only had the furious man been left far behind, scrambling in the grass for the coins Gabriel had thrown him, but they’d come to accept that there could be no outrunning the awkwardness of having woken in each other’s arms again. Breathing hard, they looked across the quiet, misty land to where D?lylleuad stood, softly wreathed in chimney smoke, beside the river.
“It’s not too far,” Elodie said. “We should be back there in time for breakfast.”
“The mist has a blue tinge,” Gabriel noted, staring at it fixedly so he would not be tempted to watch the way Elodie’s breasts heaved with her breath.
“I think it’s just a trick of the light,” she said. “Everything seems calm.”
They surveyed the view awhile longer until their gazes happened to meet. Memories filled the silence between them: waking to find themselves cuddling, the kisses yesterday, the morning after their wedding night, when they sat cross-legged in Gabriel’s tumbled bed, eating toast and eggs, talking about their favorite maps…
Elodie’s eyes darkened with blatant longing. She must be starving for breakfast, Gabriel thought, and looked away.
“We’ll be there soon,” he said.
“I don’t think we ever will,” she answered wearily. They began walking toward D?lylleuad.
Blessed silence reigned for all of three minutes before Elodie broke it with the air of a woman unable to restrain herself a moment longer. “What a pretty bird!” she exclaimed.
She pointed toward a feathered creature in a nearby tree, but Gabriel’s instincts warned him that this was merely a prelude to deeper conversation.
“No,” he said.
Elodie halted, turning to him with stormy eyes. “What do you mean, no?”
“I mean no,” he answered tersely. “Ornithology is an exceedingly dull subject, trust me. We will not be discussing it.”
She gave an astonished laugh, and the storm in her eyes flashed with her lightning-fast temper. “You can’t tell me what to discuss.”
“Of course I can.”
Her jaw dropped. Gabriel just stared at her in the way he’d perfected over years of teaching: implacable, inscrutable, unwilling to be convinced that an essay deadline should be extended or a conversation about birds be undertaken. But the heat in Elodie’s gaze burned a hole in his heart. He wished he could just tell her how he really felt. Her every rambling conversation, her every stormy look, made him love her more than he thought possible. And yet, considering she once jumped out of a laboratory window upon seeing him enter, confessing his secret adoration would almost certainly inspire her to run off into the wild, where she’d meet a carnivorous tree or river tsunami, knowing her luck. So he found himself frowning, because he did not know what else to do.
Abruptly, her jaw snapped shut. “Well—I—arrogant— humph .” Thus communicating God only knew what, she stomped off ahead of him, grumbling about mice and men and how she was looking forward to a hot bath, in which she would like to drown a certain spouse.
Grateful that conversation had been avoided, Gabriel followed. It was a placid morning, at least, and they would soon be back in D?lylleuad, with other people to come between them. Thank goodness for small mercies! Thus thinking, he quickened his pace, all the while gazing hopelessly at the sunlit magic that was his wife.