Chapter 24
Six months after Paris . . .
Auchencairn, Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland
Isobel chose this spring morning to walk the coast path down along Balcary Bay where it wound past the point and up to the heugh’s summit above. Although nights were yet cool, the Solway Firth had fully thrown off winter at last, and cheerful pink blossoms of sea thrift now dotted the cliff top.
She walked slowly until she came to the large rock, more or less flat, that afforded the best view towards Heston Isle and the firth beyond. It was not wholly in direct sun yet owing to tumbled boulders around it. She sat, enjoying the breeze on her face.
She came here often. Lucy favored walking the shore itself, the dunes and the margins of mudflats when the tide was out, and was rarely coaxed to summit the heugh, but she preferred the view of the bay from above.
She’d been here at all different times of day these past four months, in most any weather the firth had seen fit to deliver.
Lucy had smiled affectionately at her when she extended the invitation to walk but as usual preferred to remain home. It was rather windy now she’d achieved the top, but she was happy to be out.
It was so good to see Lucy beginning to smile more again. It was true that it didn’t fully reach her eyes often, but it was far more emotion than she had shown those first weeks out of France or the early months here. There were occasional brief glimpses of the spirited girl she’d been before.
Her sister never spoke of the previous year, and she did not pry. She told herself it was enough for now that Lucy was home, safe, and that any healing necessary might come in time. Too, Lucy grieved the loss of Maman and Da, for she had not known they were gone until the journey out of France.
She suspected from a few stray remarks that Lucy’s grief was underscored by internalized guilt that her disappearance had perhaps contributed to both, but Lucy did not speak of that either. Perhaps with time . . .
Far below, back the way she’d come, there was a man, hatless, walking where the track travelled around the point.
A neighbor, perhaps. If he continued onwards in this direction, he would soon reach the part of the footpath out of sight of her current perch until it came out again at the headland.
She held up a hand against the sea’s brightness but couldn’t discern the man’s features.
She was building friendly relationships within the community, but there were still people she had not met. She and Lucy had kept almost entirely to themselves when first they arrived, and they still spent much of their time with only one another for company.
She looked out again at the firth, towards the north of England where the Lake District mountains were hazy on the horizon.
Years of her life were spent on English soil.
Maman and Da were both buried there. In a way Jamie was too, even if his mortal remains were interred in Brussels. Most memories of him were in England.
She wished, not for the first time, that she had some small talent for sketching, but as she had once told étienne Baudelaire in that strange week in Paris, drawing had never been an art at which she excelled.
She had more skill with embroidery; perhaps she might sometime attempt to capture the spirit of this view with needle and silk.
She sat for a time, letting the tentative warmth of April and the breeze’s song and the sparkling water lull her. She’d found peace here in Kirkcudbrightshire.
The man achieved the top of the cliff path. A prickle edged up her spine. She couldn’t say why at first. It might have been the manner in which he moved: purposeful with the impression of energy tightly constrained. It could have been his height or the darkness of his hair.
And then she did know because despite the expanse of green and pink still between them, his eyes were fixed unwaveringly on her. The foundation of determined calm on which she had built her life these past months trembled and threatened to crack.
His long strides slowed as he neared her until he came to a stop some few feet away.
She’d thought of Nathaniel at times; oh, of course she had.
Many days with deep gratitude for what he had done for her and for Lucy.
Some days with bemusement that her previously relatively ordinary life, mundane once more and all the lovelier for it, had intersected with his.
Nights . . . Well, nights found her sometimes sleepless in her bed, filled with a deep, restless ache.
She recalled with dreamlike clarity the intensity of their bodies fitting together .
. . but equally the comfort of his arms around her and the security she’d found there.
In sharing their bodies, they had been as intimate as two people could be, but she’d glimpsed only a fraction of his interior world. Nor had he known her, not really. And yet he had fundamentally altered the direction of her life, short as their acquaintance had been.
So what did one say, some five and a half months later? There was no etiquette book in existence for this sort of meeting.
For surely half an eternity they merely looked at one another. Somewhere in there she managed a lungful or two of the spring-scented air.
His hair was longer than he’d worn it last autumn, enough so that he’d tied it back with leather lacing at his nape, although the wind had loosed some of it. It suited him.
During these intervening months, she couldn’t have summoned the precise arrangement of his features—truly, she hadn’t known him long enough for them to become fully engraved in her mind—but the shape and color of his eyes she did remember, vividly, and the way sunlight picked out flecks of gold in the darker brown.
Eventually she found breath enough to speak, although her voice was shaky. “I’ll not be silly enough to ask what you are doing here. There is no earthly reason for you to be walking this stretch of the Solway Firth, save you knew I was on it.”
“Though you doubtless wonder why I’ve come.” His eyes had not left her face. She felt oddly naked.
“Yes.” How could she not? She’d thought never to see him again after that chilly morning departing on the road to Dieppe. Certainly not here, in this quiet corner of Scotland.
“Matters in France are entirely concluded. I thought . . .” He hesitated. “I thought you might like to know.”
“You met with success?”
“Aye.” There was a whole world of events tucked carefully underneath that single word. Surely he meant to tell her at least some of it, having come so far.
But perhaps not while standing on a bare hilltop, buffeted by spring breezes. They could not in any case just remain here indefinitely, staring at one another.
She gained her feet, less gracefully than she’d have liked because she’d been sitting for quite some time. The initial shock was fading a little. Only a very little.
“It isn’t only that for which I came, Isobel,” he said softly. “I wanted to see how the two of you have done. Or shall I now call you Mrs. Graham?”
A more formal address because they were no longer in France, caught in the strange crystalline intimacy that had bound them there.
“No.” Why could she not determine what best to do with her arms?
“Isobel will do.” She crossed her arms and clasped hands to elbows, then uncrossed them and brushed at a spot on her skirt.
How impossible that any ease had once existed between Nathaniel and herself, and yet memories of it were flooding her.
“Although I suppose it must needs be Mrs. Graham if you are now Mr. Blackmore? Surely not Mr. Beaumont still. Or perhaps you now have some other name entirely?”
The left side of his mouth quirked upwards ever so slightly, and of a sudden the moment was easier, although not by much.
He shook his head. “Nathaniel. Unless your preference is Mr. Blackmore.”
Her choice in the matter, as ever he’d given her.
“Nathaniel,” she said decisively. “How did you find where exactly in Scotland we’d gone? I don’t remember saying anything about the cottage here.” And then smiled at her own words.
The left corner of his mouth kicked up again, further this time. “I’ve a few resources at my disposal,” he said drily.
“Of course you do.” She shook her head at herself and laughed. “Probably I’ll learn tomorrow that old Mr. Haffie who enjoys his pints at the Arms is one of your spies.” She sobered. “But as for finding me here on this particular rock, you must first have been to the cottage?”
“Your sister told me where I might find you, up the hill on the coast path. Something about flowers.”
“Tonn a’ chladaich. Sea thrift, it’s called in English,” she said distractedly. “I’m quite fond of them. Lucy knew you?”
“She knew me.”
She exhaled. What were Lucy’s thoughts upon seeing Nathaniel? She might not ever learn. Lucy kept every emotion close to her chest these days and other people at arm’s-length, even her own sister.
“I did have a hat at that point,” Nathaniel said. “She took it before directing me up here.”
“Did she now? She must expect you to return. Come, then. We will share our lunch with you.”
Isobel’s hair never had stayed in its pins. She wore no bonnet or cap, and the strong headwind whipped up loose tresses.
His fingers remembered the texture of it.
In a rose-colored gown, she looked part of the drifts of pink blossoms. She was no longer so thin as he remembered from Paris; her frame was rounder in places, and it suited her well.
Healthy color painted her face. She was no longer the shade she’d named herself during that first memorable conversation in the fiacre.
She was beautiful. He couldn’t have removed his eyes from her for anything less than dire catastrophe. Maybe not even for that.