Chapter Thirty-Nine
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
‘I can’t sleep,’ Ash whispers into the darkness.
I’ve been lying on my side, my face turned towards the sky, staring through the huge skylight at the full moon, but now I look towards Ash and see his eyes glinting back at me.
‘Are you excited?’ I ask, and his teeth catch the moonlight as he smiles and nods. ‘Me too,’ I tell him.
He lifts his head from the pillow and leans across to press a kiss to my lips, slipping his hand inside my pyjama top to rest on the soft curve of my belly as he does so.
‘Don’t wake them,’ I chide, teasing.
‘I still haven’t felt them kicking,’ he replies wistfully.
‘You will,’ I promise.
Every time our babies remind me of their presence, he seems to be somewhere else.
I touch my hand to his clean-shaven jaw. He looks like Ashton Berkeley these days, but he still sounds like Ash 3.0. Sometimes his Welsh accent rings through more strongly than his English – and I love it when that happens.
Ash has been busy this year, trying to get this place ready for our arrival. Celyn and Catrin relocated to cottage number one last autumn, soon after their baby, Rhys, was born. They missed the social aspect of living amongst the other workers, so Ash took over the ranger’s cabin again and set about renovating it, keen to bring it in line with the stylish interior of his tiny dark-skies cabin near Knighton.
At first there wasn’t any rush to do the work and he enjoyed spending his days up here toiling away while I did the same in the gardens at Berkeley Hall – we’d both return to off-grid living in the evenings. But when, back in January, we found out I was pregnant, we realised our long motorcycle journeys had a limited lifespan.
As of two nights ago, this cabin became our primary home, but we plan to escape to our tiny cabin at weekends and Ash will build an extension there too in a year or so. We want our children to grow up connected to nature, and I dream of them dipping their feet in the river, running through the grass in the rain and watching the starlings take flight in the autumn. I couldn’t imagine a happier childhood for our little ones.
I didn’t fall pregnant that first week in Ash’s cabin. Our not-quite accident happened two and a half months later; we’d been playing a game of chicken with each other for weeks. We actually got quite competitive, seeing how far we could go before one of us called time – on a few too many occasions neither of us did – but then we did once admit to each other over a game of pool in Lisbon that we were competitive when it came to playing games.
I know that I will always look back on those early days in the woods with fondness – the books we read, the stars we watched, the games of cards we each won and lost.
Ash persuaded me to go wild swimming in the river with him before the weather got too cold, and for weeks we walked out to the edge of the forest to watch the starling murmurations in the sky.
We kept each other warm when winter came, and made the most of his telescope to study the planets on the long clear nights.
When we found out I was pregnant, we both cried tears of joy. To discover at our twelve-week scan that we were expecting twins took a little more getting used to, but now we couldn’t be happier or more excited to meet our children.
‘Is it even worth trying to get back to sleep?’ I ask.
‘Probably not. We can sleep later, after we’ve consummated our nuptials,’ he replies playfully.
‘Twice in one day?’ I ask innocently, dipping my fingertips beneath the waistband of his boxers.
‘Oh yeah?’ he asks in a low voice, catching my hand as he turns towards me.
‘Got to kill the time somehow.’
He draws me as close as my bump will allow, catching my mouth in the sweetest of kisses.
His hand is on my waist when it happens.
Ash and I both gasp, but his is louder as he moves his hand to my belly to feel our son or daughter slowly change position.
‘Oh my God,’ he murmurs, his eyes wide with wonder. He leans down and presses his lips to my stomach. ‘Daddy loves you, Taran and Stella,’ he whispers.
This man has my heart, and it is bursting with love.
As soon as we heard that we were expecting a boy and a girl, Ash and I knew instinctively that we’d name our children after our childhood best friends.
Stella was my star, and my daughter will be too. Both our children will have names inspired by nature, because Taran, of course, means thunder in Welsh.
Even the excitement of our babies’ movements doesn’t stop us from wanting to lose ourselves in each other, and now the moon has drifted out of sight of the window and Ash has gone back to sleep. I trace his features with my eyes, luxuriating in this quiet moment and reflecting on my luck, on our happiness. Later this morning I will marry the love of my life.
We want this moment, while it’s still just the two of us, to be able to stare into each other’s eyes uninterrupted and say our vows.
I reach over and pick up my ring from the bedside table, a circle of perfect daisies, made out of white gold.
Philippa gave this to me when Ash broke the news of our engagement – it belonged to her mother. She said there was no pressure to wear it, but I couldn’t love it more.
I’ve grown surprisingly close to Philippa – or Philly, as she insists I call her now. She’s super excited to become a grandmother, although sometimes she gets caught up in worrying about everything Ash has sacrificed. She still believes that one day he’ll come to regret denying his children their heritage, and I have to admit that I’m also disposed to overthinking when it comes to this subject.
Sometimes I’ll imagine our daughter sitting out on the hilltop by the cabin and staring down at the grand mansion in the sun with its golden gatehouse that was gifted to her family by a king. I’ll imagine her running barefoot in the woods as a young girl and slipping her feet into high heels as a grown woman. Will she ever wish that she could have grown up living a grander life as the daughter of a viscount and viscountess? Will she wish she could have got married in the beautiful gardens that she will never be able to call her own?
I’ll imagine our son tearing down the corridors of his grandmother’s residence, his footsteps reverberating like his name, thunder, against the walls. I’ll think of him walking at ten, loping at thirteen. How old will he be when he can no longer enter those corridors and claim any right to them? Will he be at peace with it when his grandmother is no longer there to call on? When he realises that his father gave up his ancestral home?
Will he think of his own children and what they might have had, and their children, and the children who might come after? Will he resent his father for taking all that away from them?
When I find myself spiralling like this, I think of the words Taran said to Ash days before he died. And I remind myself that we do swim in rivers, we do watch the stars, listen to birdsong and the sound of the rain. We live good lives, do good things and appreciate every moment.
So I try not to think about tomorrow. I try not to think about twelve years’ time or fifty or a hundred. I try not to think about five hundred years of the past, or five hundred years into the future. I try not to think about what the world will be like in a thousand years, or a million, or five billion, when the earth is ash and dust and life is a long-lost memory near a dying star in the vast universe. I gather my loved ones close, my boy of thunder, my brightest star, my strong, steady Ash, and I cherish today.