The brim of Adèle's bonnet touched his shoulder. "You are right," she said. "It is a very good place to be. I am glad we came here, John. You could not have brought me to a better place."
He drew his arm free of hers and set it about her shoulders. After all, they were on the beach and some of the proprieties could be allowed to slip away there. Besides, he had brought some of his twentieth-century lack of inhibitions with him. She looked first startled and then very pleased indeed. The wind and salt air had already whipped color into her cheeks.
"I am not going to die," he said. "Not yet, anyway. I am better, my love. All I need is to regain my strength. I know you will not quite believe it yet-perhaps not for a long while. But it is true."
Pray God-he closed his eyes to make it a real prayer- that he could stay with her, or that at the very least his own health would stay with the man who would return to her. And pray God that that man, if he must return, would love her as she deserved to be loved.
"I believe it," she said softly. Her voice was trembling. "I do believe it, John. I knew when we were coming here and even more so when I saw Cartref and the valley and the beach and ocean-I knew that a miracle was going to happen."
"It has," he said. "A greater miracle than you realize, I believe."
He took her hand in his and began to walk with her toward the water. Through her glove his thumb and forefinger played with the ring on her finger. This was what he had imagined doing, he thought, when he had suggested a week at the Cartref Hotel with Allison. He had imagined quiet walks on the beach, rambles in the hills, browsings in the village of Awelfa. Long afternoons and nights of lovemaking. He was not at all sure that Allison would have enjoyed any of it except the lovemaking. She needed the hectic pace of city life as a constant stimulant, he realized.
He did not.
He felt the now familiar dizziness for a moment. How could he be doing this, strolling inside someone else's body with someone else's wife two hundred years ago, and not be feeling either alarm for his own sanity or panic at having slipped through some time warp? But it was not someone else's body. It was his own. He recognized himself in the mirror even though he did not look quite identical to his usual self. And he recognized himself inside. He had all of Viscount Cordell's memories, though some of them were coming back to him slowly. And Adèle was his wife, his beloved wife, even though their marriage was unconsum-mated.
The sand was becoming damp and spongy. The pressure of her shoes and his Hessians was making wet indentations. Finally they came to the first trickle of the receding tide and they stopped. He set his arm about her again.
"Now if I had all my strength back," he said, "I might pick you up and carry you in and make you pay me all sorts of forfeits to persuade me not to drop you."
She giggled-what a joyful sound it was. He realized that he had not heard it in a long while. His illness must have saddened her for a few years even before he went to Italy. "And if you think that is going to make me say I am glad you do not have your strength back, sir," she said, "you are very mistaken."
"What?" he said. "You would not mind being dropped into the ocean?''
"Of course I would." She giggled again. "But it would not happen. I would pay all the forfeits."
"Would you?" He drew her a little closer. "That is something I must keep in mind. I shall put it to the test- sooner than you realize."
She was crying then, noisily and unexpectedly, and hiding her face against his chest. He set his arms about her and rested his cheek against the flowers on her bonnet. This must be very bewildering for her, and rather frightening. She must expect that he would have a relapse at any moment.
"John," she said eventually, choking back her tears. "Oh, do forgive me. What a goose you will think me. It is just that I never expected-Oh, I-I don't know what it is I am trying to say."
"You expected to come here to nurse a dying man with all the gentleness of your love," he said. "You did not expect to be teased and threatened. And you did not expect to get your shoes wet in the tide."
She lifted a wet and reddened and very beautiful face to him and smiled. "How good God is," she said. "How very, very good."
He tried to imagine Allison saying just those words. But he did not want to think about Allison, and he pushed guilt back out of his conscious mind.
"Yes," he said, and kissed her. His body, he realized after a mere few seconds, was already beginning to respond weakly to the desires of his emotions.
He handed her his handkerchief after a couple of minutes and she dried her eyes and blew her nose. He started coughing at almost the same moment, as a gust of salt air caught his throat. It was just a harmless cough, over in a moment. But he noticed the quickly veiled terror in her eyes and then the gentle tenderness that had been there when he opened his own eyes two days ago to find her instead of Allison on the bed with him.
"Nothing," he said. "Look, it is over. No blood."
She smiled at him and stood on tiptoe to kiss him again.
"But," he said reluctantly, "if I am not going to have to demand that you sling me over your shoulder and carry me back to the house after all, Adèle, we had better make our way back there. At a very sedate pace. You may even persuade me to lie down for half an hour or so when we get there, provided you will lie down at my side."
"You know I will," she said, taking his hand. "You know that is why I married you, John. To be always at your side. You cannot know how happy it makes me just to be there. All my life I lived for the times when you were home and when you would come to play with the others. I tried not to cling and I tried not to be demanding or to be a nuisance-"
He squeezed her hand. "You never did and you never were," he said. "You were always the joy in my life, Adèle."
"Oh." She sounded breathless. "What a lovely thing to say."
"Our house," he said, looking up the beach to the manor in the distance. "Our Cartref. Shall we stay here forever, my love? Forget to go back to England? Live here and love here together, close to all that matters in life? Shall we bring up our children here?"
"Yes," she said softly. "Oh, yes, John. Let us do that."
Beneath the brim of her bonnet he could see her face. He could see the soft, joyous, wistful dream in it.
And we did it, too, he told her silently. We lived happily ever after here.
She tried to hold on to the cold reality of her sanity. She tried to tell herself that a man who had had consumption in such an advanced stage, a man who had appeared so very close to death just a week ago, could not recover his full health. Miracles did not happen in the mundane times of the early nineteenth century.
Soon this last burst of strength and vigor would go and he would go-out into the beyond that did not frighten him, into the kingdom of love where she would follow him one day. When the time came, she must let him go and be grateful for this precious and wonderful and unexpected week.
In many ways it would be harder to let him go after this week. She had glimpsed the joy of married life this week, as she had never expected to do, and she knew that the bleakness that would come after would be almost unbearable for a long, long time.
But she knew, too, that she would be grateful, that she would live on the memories of this week for the rest of her life.
She tried to be sane and sensible. She tried to keep herself steeled inside just as she had been from the moment she first saw him after his return from Italy. She tried to keep herself prepared, to guard herself from total collapse when it was over.
But it was difficult to do. She felt almost as if after their wedding, after their departure for Wales, they had traveled into a new and different world, a magic, wonderful world where miracles happened, where love was to be loved and life to be lived, where death was not to be feared, where death was not imminent, anyway.