And yet-his mind became dizzy with disorientation again. It was not he who had doubted. And it was not he who now loved her with all his heart. That was another man, the one who usually occupied this weak, thin body. He-John Chandler-could have no feelings for Adèle at all. He was in love with Allison Gorman. He was engaged to her. He had just placed on her finger the ring that Adèle was now wearing.
He knew what had happened, of course. He accepted it with a calm that puzzled and amazed him, as if it were an ordinary, everyday occurrence, or as if he finally understood the feelings he had always had about the house and the ring. He had slipped back into history. When he could set his mind to working rationally, he would even be able to work out exactly who in history he was impersonating. He had a smattering of knowledge about the family. And this was a Regency man. He should not be difficult to trace.
"If I had had an opportunity to choose my bride at leisure and in full health," he said, "I know whom I would have chosen."
She closed her eyes. He knew she was steeling herself against pain, though she showed no other outer sign than that.
"The Honorable Miss Adèle Markham," he said softly, "now Adèle Chandler, Viscountess Cordell. How could I ever have chosen anyone else when my heart was given to her?"
Her eyes opened again. "How kind you are," she said. "Kinder than usual." She touched his lips with her fingertips. ' 'And you are talking too much. You will tire yourself and start coughing again."
During their journey into Wales he had sometimes been made irritable by her fussing-though that was an unkind word to use. By her everlasting patience and consideration for his well-being, then. Kinder than usual. It had not escaped her notice, then.
"I shall leave for a while," she said. "You will be able to rest better if I am not here."
But he set his arm about her and held her against him. "Don't leave," he whispered. He was afraid that if she left she would never come back, that he would never see her again. It was an unbearable thought. And dizzying in light of the fact that he had just got engaged-to Allison. ' 'Kiss me."
He knew that the joy that lighted her face had always been there when she was a child and a girl. Beautiful, joyous Adèle. He knew, too, that it had not been there a great deal in recent years-only the soft, gentle look of love.
"Kiss me, my love," he whispered again. "Don't leave me. Don't ever leave me."
Her lips were soft, gentle, slightly pouted-quite different from Allison's wide, sensuous mouth. Adèle kissed as a child kissed, but with the added dimension of womanhood. She kept her lips sealed to his. He parted his lips and licked at hers. So warm and so sweet. He prodded his tongue through the seam to the softer, moister flesh within. She moaned.
He was too tired to become fully aroused. Which was just as well, some sane but distant part of his mind thought. He was kissing someone else's wife. He was kissing someone who was not Allison. But she was his wife. She was his love. The only, eternal love of his heart. He was not normally given to such poetic flights of fancy.
"Oh," she said when he drew back his head a few inches. "Oh, John." Her eyes looked rather dazed.
He did not feel ill, he thought. Just very weak and very tired. He needed food and air and exercise. Lots of all three. He was not going to die. People of the 1990s did not die of tuberculosis-not in First World countries, anyway. He had been vaccinated against it as a child, just like everyone else in his class, when a schoolfriend had developed the disease. But he was not in the twentieth century at the moment. Somehow he had been transported back into the early nineteenth. Something told him, though, that he had brought part of his old self with him, as well as his mind. He had brought his resistance to the disease that had been killing John Chandler, Viscount Cordell. He knew the name of the man in whose body and mind he found himself.
"I need food and air and exercise," he told Adèle. "What is for dinner? Do you know?"
"John?" she said. "Are you sure? You know how- how upset you become when you cannot do what you try to do. Perhaps if you rest for a few weeks your strength will come back. I am going to see that it does."
Yes, it had been a trial to him, his weakness. He had never resigned himself to his fate. He had always been a man of high energy, someone who wanted to accomplish a great deal in this world, someone who could never sit still and let the world go by him. He had raged against his illness. It seemed hard to believe now that he had been such a high-powered man. Why waste life on busy living? Allison would approve of him as he had been, he thought, and felt the dizziness again for a moment.
"And when my strength does come back," he said, "we will live here forever, Adèle, and never return to the hurry of modern life. We will raise our children here where it is quiet and beautiful, where we can be close to nature and to God."
She hid her face against him. He knew she was crying. His words must seem cruel to her. "Forever" to Adèle was probably only a few weeks, at the most. She knew there would never be children.
But he thought of something suddenly as he held her close to him. He remembered now. There had been an eccentric Viscount Cordell of the Regency era who had come to Cartref with his bride for their wedding trip and had never returned to England. They had lived here until a ripe old age, the two of them, with their children. He could not remember the exact date of their deaths and he could not remember how many children they had had. But he could remember one other thing clearly-two things.
That viscount had been John. His wife had been Adèle.
John Chandler, Viscount Cordell, certainly had not died of consumption within weeks or even months of his wedding.
It seemed to her that she had loved him all her life. When he had lifted her down from that stile, he had lifted her into his life. He had always included her, guarded her, listened to her, and talked to her after that, though a mere four-year-old girl had seemed nothing but a nuisance to her brothers and sisters and to his and to the other children with whom they had played. He had seemed so grown-up, so tall, so handsome, so-oh, so wonderful to her infant's eyes. And he had remained so ever since.
She had loved him with a woman's love for years and years. She had resisted all of her parents' attempts to find a suitable husband for their youngest child. If she could not have John, she would have no one. She had decided that when she was sixteen, perhaps earlier. If he had not cared for her, perhaps she would have forced herself to turn her eyes, if not her heart, elsewhere. But she had always known that he loved her. There was a special gentleness, a special tenderness in his treatment of her.
Not that he would have married her. She was a dreamer with a streak of realism. He was an older son, heir to a viscount's title and fortune. More important than that, she knew that he did not love her as she loved him. He loved her, but she was not that one love of a lifetime, of an eternity, as he was to her. He loved her, perhaps, as he would a beloved sister. Maybe a little more than that. He had kissed her on her seventeenth birthday…
And then he had become ill. No one, at first, had been willing to admit what it was that was striking him down, robbing him of flesh and color and vitality. But she had known from the start. She had watched her handsome, strong, vital, beloved John begin to die. And something in her had started to die too.