She rose and turned around at last.
At first glance, her face gave the impression of great tranquillity and sweetness. Then one noticed the bleakness behind her eyes, as if she were a nun on the verge of losing her faith. When she spoke, however, all illusions of meek melancholy fled, for she had the most leave-me-alone voice he’d ever heard, not strident but stridently self-sufficient, and little concerned with anything that did not involve diseased flesh.
But she was silent this moment and reminded him of a churchyard stone angel that watched over the departed with a gentle, steady compassion.
“You believe Callista?” she asked, destroying the semblance.
“I shouldn’t?”
She shook droplets of water from the gloves. “Unless you were dying in the autumn of ’95.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“She claimed you were. She said you were somewhere in the wastes of America, dying, and desperately wanted to see me one last time.”
“I see,” he said. “Does she make a habit of it?”
“Are you engaged to be married?”
“No,” he said. Though he should be. He knew a number of beautiful, loving, unassuming young women, any one of whom would make him a warm, delightful spouse.
“According to her you are. And would gladly jilt the poor girl if I but give the command.” She did not look at him as she said this last, her eyes on the gloves, which she patted dry with a cloth. “I’m sorry that she dragged you into her schemes. And I’m much obliged to you for coming out this far—”
“But you’d rather I turned around and went back right away?”
Silence. “No, of course not. You’ll need to rest and re-provision.”
“And if I didn’t need to rest or re-provision?”
She did not answer, but bent down to stow the gloves and the drying cloth in her bag.
Weeks upon weeks of trekking across some of the most inhospitable terrains on Earth, sleeping on hard ground, eating what he could shoot and the occasional handful of wild berries, so he wouldn’t be weighed down by a train of coolies carrying the usual necessities deemed indispensable for a sahib’s travels—and this was her response.
One should never expect anything else from her.
“Even the boy who cried wolf was right about the wolf once,” he said. “Your father is sixty years old. Is it so unlikely for a man of his age to ail?”
He’d acceded to Callista’s pleas because in some archaic, chivalric way he still felt responsible for Bryony—for the failure of their marriage. Whether her father’s condition was truth or fiction mattered very little: In returning her to her family he’d discharge whatever residual obligation his inconvenient sense of duty insisted that he owed her. Then he’d be free to forget her and move on.
She tightened the straps of her bag and buckled it shut. “It would be four months to go from here to England and back, on the off-chance that Callista might be telling the truth.”
“And if she is, you will regret not having gone.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
Her ambivalence toward most of Creation had once fascinated him. He’d thought her complicated and extraordinary. But no, she was merely cold and un-feeling.
“Chitral is one march away,” he said. “We can reach it tomorrow. We’ll need a day or two there for provision and coolies. Then we can start for Peshawar.”
She looked back at him, her face an unyielding mask. “I did not say I’d come.”
It was 370 miles from Gilgit, where he’d been peacefully minding his own business, to Leh, that much again back to Gilgit, then 220 miles from Gilgit to Chitral. For most of the way he’d done two marches a day, sometimes three. He’d lost a full stone in weight. And he hadn’t been this tired since Greenland.
Fuck you.
“Suit yourself,” he said. “I’m leaving in the morning.”
“Let me see your face.”
“No,” she said.
A look of bittersweet longing came over him. He quickly looked away, but the damage—to her—was done.
She’d come to realize that the man in her heart had become less Stuart Somerset than an ideal man she’d invented and re-invented over the years. The real Stuart Somerset was a mystery to her and, more than once, a disappointment: he was nothing of the fearless lover she remembered, but a man very much ruled by—and in thrall to—the conventions of Society.
Sometimes she wondered whether she still gravitated toward him simply because she could not face the fact that her faithful love might have been a mistake—a beautiful mistake, but a mistake enormous and pervasive all the same.
But now, as she gazed upon him, her heart did something strange, a twist, a clench, a fracture—she didn’t know what precisely, but yes, the damage was done. She was falling in love with this man, this man who wouldn’t touch her, kiss her, or marry her.