It was more than a mile to the keeper’s cottage and Amy walked slowly, shifting the heavy basket from arm to arm and enjoying the stillness. At last she saw ahead of her the dense black line where the woodland encroached on the park and a tiny square of yellow light standing out against it.
For the last hundred yards she walked even more slowly, listening to the faint squeaks her flat shoes made in the wet grass, and the distant burr of a car on the lane beyond the woods.
The cottage window was uncurtained, and she stopped on the doorstep with her hand raised to knock. Nick was sitting at the wooden table, reading by the yellow glow of a paraffin lamp. Amy had just time enough to see the sadness in his intent face before he sensed her eyes on him. His head jerked up just as she rapped on the door.
‘Come in.’ Nick’s Welsh voice, firm and unstartled.
Amy pushed the low door open and stepped inside. A moth fluttered around her head and was drawn at once to the glass mantle of the lamp.
Amy stood on the stone-flagged floor and looked at the bare lime-washed walls, and unlit black range and the tiny steep staircase that corkscrewed up to the single room overhead.
How lonely it must be here.
How long had Nick lived in this little house, a mile from anyone, more than a hundred miles from Nantlas? A year. Over a year. I’ve never thought, Amy reproached herself.
Nick was looking steadily at her, one eyebrow raised a fraction. ‘This is an honour,’ he said. ‘So far, so late at night.’ Amy wasn’t certain, but she thought she saw the flicker of a smile. ‘And alone? Or did you get one of the grooms to bring you over?’
Amy put her basket on the table. The room was so small she only had to stretch her arm out to it from the doorway.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Don’t let’s begin like this again. Can’t you see me just as a person? Just as Amy, and nothing to do with Chance or any of the rest of it?’
There was a small moment of silence. ‘I’ll try,’ Nick said, and now his mouth did twist up into a smile. ‘What’s in the basket?’
‘A peace offering. Can we call a truce?’
He laughed now. ‘If you like.’
Amy lifted the books out one by one. ‘My great-grandfather’s journals. The history of your orchids.’
He reached out and took them, laying them on the table under the lamplight just as Amy had done the night before. He began to turn the pages, glancing at them and then leaning forward with his head bent, absorbed. Amy stood quietly in the doorway watching him, and then she saw that he had forgotten her. She looked around the room. The beams were so low that Nick must have to stoop under them. The only furniture was the table and chair, and a black oak settle at right angles to the range. On the table beside an empty plate was a pile of books, and a scatter of papers, letters and pamphlets. Amongst them Amy recognized the familiar style of pronouncements from Appleyard Street. Clearly Nick was still politically active, for all his isolation at Chance.
Amy crossed the room behind his chair and sat down on the settle, drawing her knees up beneath her chin to make herself comfortable on the narrow seat.
Nick was smiling as he read.
‘Here it is,’ he said. ‘The one you were asking about.’ He hadn’t forgotten her, then. ‘The Brazilian orchid. “A fine specimen. Placed it in the peat bag with the greatest of care and entrusted it to the boy to carry back to the camp. There being an hour before dusk, I went on up the ravine, but found nothing of note. May 17, 1855.”’ He touched the two unopened books as if gauging the mass of information that they contained. ‘Thank you for bringing them,’ he said simply. ‘I shall enjoy reading it all.’ This time he was smiling at her, and the warmth dissolved the harsh lines in his face.
Amy was conscious of the yellowness of the lamplight and the shadows on the bare walls, the park stretching silent and moist beyond them, a moment of waiting, as if for something inevitable. She looked around her again, at the tiny room with the fluttering moths and Nick at his table, his hands resting on the old journals.
‘Who did you say he was?’ Nick asked, and she jumped.
‘Who? Oh, my father’s grandfather.’
‘I like the sound of your father’s grandfather. He must have been quite an adventurer. What happened to him in the end?’
‘He died safely in his bed here at Chance, as far as I know. At least, he’s buried in the church along with everyone else. Except for my brother Airlie, who died on the Somme.’
‘Mine too,’ Nick said. ‘I thought I’d be a pacifist after that. I’m not so sure, now.’ There was another moment of silence. One of the moths drawn to the lamp found the top of the mantle, settled for an instant and then plunged. There was the faintest sizzle as the papery wings burned.
Amy thought of Airlie, and of Nick’s brother, and then of her own time vanishing as irrevocably as the moth’s. She was possessed by a sense of loss and transience, and by the certainty that if she didn’t reach out and hold it something vital would be gone too.
Then she looked up and saw Nick watching her, and she thought that she knew his face better than anything else in the world.
‘Why did you come?’ he asked softly.
‘To bring you the journals. As a peace offering.’
Nick stood up and came over to the settle. ‘Why did you really come?’
He was forcing her to answer, uncompromising, but Amy saw the flicker in his face that betrayed him. So Nick was vulnerable, and needy, too. Suddenly, the precious something she had been afraid to lose was there, within her grasp. The closeness and importance of it made her heart knock in her chest.
‘I came because I wanted to see you.’ She shouldn’t look away, covering herself. Amy met his eyes. ‘I’m afraid of you, but I want to be with you.’
That was the truth. She didn’t understand yet, but she was certain that she wanted to be with him.
Nick stooped, and then knelt in front of the settle. He was very close. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said. He took one of Amy’s hands, lying clenched in her lap, and held it. And then: ‘I’m afraid, too.’
Amy understood that he had stopped fencing with her. He was no longer taunting her with the distance that separated them, and he was admitting the question that had hovered between them since the night at Bruton Street.
Amy’s heart was hammering so that she was sure he must hear it. The breath caught in her chest and her mouth opened to draw in the air. She saw Nick’s high cheekbones and wry mouth, and the chameleon eyes suddenly clear under the black brows, and she knew that she was seeing Nick himself, unguarded.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ she whispered.
Very slowly, he bent his head. His mouth brushed against hers as lightly as the moth’s wings.
‘Amy. My friends call me Amy,’ he murmured, and impatiently she turned her head a fraction so that their mouths met again. His hands came up to cup her face, tilting it to his, and then he kissed her.
Amy closed her eyes, and against the velvet blackness she saw the yellow halo of the paraffin lamp, bright and dim, image upon image, receding into the dark. Stillness folded around them, their own stillness, inviolable.
Nick.
His mouth opened against hers, wider, bruising her lips with its insistence. She tasted the quick movement of his tongue and answered it with her own.
Nick’s hand moved, down to the buttons of her thin jacket and then to the loose bodice of her dinner dress. His fingers found the fastening and opened it, and then his