But she did not play. She lowered the gleaming lid over the keys, pillowed her head on her arms, and cried and cried until she was sore from the crying. They were the first tears she had shed since his leaving.
She could see him in the early mornings opening the connecting door between the library and the music room, standing there deliberately until she saw him so that she would not think that he intended to eavesdrop without her knowledge. She could hear herself playing, lost in the music, but feeling him there in the next room, silently listening.
For so long she had thought that she hated him, that she feared him and was repulsed by him. And she had been afraid—oh, mortally afraid—of the strange, unexpected attraction she had felt to him.
He had sent her this one precious gift, knowing how much music meant to her. But he would never hear her play it. She would never be able to play it for him.
All her tears were spent by the time, later the same evening, she discovered a flow of blood, which told her that she would not bear his child either. She was more than a week late.
It had been foolish, foolish, of course, to have hoped that it was true. She should have been panicking for that week. It would have been disastrous if it had been true.
But the heart cannot always be directed by the head, she was discovering. She felt as bleak and as empty, lying on her bed after she had cleansed herself and put the padding in place, as she had the day he left.
She would not have cared, she told herself. She would not have cared about all the awkwardness and scandal. A great deal of hope could build in eight days. She had begun to believe in her hope.
“Adam,” she whispered into the darkness. “Adam, there is too much silence. I can’t bear the silence. I can’t hear you.”
The words sounded ridiculous when she heard them. She turned onto her side and hid her face against the pillow.
SOON AFTER PETER HOUGHTON’S VISIT, Fleur asked Mollie, the maid from Heron House, if she would like to move to the cottage to keep house for her. Mollie was delighted at the chance to be housekeeper and cook as well as maid. But she hinted that Ted Jackson would be unhappy to have her so far away. Before a month had passed, Mr. and Mrs. Ted Jackson were both living at the cottage, and Fleur had a handyman and gardener as well as a housekeeper.
Once she was no longer alone in the house, the Reverend Booth sometimes visited her without his sister. He found her presence relaxing, he would say, watching her at her embroidery. And he liked to listen to her play the pianoforte.
Fleur enjoyed his visits and looked back with some nostalgia to the time when she had believed herself in love with him. If all those events had not happened, she often thought—if Cousin Caroline and Amelia had not left for London, if Matthew had not stopped her from leaving the house, if Hobson had not fallen and she had not fled, thinking she had killed him—how different life might be now. She would have moved to the rectory as planned and lived there with Miriam until Daniel had come with the special license.
They would have been married now for many months.
They would have sat every evening as they often sat now. Perhaps she would be with child.
And she would have been happy. For without the experiences of the previous months, perhaps she would never have seen the narrowness of Daniel’s vision. Perhaps she too would have continued to see morality in strict terms of black and white. And she would never have met Adam. She would never have known the passionate, all-consuming love she felt for him.
She would have been happy with the gentle love that Daniel had offered. Sometimes she wished she could erase the past months, go back to the way things had been. But one could never go back, she realized, or truly wish to do so, because once one’s experience was enlarged, one could no longer be satisfied with the narrower experience.
Besides, despite all the pain, despite all the despair, she would not wish to have lived her life without knowing Adam. Without loving him.
“You are happy here, Isabella?” the Reverend Booth asked her one evening.
“Yes.” She smiled. “I am very fortunate, Daniel. I have this home and the school and friends. And a wonderful feeling of safety and security after all the anxiety of that thing with Matthew.”
“You are well-respected and liked,” he said. “I thought that perhaps you would find it difficult to settle here after all you had gone through.”
She smiled at him and lowered her head to her work again.
“I sometimes wish we could go back to the way things were before that dreadful night,” he said, echoing her own thoughts. “But we can’t, can we? We can never go back.”
“No,” she said.
“I thought,” he said, “that it would be possible to love only someone I felt to be worthy of my love. I thought I could love other people in a Christian way and forgive them their shortcomings if they repented of them. But I could not picture myself loving or marrying someone who had made a serious error. I was wrong.”