Listening, Gabriel found himself caught up in her enthusiasm. For most of his life he hadn’t given much thought to the Hall, but now he was interested, curious. What, he now wondered, would he do there once they got there? He would familiarize himself with the house, of course, and the stables. He’d never met the bailiff, Eccles; and so he would get to know him at last, and the tenant farmers. Maybe he’d take up horse-breeding . . .
Livia yawned behind her hand, and he saw that Miss Cott’s head was drooping with fatigue. “Forgive me,” Livia said, “we’ve been running up and down the stairs all day.”
“It has been busy,” acknowledged Grandmama graciously. “Do go to bed. You as well, Evangeline. Ring for Bettina, please, as you go. Gabriel, you’ll wait with me until she comes?”
“Of course. I’ll see myself out after.”
“You’ll have to,” Livia said, yawning again. “There are practically no servants left, and I suspect they’re all in bed except for Granny’s Bettina. Until tomorrow morning, then. Good night.” She smiled sleepily at him, and followed Miss Cott out of the room.
Gabriel spent a convivial fifteen minutes making plans with Grandmama about house parties, balls, and, of course, once they were all established and a few alterations to the house made— “New wallpaper in the chief bedchambers, I daresay, and perhaps some rugs,” said the old lady comfortably—a magnificent wedding in the chapel where his parents had been married, where Grandmama had married her Richard, and where had many previous Penhallow couples also said their vows.
“Much better than a hurried event here in Bath, and really, now that I come to think on it, how superior to my original idea of a wedding in London. You shall be married at home.”
“Fine,” Gabriel answered equably, captivated by a sudden a vision of Livia, dressed for her wedding day, walking toward him as he waited for her by the chancel, waiting for the moment when he might kiss his bride. Here his fantasy became rather vague as he didn’t really remember the chapel at all. In truth, he remembered almost nothing about the Hall. He could dimly recollect his bedchamber, a room which sometimes unnerved him by its sheer size, a bed which seemed to his small self to be ten feet high, and a nursery, also a gargantuan room, but sunny and filled with interesting things. Toys and books; a globe that spun, a microscope. There were servants, so many and rather anonymous. But there was someone he addressed as “Nanny”: searching his memory brought fragmented images of a white apron, a big round face and kind eyes. She used to give him baked apple pudding so delicious that even now he felt saliva gathering in his mouth at the thought.
Grandmama’s dresser Bettina hurried into the room, and Gabriel said his farewells. He stepped into the long, dark hallway and softly closed the door. He passed by a series of closed doors—wondering all over again at the sheer size of the place; how many bedchambers had his grandmother thought she needed?—and came to the juncture where the stairs began.
Ahead of him, further down the hallway, a door opened and Livia emerged, still in her white gown, but he could see that she was barefoot. Something about that simple fact seemed all at once to immobilize him and he stood there staring at her, just as she had stopped, eyes wide, lips parted.
Gabriel thought, suddenly, of Artemis, goddess of the wilderness and of the hunt, and lines from the ancient Greek poet Hesiod floated through his mind as if in a dream:
Leto bore Apollon and Artemis, delighting in arrows,
Both of lovely shape like none of the heavenly gods,
As she joined in love to the Aegis-bearing ruler.
Orion, her hunting companion, was said to have captured the resistant heart of Artemis, and while Gabriel entertained no fancies of himself as one of the Greek gods, there was something about the phrase joined in love—both coyly evocative and bluntly carnal—which caught at him so hard that he found himself walking, walking to Livia where she stood in the dimness of the hallway. She looked as if she, like Artemis, might flee at any moment, leaving him far behind. Very gently, then, he said:
“Are you all right?”
“I didn’t know you were still here,” she answered, a little disjointedly. “It’s only that—I thought I could reach all the buttons on my gown, but I can’t. I didn’t want to wait for Bettina, or wake up one of the other maids, so—so I thought I’d go to Miss Cott.”
Oh God, he wanted her, and badly too. It felt as if his entire body was filled with light and lust, with hunger and desire. But he schooled himself to say, still gently, “If you like, I could help you with that.”