a chapter because he looked up and saw me and shot to his feet, sending the book flying. By the time we had rescued it from under a chair and found three scattered bookmarks and flattened the bumped corners we were firm friends.’
‘And he was at Cambridge? A don?’
‘Yes. Classical languages and philology. I knew enough Latin and a little Greek to understand what he was talking about and I speak several Indic languages, which interested him. And he listened to me and he would argue things out with me. It was so refreshing. Before long we were firm friends and then, gradually, more. He had come to London to keep his mother from fretting at him about finding a wife and settling down, but he wasn’t enjoying the Season much either.’
‘Was he good looking?’
Was that a slight overtone of masculine rivalry there? Sara smiled and closed her eyes, strangely comfortable with this intimate confession as she half-lay against Lucian’s broad chest. ‘No. He was not ugly, you understand, or even plain. He was almost as tall as you, but of a more slender build. His hair was mousy and his eyes grey and his nose not particularly distinguished, but his chin was firm. His face was a little too long for good looks and his ears stuck out, just a little, but perhaps that was because he was always jamming pens behind them. It was a kind face and an intelligent face and... Michael’s face.’ She found that tears were running down her cheeks. Tears of recollection and regret, but not desperate tears. She let them flow, strangely comforted by them.
‘And one day,’ she said, clearing her throat because it was a little husky, ‘we were in Hatchard’s bookshop. We both stretched up for the same book and bumped elbows and the next thing I knew I was in his arms and he was kissing me in the corner of the Greek and Latin translation section. Fortunately, it is not a popular area.’
Lucian’s grunt of amusement made her smile, too, and suddenly Sara realised that she was smiling over a memory of Michael for the first time since his death. Smiling out of amusement and affection, not the sad smile of memories and regret.
How strange that it was this man, her lover, who had given her that humour back.
‘So what happened next?’ Lucian prompted when she had fallen silent for several minutes.
‘Michael dropped three different translations of Homer that he was carrying and the shop assistant came and he had to end up buying two of them because the corners were bent.’
‘Not with the books, with your romance,’ Lucian said in her ear. ‘Women! Never can tell a story.’
Laughing—how did that happen when she was crying, too?—she nudged him in the ribs with her elbow. ‘So Michael took himself off to see Papa, all very proper and formal, and Papa was really very good about it. I don’t think he had ever come across someone like Michael because he had not gone to university himself, but straight into the East India Company army, so intellectuals were a strange breed to him.’
‘And I should imagine he was a terrifying prospect for a quiet scholar.’ Lucian shifted a little and managed to link his arms around her.
‘Oh, no. Michael could stand up for himself. He was quiet, certainly, but exceedingly intelligent, so he could play Papa like a fisherman with a trout, long before Papa realised he was being manipulated. And he had courage. He loved me and he wanted me, so he was going to stand up and ask for me. He was not a poor man. Not rich, but he could keep us in very respectable comfort. And Papa, bless him, did listen and talk to both of us and then it was agreed. Before the Season was over I had married and moved to Cambridge and I was learning an entirely new culture.’
‘You liked life in a university town?’
‘Yes. I made a lot of friends amongst intellectual women—bluestockings, I suppose you would say—and I began to learn Greek in earnest and I taught Michael the languages I knew and we were friends as well as lovers. We were so happy.’ I was safe.
‘Are you weeping?’ Lucian murmured, close to her ear.
‘Just a little, and smiling, too,’ she admitted and he kissed her in the soft hollow behind her ear. ‘I could not cry much, before. I was too angry.’
‘With his friend, the one he challenged?’
‘No, with Michael. I have to learn to forgive him for wanting to protect me that way.’ And with myself. If I had been a better wife this would never have happened.
‘Perhaps the need to protect our womenfolk is as deep in a man as the need to protect a child is in a woman,’ Lucian suggested. ‘I had never thought of it like that before, but it does not seem to me to be something one learns, or has impressed upon you. For me, certainly, it feels like instinct.’
‘Perhaps,’ she agreed, reluctantly impressed by the comparison. ‘But the man should talk it over with the woman first. I don’t mean if there is a physical attack, it would be foolish to stand about debating when someone is brandishing a cudgel. But if it is a case of an insult, then definitely.’
‘You would let an insult pass?’
‘There are more ways of getting even than getting up before dawn and shivering in a damp field with the chance of getting killed at the end of it. A woman would apply her mind to finding a poetic form of revenge. Itching powder in a rake’s silk breeches at a Court presentation, a mouse in a spiteful gossip’s reticule...’
‘Itching powder? Remind me never to upset you.’
His breath was warm on the side of her throat. Was he going to kiss her there? She arched her neck in invitation and was rewarded by the pressure of his lips, the slight friction of stubble. Lucian was going to have to shave before dinner.
All too quickly the caress stopped. ‘What do you miss most about being married?’ he asked.
Sara thought about it for a while and he did not press her, simply held her while she lay back in his arms, watching the wildlife around the pond come out, reassured by their stillness. A dabchick bobbed across the surface, fish rose and dived, the dragonflies buzzed.
Strange that her lover should be so interested in her marriage. Most men would have wanted to ignore the subject, pretend her husband had not existed. Some would have jealously probed for a flattering comparison—was he more handsome, taller, better endowed, a better lover? But Lucian’s questions did not seem like that, more as though he was genuinely interested in her past, wanted to understand and sympathise with her loss.
‘Miss?’ she said at last. ‘I miss him, of course, as a person, because he was my friend. And I miss the companionship of marriage and being able to say what I was thinking without having to censor it in any way. I miss discussing things. I miss...missed, the lovemaking. I miss the intellectual stimulation of trying to keep up with him mentally and the community of friends we had.’
‘You were not tempted to stay there, in Cambridge?’
‘No. That would have felt like second best, somehow. Michael was why I was there and without him... No, I wanted to do something different, something for myself.’ Somewhere new to run away to while you tried to find the real you, the niggling little voice of her conscience murmured.
‘Someone is coming.’ Lucian had heard the voices raised in laughter before she had. He pushed her gently upright so she could slide along the seat and let him get both feet on the ground. ‘Heading this way, by the sound of it. Shall we make a bolt for it or be found earnestly studying
