Elizabeth clucked her tongue and laughed. "How provokingly clever of Lily and Miranda," she said. "They are doing what all of us have been secretly longing to do and are enjoying the sunshine and the sea air—and even the sea."

But her attempt to smooth over the awkwardness of the situation did not quite succeed. The whole party had come into view, Aunt Theodora had turned very red, and Miranda had burst into tears. Aunt Mary was assuring everyone in agitated accents that she dared say her sons were entirely to blame. They were such high-spirited lads. Hal was reminding her indignantly that at the age of one-and-twenty he no longer appreciated being referred to as a lad.

Lily quietly pulled on her stockings and shoes and tied the ribbons of her new bonnet beneath her chin and turned to descend carefully back to the beach. Wilma was loudly complaining about something and Gwendoline was telling her not to be tiresome. The marquess was asking in a deliberately languid voice if anyone had heard about storms in teacups and Pauline choked on a laugh. A pair of strong arms lifted Lily down when she was still carefully picking her footholds.

He turned her and smiled at her, his hands still at her waist. "I had such a vivid memory, seeing you up there," he said, "of watching you sitting on an outcropping of rock, looking about at the hills of Portugal." But his smile faded even before he had finished speaking. "I am sorry. It was just before your father died."

And just hours before their wedding. How he must regret that any of it had ever happened. How she regretted it.

Everyone had begun walking back toward the valley and the path up to the house amid a general atmosphere of discontent and awkwardness. Lily and Neville fell into step a short distance behind.

"I am sorry," she said.

"No," he told her firmly. "No, you must not be, Lily. You must not always be sorry. You must live your life your way."

"But I got Miranda into trouble," she said. "I did not think."

"I will have a word with Aunt Theodora," he told her, chuckling. "It was no very great mischief, you know."

"No," she said, "I will have a word with her. You must not always be protecting me. I am not a child."

"Lily," he said softly. "This is not working well, is it? Let us take a little time for ourselves, shall we? Let me show you the cottage."

"The one in the valley?" she asked him.

He nodded. "My private retreat. My haven of peace and tranquility. I'll take you there."

***

He took her hand in his and laced his fingers with hers. He did not care that someone ahead of them might look back. They were married, after all.

"The cottage is your own, then?" she asked him. "It is very pretty."

"My grandmother was a painter," he explained. "She liked to be on her own, painting. My grandfather had the cottage built for her on surely the loveliest spot of the whole estate. It is furnished, and it is cleaned and aired once a month. It is there for all of us to use and enjoy, though I believe it has come to be considered my own special place. I like to be alone and quiet too at times."

She smiled at him. Obviously such antisocial needs were quite understandable to her.

"It was the one thing I found hard about military life," he said. "The lack of privacy. You must have felt it too, Lily. And yet there was something about you… I used to notice, you know, that you often went off on your own, though never beyond your father's sight. You used to sit or stand alone, doing nothing except gazing about you. I always used to imagine that you had discovered a world that was closed to me and to almost everyone else. Had you?"

"There are some places," she said, "that seem more specially graced than others. Places where one feels… God, I suppose. I have never been able to feel the presence of God inside a church. Rather, I feel closed in there, op-pressed, as I do in many buildings. But there are places of unusual beauty and peace and… holiness. They are rare, though. I did not have a valley like yours when I was growing up, or a waterfall or pool or cottage. And I did not find many of those places with the regiment, though there were some. I learned to—to…"

"To what?" He bent his head closer to hers. He had often talked with Lily in the past, sometimes for an hour or more at a time. They had always been comfortable with each other despite the differences in their gender and stations. He had felt that he knew her well. But he had never asked her about her private world, only observed it. There were depths to her character that were still unknown to him. There was great beauty there, he suspected, and wisdom too despite her youth and lack of formal education. There was nothing shallow about his Lily.

"I do not know how to say it," she said. "I learned to be still and to stop doing and listening and even thinking. I learned to be. I learned that almost any place can be one of those special places if I allowed it to be. Perhaps I learned to find the place within myself."

He gazed down at her—pretty, dainty Lily in her new primrose dress and pelisse and straw bonnet. The serenity he had always observed in her had an explanation, then. She had discovered in her short, difficult life what not many people discovered in a whole lifetime, he suspected. He had not progressed as far himself though he knew the value of solitude and silence. He wondered if Lily's ability to find a place within, simply to be, as she had put it, had helped her endure her ordeal in Spain. But he would not ask her about that. He could not even bear to think about it.

They had reached the valley and walked up the path toward the cottage and the pool at the base of the waterfall. Everyone else had already disappeared up the hill and in among the trees. They stopped by unspoken assent when they were a short distance away and feasted their eyes on the beauty of the scene and their ears on the soothing sound of rushing water.

"Ah, yes," she said at last with a sigh, "this is one of those places. I can understand why you come here."

He had noticed that she had not called him by any name since her return even though he had reminded her that she was his wife and might use his given name. He longed to hear it on her lips again. He could remember how it had sounded like the most intimate endearment on their wedding night. But he could not, would not press the point with her. He must give her time.

"Come and see the cottage," he said. It occurred to him suddenly with some surprise that he had never come here with Lauren, or not at least since they were children.

There were just two rooms, both cozily furnished and both possessing fireplaces with logs piled beside them in readiness for a chilly day—or night. He occasionally spent a night here. He had done it sometimes during the past year or so, when he had been remembering his life with the Ninety-fifth and his years in the Peninsula and had been restless with a nameless yearning.

No, not nameless. He had yearned here for Lily, whom he had grown gradually to love during the years he had known her, though that love had bloomed into sexual passion only a short time before its final glorious flowering the night before he believed she'd died.

He had tried not to think of Lily at Newbury. There he had tried to think only of his new life, the life of duty for which he had been raised and educated, the life that included Lauren. He had come to the cottage to do his remembering and his leftover mourning.

It was still strange to realize that Lily had not died. That she was here. Now.

She peered into the bedchamber, but it was the other room that appeared to fascinate her more. There were chairs, a table, books, paper, quill pens and ink—and a view directly over the pool and the waterfall. He liked to sit here, reading or writing. He also liked to sit and merely gaze. Perhaps it was what she called being.

"You read here," she said, picking up one of the books after taking off her bonnet and setting it down on one of the chairs. "You learn about other worlds and other minds. And you can go back and read them again and again."

"Yes," he said.

"And sometimes you write down your own thoughts," she said, running a finger along one of the quill pens. "And you can come back and read them and remember what you thought or how you felt about something."

"Yes." She sounded wistful, he noticed.

"It must be the most wonderful feeling in the whole world," she said, "to be able to read and write."

He took so much for granted, he realized. He had never really considered how privileged he was to have been educated. "Perhaps," he suggested, "you could learn, Lily."

"Perhaps," she agreed. "Though probably I am too old. I daresay I would not be an apt pupil. Papa always said learning to read was the most difficult thing he had ever done in his life. He never did find it easy." She set the book down and went to stand at the window, looking out.

He had not meant to ask her the question whose answer he dreaded to hear—certainly not yet. He did not feel strong enough to know. But somehow the time and the place seemed right and somehow the words just came spilling out.

"Lily," he asked her, "what did you suffer?"

He went to stand beside her, facing her profile. He touched the backs of his fingers to her cheek. She looked so delicate, yet he knew her to be as tough in her own way as even the most hardened of veterans. But how badly had her toughness been tested? "Are you able to talk about it?"

She turned her head and her huge blue eyes gazed back into his. Curiously, they looked both wounded and calm. Whatever she had suffered had hurt her, perhaps permanently, but it had not broken her. Or so her eyes seemed to say.