“I was going to marry Henry Arnold,” she said. “But we were both very young-too young to marry-and my father was having financial difficulties and I offered to take employment as a governess for a couple of years. I went to Cornwall and thought for a while that my heart would break-I had known Henry all my life and missed him more than I missed any of my family. We were not officially betrothed, but everyone knew we had an understanding. Everyone was happy about it-both his family and mine.”

And he had abandoned her. Sydnam waited for the most painful part of her story.

“And then,” she said, “soon after I had made a visit home and we had celebrated Henry’s twentieth birthday, I was forced to write home to tell…what had happened to me. I wrote to Henry too.”

And the blackguard had rejected her.

“My mother wrote back,” she said. “She told me that they forgave me and that I could come home afterward if I wished-I assumed she meant after the baby was born-but that perhaps it would be better if I did not.”

Sydnam closed his eye, and his hand played with her hair. How could any mother not have rushed to her side at such a time? How could any father not have rushed to call to account the rogue who had ruined her?

“Henry did not write,” she said.

No, he would not have done.

“And then, just three weeks after her first letter,” she said, “my mother wrote again to announce that Sarah, my younger sister, had just been married-to Henry Arnold. One month after my letter must have arrived. Just time for the banns to be called. She added again that perhaps it would be best if I did not come home-and I assumed she meant ever.”

Sydnam’s hand lay still in her hair.

“I did not know how many more blows I could take,” she said, her voice more high-pitched. “First, Albert. And then the discovery that I was with child. Then my dismissal by the Marchioness of Hallmere-Albert’s mother. And then rejection by my own mother and father. And finally the betrayal. You cannot know how dreadful that was, Sydnam. I had loved Henry with all my young heart. And Sarah was my beloved sister. We had confided all our youthful hopes and dreams in each other. She knew how I felt about him.”

She buried her face against his shoulder. He turned his face to kiss the top of her head and realized that she was weeping. He held her close, as she had held him just two days ago. He did not attempt to speak to her. What was there to say?

She was still at last and quiet.

“Do you wonder,” she asked him, “that I have never gone home?”

“No,” he said.

“My mother writes at Christmas and my birthday,” she told him. “She never says a great deal of any significance, and she has never once mentioned David, though whenever I write back I tell her all about him.”

“But she does write,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I tell you what I would do,” he said, kissing the top of her head again, “if Albert Moore were still alive. I would find him, and I would take him limb from limb even with my one hand.”

She half choked on a laugh.

“Would you?” she said. “Would you really? I would almost pity him. Almost.”

They fell silent for a few moments.

“What I have never been able to contemplate with any calmness,” she said, “is the fact that David is his son. He even looks like him. I try so very hard not to see that. I did not even know I was about to admit it aloud now until the words came out of my mouth. He looks like him.”

“But David is not Albert,” Sydnam said. “I am not my father, Anne, and you are not your mother. We are separate persons even if heredity does cause some physical resemblance at times. David is David. He is not even you.”

She sighed.

“How did Albert Moore die?” he asked. “Apart from the fact that he drowned, I mean?”

“Oh.” He could hear that the breath she drew was ragged. “I was already with child and living in the village. Lady Chastity Moore came one evening and told me that Albert and Joshua were out in a fishing boat. Joshua was apparently confronting him over what had happened. But Lady Chastity, Albert’s sister, was going down to the harbor to await their return. She had discovered the truth-from Prudence, I suppose. She had a gun. I went with her.”

“He was shot?” Sydnam asked.

“No,” she said. “When the boat came back, Joshua was rowing it and Albert was swimming alongside. Apparently he had jumped out when Joshua threatened him. Joshua turned without seeing us and rowed away as soon as he saw that Albert could wade safely to shore, but Lady Chastity raised the gun and would not let Albert come to land until he had promised to confess to his father and to leave home forever. He laughed at her and swam away. It was a rather stormy night. He never did come back. His body was discovered later.”

“Ah,” Sydnam said.

Sometimes, it seemed, justice was done.

They lay there in silence for a while.

“I will take Henry Arnold limb from limb if you wish,” he said at last. “Do you?”

“Oh, no.” She laughed softly and touched his face-the damaged side-with one hand. “No, Sydnam. I stopped hating him a long time ago.”

“And did you also stop loving him?” he asked softly.

She drew back her head and looked at him. She was flushed and red-eyed and lovely.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes, I did. And I am glad now that he did not have the courage to stand by me. If he had, there would not be you.”

“And that would be bad?” he asked.

“Yes.” She stroked her fingers lightly over his cheek. “Yes, it would.”

And she turned farther onto her side in order to kiss him on the lips. He felt himself stir into an unwelcome arousal.

“It is hard to understand,” she said, “how if all the bad things had not happened in both our lives, we would not have met. We would not be here now. But it is true, is it not?”

“It is true,” he said.

“Has it been worth it?” she asked. “Going through all we have been through in order that we may be together now like this?”

He could no longer imagine his life without Anne in it.

“It has been worth it,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, “it has.”

She gazed steadily at him.

“Make love to me,” she said.

He gazed back at her, and she licked her lips.

“It is bright and sunny here,” she said. “It feels…clean here. I want to feel clean again. I don’t believe I have felt quite clean in ten years. How foolish a thing is that? I feel so…soiled.”

“Shh, Anne.” He turned onto his side and set his mouth to hers. “Don’t upset yourself again.”

“Make love to me,” she said. “Make me clean again. Please make me clean.”

“Anne,” he said. “Ah, my dearest.”

“But perhaps,” she said, “you do not want to. I have not been-”

He kissed her into silence.

She had not even known that about herself-that she felt unclean. The hurt, the ugliness, the injustice, the pain had all been pushed ruthlessly inside her, beneath the necessity of living on, of maintaining dignity and integrity, of earning a living, of raising a son.

She had never talked it all out before now. She had never even allowed herself to think it all through. She had denied her own suffering. She had never wept-until now, today.

But the weeping had eased the pain, had enabled her to put it all in the past-Albert Moore, Henry Arnold, Sarah, her parents. All of it.

And now what was left was the Anne who had survived it all and found solace with another lonely soul, whose life had been as turned inside out as hers had been by circumstances beyond his control. He was here with her now-Sydnam Butler, her husband, her lover.

They were here in this lovely place, just the two of them, surrounded by natural beauty and solitude.

All was perfect-except this feeling of being unclean, spoiled.

Yet cleanliness, peace, joy were surely within her reach at last. They were contained in the power, the energy of love. She had reached out to Sydnam with a love that went far beyond the merely romantic, and now she knew that she could also receive love, that at last-oh, surely-she was worthy of being loved.

Even if he could not give her the sort of love that any woman dreamed of having from her mate…

It did not matter.

He was Sydnam, and he could…

“Make me clean,” she murmured again against his mouth.

He remained on his side facing her as he raised her skirts and unbuttoned his breeches and stroked her stomach and her hip and her inner thighs with his lovely warm, long-fingered left hand. She gazed into his face, so beautiful despite the burns and scars-no, beautiful because of them, because of the person they had made him into. Behind his head and all about them the sky was blue and sunfilled.

He touched the moist heat between her thighs.

“You are ready, Anne?” he asked her.

“Yes.”

He lifted her leg over his hip, adjusted his position, and pressed slowly into her. He kept his head back the whole time and held her gaze with his own.

It was exquisite. And it was Sydnam who was inside her. She closed her muscles about him, holding him deep, and smiled.

“Yes,” she murmured.

Perhaps, she thought over the next few minutes, he would not have chosen her as the companion of his life if he had been given a free choice, but he was nevertheless a man filled with love, with tenderness, with compassion. He loved her slowly, deeply, rhythmically, very deliberately, his eye on hers. She bit her lower lip as swirls of pleasure and of wonder radiated up through her womb to fill her whole being with warmth and light until finally there was no room left for ugliness or hatred or bitterness.

Only love.