Timeswept Brides

The Heirloom by Mary Balogh

“There it is," he said, easing his foot off the accelerator, partly because they were at the top of a steep slope and partly because he wanted to savor-and wanted her to savor-the sight below.

"Mm, wild," she said. "But lovely for a week's holiday away from the rat race." She stretched her arms above her head and her legs out ahead of her, and yawned.

He did not want to admit that the mildness of her reaction disappointed him. "The Cartref Hotel," he said, moving over to the far left of the road so that faster traffic could pass them. He pointed to the large whitewashed building at the foot of the hill. " 'Cartref means 'home' in Welsh, you know."

"Yes." She laughed. "You have told me so a million times, John-and that many moons ago it was one of your family homes. It is no more than a cottage in comparison with the others, though, is it? And it is so remote from civilization that I wonder anyone ever came near it. And they would have had to come by carriage, wouldn't they? It must have taken days. Ugh!"

"Everything was sold off or given over to the National Trust by the beginning of the century," he said. "This was the last to go-my grandfather sold it in 1920."

"Probably because everyone had forgotten all about it until then," she said, laughing again.

He pulled right over onto the shoulder of the road and stopped the car. It was not the safest place in which to do such a thing, even though he put on the hand brake, but it was something he wanted to do. Every time he had been here as a boy they had zoomed down the hill, glad to be at the end of their journey, eager to be at the hotel and relaxing in its old-fashioned but luxurious rooms.

To him it had always seemed the loveliest place on earth. He had never minded its remote location on the coast of Cardiganshire in West Wales. That had been its main charm, in fact. And there was an added seclusion to the particular location of the Cartref Hotel because it was located at the bottom of steep hills rising to either side of it. Across the road from it were grassy dunes, a wide golden beach, and the ocean. Behind it was a high fern-covered hill. The hotel itself, once a family home, was a small and elegant mansion.

It had always hurt him to know that it might have been his one day if he had lived in a previous age. It was something he did not feel for the other ancient homes and estates that had once been in the family. Just this one.

"Can you understand why I wanted to bring you here for this particular week?" he asked, reaching for Allison's hand and holding it tightly. "Is there a lovelier place on earth?"

"Oh." She laughed. "I am sure I could think of a dozen without even having to try too hard. But this is very picturesque and I know it is special to you. And I suppose there will be no chance to feel boredom. Not this week." She turned her head and leered at him, waggling her eyebrows.

He lifted his sunglasses and dipped his head to kiss her, despite the fact that one passing motorist leaned on his horn-with the hood down on the car, they were in full view, of course. No, this week there would be no boredom. This week, they had both agreed, would be spent largely in bed, with the occasional walk or drive for relaxation. This week was for themselves. He was to forget his law practice, knowing very well that all his outstanding cases were in quite capable hands for the coming week, and she was to forget her thriving boutique, which had been left in equally capable hands.

This was the week of their engagement.

He released the hand brake, flicked on his signal light, and pulled out onto the road before continuing on the way down the hill. At the bottom he made a sharp right turn onto the horseshoe driveway that led up a slight slope to the front of the hotel. There was parking off to either side, but he stopped in front of the doors. He would park later, after they had settled in.

It was over twelve years since he had been here last. He had come with his parents at the age of sixteen, despite their assurances that they would understand perfectly if he did not wish at his age to go on holiday with them. He probably would have remained at home or gone to stay with a school friend if they had been going anywhere else but Cardiganshire. But their destination had been irresistible to him.

"Mr. Chandler?" The owner of the hotel and his wife were both in the foyer to greet him and Allison, even though there was a receptionist behind the desk. Huw Jones held out his right hand and smiled broadly. "I would have recognized you anywhere, though you were just a pipsqueak the last time we saw you. Hasn't changed at all, has he, Blodwyn?"

His wife laughed. ' 'Only that he has got taller and darker and handsomer, Huw," she said. "How do you do, Mr. Chandler?"

They had long memories, these people from one of the more remote areas of Wales. Not only memories of his last visit with his parents, but the memory that his family had owned Cartref for two centuries.

"This is my fiancée, Allison Gorman," he said, setting an arm loosely about her shoulders. "Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Allie."

They were upstairs in their room ten minutes later, their suitcases and bags just inside the door. Huw Jones had gone himself to park the car. It was a front room at the center of the house, the one John had specifically asked for, the one he supposed had been the master bedroom in a former age.

Allison plopped down on the bed after kicking off her shoes. It had been a long drive. They had come all the way from London with only one meal stop. She sighed with contentment.

"Wake me for dinner," she said.

He strolled to the window to look out. It was a perfect view. The slope of the hills on either side of the valley was almost geometric. Whoever had built this house had taken great care with its exact placement. There were masses of flowers in beds between the horseshoe driveway and the road. The tide was half in, but there was still a fairly wide expanse of sandy beach. The late afternoon sun made a shimmering band of light across the water. There was an old lighthouse on a small island beyond one of the headlands. He remembered that one could walk out to it at low tide.

He hunched his shoulders. If he could just ignore the hotel sign and the traffic on the road…

There had always been a funny feeling about the Cartref Hotel. Perhaps it had something to do with the name- home. And yet it was not entirely a feeling of homecoming he felt here, though that was definitely a part of it. He had always had a feeling of-nostalgia. He was not quite sure that was the right word. He had it now, powerfully strong. He felt the ache of tears in his throat.

Maybe it was merely curiosity, the desire to look back in time to see it all as it had been. Though he never had that feeling when he visited any of the other former family properties. Mr. and Mrs. Jones must be close to retirement age. He had found himself wondering lately-it was what had made him bring Allison here, perhaps-if they would be interested in selling. It was a foolish idea when his life and Allison's were so much bound up with their careers in London.

Sometimes he wished… Oh, sometimes he hated modern living. He hated the global village idea. He hated computers and instant communication, though, as Allison had pointed out when he had said these things to her, he would probably scream to have it all back again, if deprived for only a day.

"Wouldn't you like to live here for the rest of your life?" he asked now without turning. "Forget about the rat race? Bring up children close to nature and the ocean, away from the ugly pull of civilization?"

"Telephones, television, modern transport," she said after yawning, "they are all here, John. You cannot escape them. And, no, I would not like to live in a country backwater, picturesque as it may be, thank you kindly. I am not the back-to-basics type. Don't get any ideas."

She spoke lightly. There was laughter in her voice. But he felt a twinge of something he had been ignoring ever since accepting her proposal a month before-yes, it really had been that way around. They had known each other for a month before that. And ignore it he must. He supposed it was natural to feel qualms about taking such an enormous step as marrying. To him it was an enormous step, even though his best friend had commented half seriously that, after all, marriage was not a life sentence these days as it used to be. If it did not work out, then they could bow out of it and try again some other time with other partners.

That was another thing he hated about modern living- its basic cynicism.

He loved Allison. Certainly he lusted after her. She was tall and blonde and sleek. She was poised and articulate and ambitious and successful. Of course there were differences between them. Many of them. It was natural. They would work through the differences if they wished their marriage to be a success. That was the challenge of marriage.

He turned to look at her. She was lying with her hands locked behind her head, her legs crossed at the ankles. She was looking at him and smiling.

"It was a funny party, wasn't it?" he said, grinning. "An engagement party without a ring." It had taken place at his flat just the day before yesterday.

"Who needs a ring?" She shrugged her shoulders. "And everyone was told about the family heirloom. It will be something to show when we return. Are you going to insure my finger for a million pounds or so?''

"I think you are a little more valuable than the ring," he said. "Why not insure all of you?"

"Gallant John." She smiled at him. "Or mercenary John?" She opened her mouth to say more, hesitated, and then spoke anyway. "Do we have to wait until this evening? I know you have arranged a special candlelit dinner downstairs. But do we have to wait?"

He had the ring in his wallet. He had driven to Reading yesterday and got it from his father. His mother had died eight years ago. The ring was for his bride now. Not many of the family wives during the past three centuries had had the ring in time for their engagements.

He had always had strange feelings about the ring. His mother had not worn it a great deal, as she had had another engagement ring-the family ring had not come to her until fifteen years after her marriage. So he had not seen it much himself. Whenever he had, he had felt-how had he felt? It was almost impossible to put the feeling into words. Breathless? Nostalgic? Excited? Afraid? None of the four words, except perhaps the first, really described his feeling.

And the feeling had returned yesterday. He had thought perhaps it was the value of the ring and the knowledge that now it was in his keeping and that soon it would be on Allison's finger. But it was not so much the monetary value that had affected him as the historic value. Though that word was too cold, too clinical.

He had put it carefully in his wallet. He had checked and rechecked ever since to see that it was still there, even though the wallet had never left his person. But he had not unwrapped it or touched it. There was something about touching it-well, something that made him breathless. He could put it no more clearly than that. And he did not have to. He had never tried to explain the feeling to anyone else.

"No," he said now, reaching for his wallet. "There is no reason to wait. And I would rather do it here in private than in the dining room where someone else might notice and somehow intrude."

"I have not even seen it," she said, sitting up.

He took the velvet bag out of his wallet and the tissue paper out of the bag. He unwrapped it. He had not yet touched the ring with his bare hand. His father had wrapped it yesterday.

He sat down on the side of the bed and held out his palm to her. "You see?" he said. "It can be the something old and the something blue for our wedding." He had said that before. Déjà vu hit him like a hammer blow, catching him somewhere low in his stomach. He must be very tired from the long drive.

It was a large sapphire in a heavy gold setting. His father had had it cleaned just last week and sized for Allison.

"Mm, very nice," she said, warm appreciation in her voice.

Yet for some reason the words cut him. Very nice?

"Well?" She was laughing and holding out her left hand to him, the fingers spread. "Are you going to put it on me or am I going to have to do it myself?"

He did not want to touch it. It was absurd. And he knew now that two of those words about his feelings were correct-he was both breathless and afraid. But afraid of what? Afraid of dropping it? Of losing it? Of sharing his family heritage and therefore himself with a stranger? Good Lord, Allison was not a stranger. She was his fiancée. They had been together for two months. Intimately together.

He picked it up. It felt warm, as if it had been worn recently. The heat from his body had warmed it through his wallet and through its wrappings. He slipped the ring onto her finger.

"There." He smiled at her. "The deed is done. You are mine, body and soul. I love you, Allie."

"I love you too." The tears that brightened her eyes were unexpected. She was not an overly emotional person. Passionate, yes, but not emotional. "I do, John. I know we do not see eye to eye on everything. You half meant it a moment ago when you suggested coming here to live for the rest of our lives, didn't you? And I would die of such an existence. But we do love each other. We will make this work. Won't we?"

Allison did not usually need reassurance. She was abounding in self-confidence. She sounded anxious now, endearingly so. Sometimes, treacherously, considering the fact that he was living through the 1990s, he wished she were a little more dependent. But that was certainly something he would never utter aloud.

"Yes," he said, releasing her hand in order to wrap his arms about her. "Of course we will. We will adjust to each other's needs. Because we love each other."

He kissed her and lowered her back onto the bed. He followed her down until he was lying beside her, his mouth still against hers. Surprisingly, though, he found that it was not desire they shared but tenderness. Passion would come later, in the night. Now was the time for love-in the moments following their official engagement. He reached one hand down to hers, to take her ring between a thumb and forefinger and twist it.

He was not sure at what precise moment he felt the other ring. At first his fingers merely brushed against it. Then they moved curiously to it and felt its smoothness. It was a plain band, like a wedding ring. He stretched his hand out along hers, palm to palm. Hers seemed smaller than usual. It was as if the ring had dwarfed it. Her lips had softened to exquisite gentleness. For the first time he noticed her perfume-subtle and unobtrusive, but unmistakably lavender.

The drive had tired him far more than he had thought. He doubted that he was going to be able to get up for dinner. He even doubted-alarming thought-that he was going to be able to make love to her tonight. He was so tired he could hardly exert any pressure against her hand and against her ring-her rings.

And then, before he opened his eyes, he realized something. He realized that it was not Allison he held in his arms at all. It was another woman. And in fact it was he who was lying in her arms.

Perhaps the most disorienting realization of all, though, was that he knew who she was.

"Adèle," he murmured, and opened his eyes. Even doing that took great physical effort.

She had dark eyes and dark hair, worn rather formally in a topknot with wavy tendrils at her temples and neck. She wore no makeup. She was wearing a dress of some flimsy stuff, low and scooped at the neckline, drawn in by a wide ribbon beneath her breasts. The sleeves were short and puffed. Empire style, he thought. Regency.

She was looking at him with such naked love in her eyes that his heart turned over.

Adèle? How did he know her name? How had he known he would open his eyes to see her? How did he know he loved her more than life?

"John?" She released her hand from his and lifted it to his face. She set the backs of her fingers against his forehead. They felt cool. He saw the ring on her finger-the rings. They both looked very shiny and new. "You slept for a while. The fever seems to have cooled a little. Would you like a drink? Water? Lemonade?"

He did not want her to have to leave the room. She could fetch water from the bathroom. Had he had the flu? "Water, please," he said.

She sat up and got off the bed and reached out to pull a strip of silk beside the bed. Of course, he thought, his eyes following her movements. One of the servants would bring it. And, yes, definitely Regency. Her dress-it was made of muslin-fell soft and straight to the floor from beneath her bosom. She was small-he knew that he had to raise his chin only a little to be able to rest it on the top of her head when they were both standing.

His eyes roamed the room, seeing with a curious mixture of surprise and recognition the ornate canopy above the bed, the finely carved bedposts, the velvet curtains, which were pulled back so that he could see the rest of the room. He could see the ornate Adam furniture, the gilding on the high ceiling.

He must have dozed again for a few moments. She was taking a glass from a tray held by a maid-the same maid who had removed the blood-spotted cloths some time ago.

Flu? He had been coughing blood.

She turned back to the bed with a smile. He had never seen such luminous tenderness in anyone's face as there was in hers. She half knelt, half sat beside him and lifted him-there seemed to be no strength in him at all-until his head nestled on her shoulder. The water tasted good, though it was not very cold. He half expected to feel it burn his throat, but it did not. He drew a deep and careful breath, expecting to feel a burning in his lungs, but he did not.

"Thank you," he said. "You are an angel, pure and simple, Adèle."

"You will feel better for the rest," she said. "The journey was a long and rough one, John. It was madness to come so far. But I know now what you meant about this place." Her cheek was resting against the top of his head. "It is the loveliest place on earth. And I am glad we came. I think you will get better here."

He could tell from the bright warmth of her voice that she did not believe her own words. He was dying. He had come here to die.

"I already feel better," he said.

What he did feel was strange-a massive understatement. A few minutes ago he had been lying in this very room with another woman-with Allison, his fiancée. Both room and woman had changed. Even he was different. He could see his legs encased in tight pantaloons with silk stockings instead of in jeans and socks. He could see his waistcoat. He had seen the ruffles of his shirt cuffs when he had lifted his hand briefly to the glass-and his hand was thin and emaciated. Yet he knew he was not asleep. And he knew he was not mad. He knew all this though his mind was sluggish on the details.

He saw her rings again when she set the glass down beside the bed. She was his wife. He held out his hand to her on the bed and she placed hers in it. He raised it to his lips and kissed the sapphire of her ring. Damn, but he was weak.

"But I should not have done this," he said.

He was not quite sure what he meant by the words, but she knew, all right. He could hear the tears in her voice when she spoke. "John," she said, "please do not. Please do not keep on saying that. I know that it was I who asked you to marry me. It was unpardonably forward of me to do so, and I never would have done it if I had not thought that perhaps you needed me."

"Adèle," he said.

"No," she said. "Talking takes your energy. Just rest. Please rest, my dearest love. John, I wanted to marry you. More man anything else in this world. I love you so very dearly. I have always loved you, from the moment you lifted me down from that stile when I was four and you were eight and the other children were jeering because I was stuck and frightened."

He smiled at the memory of the infant with the soft baby curls and huge eyes.

The memory?

"This is what I have always dreamed of," she said. "Being your wife, John. Being wim you like this. I do not care for how long-" She broke off suddenly and he could hear her distress in the silence. "But you are going to get better. I know you are. I feel it. I am going to make you better. They said you needed a dry, warm climate and so you went off to Italy for a whole year and came back worse. I do not care what they say. This place will be good for you. And I will be good for you."

He pulled on her hand until she was lying beside him again. He turned onto his side to face her.

"You are good for me," he said. "You are all I could ever need, Adèle. How foolish I was to go to Italy and waste a whole year I might have spent with you. But no matter. We have the rest of our lifetimes together."

Her eyes were bright with tears, brimming with love. The rest of a lifetime. How much longer did he have? A few weeks? A few days? And yet, weak as he felt, he did not feel ill. He should, shouldn't he? He had tuberculosis- consumption. Didn't he?

"How long have we been married?" he asked her.

She looked frightened for a moment. Perhaps she thought he was delirious. Then she smiled. She had a dimple in the middle of her right cheek. It had been there since she was a child-How did he know that?

"For shame," she said. "Have you forgotten the number of days? But it was a long journey for you-four days, with the wedding just the day before we set out. It has been five days and four hours, sir. We are an old married couple."

Yes, he knew how long they had been married. He had remembered as soon as he asked the question. He knew, too, that the marriage was unconsummated, that she fully expected it would forever remain so. She had married him anyway.

"I love you," he whispered to her.

Her eyes filled with tears again. "Yes, I know you do, John," she said, "even if not quite as you would have loved a bride if you had had more opportunity to choose. But I know you love me. I am content."

Had he ever given her the impression that he did not love her totally, to the exclusion of all other women? He knew he had. He knew it as soon as he asked the question, silently this time. He had always loved her as a friend. He had loved her, too, as a woman, though there had always been a niggling doubt. Was it just habit that made him believe that he loved her? Did he really love her? Was he prepared to give up all other women in order to spend the rest of his life with her?

Finally the question had become immaterial. He was dying. He had come back from Italy to find her still unmarried at the age of twenty-four, still waiting for him, still loving him. And so he had married her.

But looking at her now, he could hardly believe that he had ever doubted the depth of his feelings for her. There was something about her just a little too soft, a little too dependent, he had thought. He might prefer someone rather more forceful, someone with a more vivid personality. He could not understand why he had never before fully appreciated her strength of character. She had remained true to a dying man. She had married him, knowing that there was no future with him-because she loved him.

And yet-his mind became dizzy with disorientation again. It was not he who had doubted. And it was not he who now loved her with all his heart. That was another man, the one who usually occupied this weak, thin body. He-John Chandler-could have no feelings for Adèle at all. He was in love with Allison Gorman. He was engaged to her. He had just placed on her finger the ring that Adèle was now wearing.

He knew what had happened, of course. He accepted it with a calm that puzzled and amazed him, as if it were an ordinary, everyday occurrence, or as if he finally understood the feelings he had always had about the house and the ring. He had slipped back into history. When he could set his mind to working rationally, he would even be able to work out exactly who in history he was impersonating. He had a smattering of knowledge about the family. And this was a Regency man. He should not be difficult to trace.

"If I had had an opportunity to choose my bride at leisure and in full health," he said, "I know whom I would have chosen."

She closed her eyes. He knew she was steeling herself against pain, though she showed no other outer sign than that.

"The Honorable Miss Adèle Markham," he said softly, "now Adèle Chandler, Viscountess Cordell. How could I ever have chosen anyone else when my heart was given to her?"

Her eyes opened again. "How kind you are," she said. "Kinder than usual." She touched his lips with her fingertips. ' 'And you are talking too much. You will tire yourself and start coughing again."

During their journey into Wales he had sometimes been made irritable by her fussing-though that was an unkind word to use. By her everlasting patience and consideration for his well-being, then. Kinder than usual. It had not escaped her notice, then.

"I shall leave for a while," she said. "You will be able to rest better if I am not here."

But he set his arm about her and held her against him. "Don't leave," he whispered. He was afraid that if she left she would never come back, that he would never see her again. It was an unbearable thought. And dizzying in light of the fact that he had just got engaged-to Allison. ' 'Kiss me."

He knew that the joy that lighted her face had always been there when she was a child and a girl. Beautiful, joyous Adèle. He knew, too, that it had not been there a great deal in recent years-only the soft, gentle look of love.

"Kiss me, my love," he whispered again. "Don't leave me. Don't ever leave me."

Her lips were soft, gentle, slightly pouted-quite different from Allison's wide, sensuous mouth. Adèle kissed as a child kissed, but with the added dimension of womanhood. She kept her lips sealed to his. He parted his lips and licked at hers. So warm and so sweet. He prodded his tongue through the seam to the softer, moister flesh within. She moaned.

He was too tired to become fully aroused. Which was just as well, some sane but distant part of his mind thought. He was kissing someone else's wife. He was kissing someone who was not Allison. But she was his wife. She was his love. The only, eternal love of his heart. He was not normally given to such poetic flights of fancy.

"Oh," she said when he drew back his head a few inches. "Oh, John." Her eyes looked rather dazed.

He did not feel ill, he thought. Just very weak and very tired. He needed food and air and exercise. Lots of all three. He was not going to die. People of the 1990s did not die of tuberculosis-not in First World countries, anyway. He had been vaccinated against it as a child, just like everyone else in his class, when a schoolfriend had developed the disease. But he was not in the twentieth century at the moment. Somehow he had been transported back into the early nineteenth. Something told him, though, that he had brought part of his old self with him, as well as his mind. He had brought his resistance to the disease that had been killing John Chandler, Viscount Cordell. He knew the name of the man in whose body and mind he found himself.

"I need food and air and exercise," he told Adèle. "What is for dinner? Do you know?"

"John?" she said. "Are you sure? You know how- how upset you become when you cannot do what you try to do. Perhaps if you rest for a few weeks your strength will come back. I am going to see that it does."

Yes, it had been a trial to him, his weakness. He had never resigned himself to his fate. He had always been a man of high energy, someone who wanted to accomplish a great deal in this world, someone who could never sit still and let the world go by him. He had raged against his illness. It seemed hard to believe now that he had been such a high-powered man. Why waste life on busy living? Allison would approve of him as he had been, he thought, and felt the dizziness again for a moment.

"And when my strength does come back," he said, "we will live here forever, Adèle, and never return to the hurry of modern life. We will raise our children here where it is quiet and beautiful, where we can be close to nature and to God."

She hid her face against him. He knew she was crying. His words must seem cruel to her. "Forever" to Adèle was probably only a few weeks, at the most. She knew there would never be children.

But he thought of something suddenly as he held her close to him. He remembered now. There had been an eccentric Viscount Cordell of the Regency era who had come to Cartref with his bride for their wedding trip and had never returned to England. They had lived here until a ripe old age, the two of them, with their children. He could not remember the exact date of their deaths and he could not remember how many children they had had. But he could remember one other thing clearly-two things.

That viscount had been John. His wife had been Adèle.

John Chandler, Viscount Cordell, certainly had not died of consumption within weeks or even months of his wedding.

It seemed to her that she had loved him all her life. When he had lifted her down from that stile, he had lifted her into his life. He had always included her, guarded her, listened to her, and talked to her after that, though a mere four-year-old girl had seemed nothing but a nuisance to her brothers and sisters and to his and to the other children with whom they had played. He had seemed so grown-up, so tall, so handsome, so-oh, so wonderful to her infant's eyes. And he had remained so ever since.

She had loved him with a woman's love for years and years. She had resisted all of her parents' attempts to find a suitable husband for their youngest child. If she could not have John, she would have no one. She had decided that when she was sixteen, perhaps earlier. If he had not cared for her, perhaps she would have forced herself to turn her eyes, if not her heart, elsewhere. But she had always known that he loved her. There was a special gentleness, a special tenderness in his treatment of her.

Not that he would have married her. She was a dreamer with a streak of realism. He was an older son, heir to a viscount's title and fortune. More important than that, she knew that he did not love her as she loved him. He loved her, but she was not that one love of a lifetime, of an eternity, as he was to her. He loved her, perhaps, as he would a beloved sister. Maybe a little more than that. He had kissed her on her seventeenth birthday…

And then he had become ill. No one, at first, had been willing to admit what it was that was striking him down, robbing him of flesh and color and vitality. But she had known from the start. She had watched her handsome, strong, vital, beloved John begin to die. And something in her had started to die too.

All her dreams became focused on one single impossible goal. She wanted to be the one to nurse him out of this life, the one to love him over into the kingdom of love so that there would be no darkness for him between the two moments. The dream had seemed even more impossible when he had left for Italy in the hope of some miracle cure. She had expected never to see him again.

But he had come home. She had gone with her mama and papa to call on him. She preferred not to think about her first sight of him. Death hovered over him, very close. But her dream had lurched painfully into focus again.

She had found a way to be alone with him for a few minutes just two days later and she had asked him to marry her. He had protested, of course. For the first time he had spoken the truth to her.

"I am dying, Adèle," he had said gently. "I do not have long left. I have nothing to give you, dear."

Somehow-she was not normally a bold woman-she had persuaded him that indeed he did. That he had the power to enable her to be with him all the time, making him more comfortable.

"I cannot stay close to you if I am not married to you, John," she had said. She had taken both his thin hands in hers and had kissed them repeatedly. She had not known quite where her boldness had come from. "I can think of no greater happiness than being close to you."

And so he had married her just one week later. He had decided on some impulse to bring her here, to his home in Wales, for their wedding trip. Everyone had thought him mad. It was such a long distance over roads that were notoriously rough. But she had not tried to argue with him. She had known it was a dying man's wish-to die in the place he considered the loveliest in the world. In the place that had the loveliest name she knew-Cartref. Home.

She had come here with a strange hope in her heart. It was the hope for a miracle. It was strange because she had never had hope, not since the moment she had realized he had consumption. Even when he went to Italy, she had had no hope. When he had come home and when she had begged him to marry her, there had been no hope beyond the dream to be his wife and to have the privilege of comforting his last days.

But throughout the journey, hope had built, even as his body became weaker with exhaustion and as the coughing spells became longer and more frightening. By the time they reached Cartref that new and strange inner part of herself knew that he was going to recover, even while the rational, practical part of her was certain that it was impossible. She must not buoy herself up with false hope, she had told herself repeatedly.

Besides-the thought had saddened her-if he recovered, he would find himself trapped in a marriage that was not entirely of his own choosing.

During the three days following their arrival in Wales, then, she watched the changes in him with a bewildering mixture of hope and cold reason. He was rallying after the exhaustion of the journey. He was rallying from the pleasure of being in a place he loved. And from the knowledge that no further great effort would ever be required of him. They had both known, though it had never been spoken between them, that he had come here to die, that he would never have to make the return journey to England.

It was not unusual, she knew, for patients to rally and even seem to recover from serious illnesses for a short while. That was what was happening to John. She tried to believe that and to be grateful that she was to have a little more of him than she had ever expected, especially during that dreadful journey. She had even doubted once or twice-or the part of her that had not been borne up by that strange hope had doubted-that he would get as far as Cartref.

On the first day he dressed for dinner-his valet had looked at him in amazement and then at her in inquiry when he demanded it-and came down to the dining room with her. He even ate. Not a great deal, it was true, but then since their wedding it had seemed to her that he existed on air. He had eaten no solid food.

"I have to eat," he told her with a smile, tackling the fish course. "I just looked at myself in the looking glass, Adèle, and I am nothing but skin and bones. I do not know how you can bear to look at me."

She would have wept except that there was a twinkle in his eye. "You are John," she said. "I could look at you every moment for the rest of my life and not grow tired of doing so."

He chuckled-and her heart turned over with joy at the sound. "And I am so weak," he said, "that I fear I made a dent in both the banister and your shoulder coming downstairs."

They had taken the stairs one at a time, with a long pause on each one. The butler had watched anxiously and incredulously from the foot-John's valet had carried him upstairs on their arrival.

On the second day he insisted on taking each meal in the dining room, even breakfast. And he forced himself to eat. She could tell that it was an effort and part of her wondered if it was worth torturing himself when… But there was the other part of her that hoped and did more than just hope. There was a part of her that knew.

He would not go back to bed except for one hour in the afternoon-he had her promise to wake him after an hour, provided she was awake to do it. He insisted that she lie down with him, and he held her hand, twisting her sapphire ring, until he drifted off to sleep.

For the rest of the day he walked. It was incredible to see. He would not sit down to conserve his energy. And he would not allow her to close the downstairs windows after he had thrown them all open, even though the air coming off the ocean was brisk. He walked all about the house, slowly and doggedly, her arm drawn through his, though he assured her that she must not feel obligated to trudge her slippers to shreds on his account.

"I would trudge my slippers and my boots and the soles of my feet to shreds to be with you," she told him, rubbing her cheek against his shoulder. "But do not exhaust yourself, John. And do not catch a chill."

"Sea air and exercise are good for a person," he said. "Once I am stronger, I am going to be marching along the beach and running up and down the hills to build an appetite for breakfast."

She laughed against his shoulder. Helpless laughter that bordered on tears. "Will I be able to keep up to you?" she asked. "Or will I have to trail along half a mile behind?"

"I shall match my strides to yours," he said. "But we will have to get you fit enough not to pant and wheeze as we run."

"Up hills?" she said, still laughing. "Hills, John? Have mercy."

He even went outside on that second day and strolled very slowly with her along the graveled paths between the flower beds that stood between the house and the rough trail that descended the hill to one side of the house and ascended on the other side to the village of Awelfa, just out of sight over the crest.

He stopped frequently to draw deep breaths of the fresh salt air. She was terrified that he would bring on another of the coughing spells. He had not had one since just after their arrival the day before.

And then once, before they strolled on, he dipped his head and kissed her. He kissed her the way he had kissed her yesterday-and never before that-with his lips parted and his tongue stroking over her lips and even pressing through. A shocking, wonderful kiss. One that made her knees turn weak. A fine prop she would make for him if he kept kissing her like this.

And that was the biggest change in him, she thought, and the one she had been most trying to ignore, because she had accepted the way he was and had thought to be happy with it long after he had gone. She had accepted that he loved her but that there was no magic in his love.

Since their arrival, since that coughing spell and the short sleep of exhaustion that had followed it, he had been different. There had been something in his eyes, something in his voice, something in his kiss… And something in his words, too, though she guessed he was speaking them out of tenderness and gratitude to her. He knew that she loved him more than life and he knew that she was going to have a leftover life to live very soon. He was being wonderfully kind to her as he always had been.

But there was something in his eyes. The eyes cannot deceive as well as the voice can.

On the third day he decided that they would go walking on the beach.

"John." They were in the dining room at the time, having just risen from breakfast. ' 'Is it wise? You are so much better. Would it not be wiser to rest today? To get your strength back gradually?" She stepped closer to him and framed his face with her hands. "There is even a little color in your face today."

"Perhaps in time," he said, "you will even have a halfway handsome husband, Adèle."

His face blurred beyond the tears that sprang to her eyes. "You are the most handsome man in the world," she said.

He laughed-oh, how she loved to hear him laugh. "Did you not know," he asked her, "that the most sure way to build strength and energy is to use them?"

He had some strange ideas, this new John who had appeared just the day before yesterday. "How absurd," she said.

"They are just like love," he said.

She smiled at the idea. Yes, it was true. The more love one gave, the more there was to give. But strength and energy? She was not at all convinced by the analogy. She could see, though, that he wanted to walk on the beach, that he wanted to believe his strange theory. She could see that he was happy here at Cartref. Why should she try to curb his happiness merely so that she could guard his little remaining strength and keep him with her a few days longer? She had married him so that she could love him into the next world.

"Do it, then, you foolish man," she said. "I shall even come with you. But do not expect me to carry you home."

"Soon," he said, "I'll be able to do that for you, Adèle." His eyes softened, filled with that look again, the one that made her breathless because it was new and unexpected and undreamed of. "I want to be whole for you. I am going to be whole for you."

She had expected nothing of this marriage except a fulfillment of her own dream. She ached with sudden longings that she did not want to feel. She did not want to have more pain than there was going to be anyway.

And yet there was the hope. And the knowledge.

"To the beach," he said, taking her hand and leading her to the door. "No more procrastinating."

"To the beach, sir," she said, trying to match the lightness of his tone.

He had only one real fear and it was a fear that puzzled him at best and made him feel guilty at worst. He feared being suddenly projected forward into his own life again- though there seemed nothing particularly alien about this life. He feared every time he woke up from sleep that he would be back in the Cartref Hotel in the middle of the 1990s.

It was a fear that puzzled him. Could he want to be trapped in a former age, cut off forever from the life he had known for twenty-eight years? Could he want to live without the trappings of late-twentieth-century civilization? And without the conveniences-electric lights and shavers, central heating, running water, zippers, to mention just a few. And without his red sports car?

And it was a fear that made him feel guilty. Could he be content never to see his father again? Or his other relatives and friends? Or Allison? He had just become engaged to Allison. She was the woman he loved, the woman he had decided to spend the rest of his life with.

And yet he feared having to go back. He feared having to leave Cartref and his sense of belonging there. He feared-oh, he feared more than death having to leave Adèle. How would he ever cope with the grief of being separated from her by the insurmountable barrier of almost two centuries?

He did not fear having been projected back into the body of a desperately sick, dying man. He could be deceiving himself, of course. He knew that it was possible to be very ill and not even realize it until a chance medical checkup revealed a problem. But even so he felt convinced that he was only weak, not sick. All he needed in order to get back his full health and strength was food and rest and exercise. He was certainly in the right place for all three, despite the horror Adèle and his servants felt for his insistence on exercising.

Perhaps what cheered him most of all was that memory he had from his studies of family history. The memory of John and Adèle Chandler, who had begun their married life in the Regency era but had lived on with their children well into the Victorian age. Sometimes he wished that he had learned more about them and that his memory was sharper. But then, he decided, he did not really want to know exactly when they had died or who had died first. And he did not really want to remember how many children they had had-though he did know that it was more than one. If he was to live the life of the Regency Chandler, he did not want to know any more about his future than the fact that it was to be a lengthy one, with Adèle at his side.

He put a cloak on over his coat and his waistcoat and his shirt to go to the beach, despite the fact that it was a warm day. Adèle would have been too upset if he had refused. And he wore a hat, though he was afraid that it might blow away in the wind. It was probably wise to dress warmly anyway-his emaciated body felt the cold. It would do him no good to catch a cold in his weakened state.

Adèle looked remarkably pretty with a yellow spencer over her matching dress and a straw bonnet trimmed with blue flowers. He had always felt a treacherous preference for the femininity of female dress of a century and more ago, though Allison's clothes were always chic and elegant and sexy.

But the prettiest thing about Adèle was her face. Despite her anxiety that he was going to tax his strength too much, there was a glow of joy in her face that he knew he had put there in the past two days. He knew that he had aroused hope in her-it was another cause for fear if he should have to go back and take his tuberculosis resistance with him. And he knew that he had surprised her by the depth of his need for her and his love for her. He knew that the John she had married had never felt more than a deep affection and tenderness for her.

She deserved more. She had devoted all of her love for all of her life to him. He knew that she would go on loving him for the rest of her life, even if he should die tomorrow and she should live on to be eighty or ninety. He knew that her love for him was that deep.

"Are you ready?" he asked her, offering his arm. "Though this is a deceptive gesture, is it not? It seems that 1 am offering you my support when in reality I am begging for yours. I hope you noticed this morning, though, that I paused on each stair for only five seconds instead of five minutes."

"Yes." She smiled wistfully at him. "I noticed." He wondered if she was fighting hope or if she was beginning to give in to it. "I do believe you have put on weight, too."

"All of half a pound, I daresay," he said. "Though I believe it is the cloak that makes me look voluminous. Wait until it is filled by the wind on the beach. You will be putting me on a reducing diet."

It irked him to have to descend the stairs so slowly, to have to walk so slowly from the house and around the cobbled driveway to the road-or track would be a more suitable word-and across it to the grass and then the beach. There was just not the strength to stride along as he wished to do. But when he remembered how just the day before yesterday every step had taken almost all his strength, he decided that he must make a friend of patience for the coming days and weeks.

She chattered to him-mainly to try to keep him from using precious energy in talk, he guessed. Though he could remember that she had always liked to walk and chatter with him. Only him. Other people knew her as a shy, quiet, not particularly interesting lady. It was as if she saw him as the other half of her soul and could talk with him as freely as she could think.

He drew her to a halt when they were on the beach and shaded his eyes against the sun sparkling on the water. The tide was almost out. The beach was wide and flat and golden.

"The beginning of eternity," he said. "It is a wonderful place to live, Adèle, close to the ocean. One is constantly reminded of the vastness of life and eternity. And of God. And yet it is an awareness without fear. One feels a part of it all, a part of eternity. I never fear death when I am here."

He could never speak thus with Allison, he realized. She would either think he had taken leave of his senses or she would plain not comprehend.

The brim of Adèle's bonnet touched his shoulder. "You are right," she said. "It is a very good place to be. I am glad we came here, John. You could not have brought me to a better place."

He drew his arm free of hers and set it about her shoulders. After all, they were on the beach and some of the proprieties could be allowed to slip away there. Besides, he had brought some of his twentieth-century lack of inhibitions with him. She looked first startled and then very pleased indeed. The wind and salt air had already whipped color into her cheeks.

"I am not going to die," he said. "Not yet, anyway. I am better, my love. All I need is to regain my strength. I know you will not quite believe it yet-perhaps not for a long while. But it is true."

Pray God-he closed his eyes to make it a real prayer- that he could stay with her, or that at the very least his own health would stay with the man who would return to her. And pray God that that man, if he must return, would love her as she deserved to be loved.

"I believe it," she said softly. Her voice was trembling. "I do believe it, John. I knew when we were coming here and even more so when I saw Cartref and the valley and the beach and ocean-I knew that a miracle was going to happen."

"It has," he said. "A greater miracle than you realize, I believe."

He took her hand in his and began to walk with her toward the water. Through her glove his thumb and forefinger played with the ring on her finger. This was what he had imagined doing, he thought, when he had suggested a week at the Cartref Hotel with Allison. He had imagined quiet walks on the beach, rambles in the hills, browsings in the village of Awelfa. Long afternoons and nights of lovemaking. He was not at all sure that Allison would have enjoyed any of it except the lovemaking. She needed the hectic pace of city life as a constant stimulant, he realized.

He did not.

He felt the now familiar dizziness for a moment. How could he be doing this, strolling inside someone else's body with someone else's wife two hundred years ago, and not be feeling either alarm for his own sanity or panic at having slipped through some time warp? But it was not someone else's body. It was his own. He recognized himself in the mirror even though he did not look quite identical to his usual self. And he recognized himself inside. He had all of Viscount Cordell's memories, though some of them were coming back to him slowly. And Adèle was his wife, his beloved wife, even though their marriage was unconsum-mated.

The sand was becoming damp and spongy. The pressure of her shoes and his Hessians was making wet indentations. Finally they came to the first trickle of the receding tide and they stopped. He set his arm about her again.

"Now if I had all my strength back," he said, "I might pick you up and carry you in and make you pay me all sorts of forfeits to persuade me not to drop you."

She giggled-what a joyful sound it was. He realized that he had not heard it in a long while. His illness must have saddened her for a few years even before he went to Italy. "And if you think that is going to make me say I am glad you do not have your strength back, sir," she said, "you are very mistaken."

"What?" he said. "You would not mind being dropped into the ocean?''

"Of course I would." She giggled again. "But it would not happen. I would pay all the forfeits."

"Would you?" He drew her a little closer. "That is something I must keep in mind. I shall put it to the test- sooner than you realize."

She was crying then, noisily and unexpectedly, and hiding her face against his chest. He set his arms about her and rested his cheek against the flowers on her bonnet. This must be very bewildering for her, and rather frightening. She must expect that he would have a relapse at any moment.

"John," she said eventually, choking back her tears. "Oh, do forgive me. What a goose you will think me. It is just that I never expected-Oh, I-I don't know what it is I am trying to say."

"You expected to come here to nurse a dying man with all the gentleness of your love," he said. "You did not expect to be teased and threatened. And you did not expect to get your shoes wet in the tide."

She lifted a wet and reddened and very beautiful face to him and smiled. "How good God is," she said. "How very, very good."

He tried to imagine Allison saying just those words. But he did not want to think about Allison, and he pushed guilt back out of his conscious mind.

"Yes," he said, and kissed her. His body, he realized after a mere few seconds, was already beginning to respond weakly to the desires of his emotions.

He handed her his handkerchief after a couple of minutes and she dried her eyes and blew her nose. He started coughing at almost the same moment, as a gust of salt air caught his throat. It was just a harmless cough, over in a moment. But he noticed the quickly veiled terror in her eyes and then the gentle tenderness that had been there when he opened his own eyes two days ago to find her instead of Allison on the bed with him.

"Nothing," he said. "Look, it is over. No blood."

She smiled at him and stood on tiptoe to kiss him again.

"But," he said reluctantly, "if I am not going to have to demand that you sling me over your shoulder and carry me back to the house after all, Adèle, we had better make our way back there. At a very sedate pace. You may even persuade me to lie down for half an hour or so when we get there, provided you will lie down at my side."

"You know I will," she said, taking his hand. "You know that is why I married you, John. To be always at your side. You cannot know how happy it makes me just to be there. All my life I lived for the times when you were home and when you would come to play with the others. I tried not to cling and I tried not to be demanding or to be a nuisance-"

He squeezed her hand. "You never did and you never were," he said. "You were always the joy in my life, Adèle."

"Oh." She sounded breathless. "What a lovely thing to say."

"Our house," he said, looking up the beach to the manor in the distance. "Our Cartref. Shall we stay here forever, my love? Forget to go back to England? Live here and love here together, close to all that matters in life? Shall we bring up our children here?"

"Yes," she said softly. "Oh, yes, John. Let us do that."

Beneath the brim of her bonnet he could see her face. He could see the soft, joyous, wistful dream in it.

And we did it, too, he told her silently. We lived happily ever after here.

She tried to hold on to the cold reality of her sanity. She tried to tell herself that a man who had had consumption in such an advanced stage, a man who had appeared so very close to death just a week ago, could not recover his full health. Miracles did not happen in the mundane times of the early nineteenth century.

Soon this last burst of strength and vigor would go and he would go-out into the beyond that did not frighten him, into the kingdom of love where she would follow him one day. When the time came, she must let him go and be grateful for this precious and wonderful and unexpected week.

In many ways it would be harder to let him go after this week. She had glimpsed the joy of married life this week, as she had never expected to do, and she knew that the bleakness that would come after would be almost unbearable for a long, long time.

But she knew, too, that she would be grateful, that she would live on the memories of this week for the rest of her life.

She tried to be sane and sensible. She tried to keep herself steeled inside just as she had been from the moment she first saw him after his return from Italy. She tried to keep herself prepared, to guard herself from total collapse when it was over.

But it was difficult to do. She felt almost as if after their wedding, after their departure for Wales, they had traveled into a new and different world, a magic, wonderful world where miracles happened, where love was to be loved and life to be lived, where death was not to be feared, where death was not imminent, anyway.

It was not just hope she felt as the days passed and his health showed every sign of recovering. It was knowledge, certainty. It was faith.

And so faith warred with sanity in her mind. And faith was winning.

Every day he was stronger. Every day he ate a little more heartily. He was still very thin, but some of the gauntness, the skeletal look, had gone. There was a suggestion of healthy color to his flesh. Every day he walked a little faster and a little farther. Every day he talked a little more and laughed a little more and teased a little more.

On the last day of the week they walked all the way up the hill-though they stopped several times to look down at the view and recover their breath-to me village. They were greeted with vociferous Welsh cheer at the tavern, where they stopped for lemonade. She knew that word would quickly spread that Viscount Cordell was not lying at home dying but was up and about and apparently recuperating from a long illness. She knew that they would now have callers and invitations. The tavern keeper had already mentioned an assembly that was to be held soon in the rooms above the tavern.

John had said they would be there and would lead the first waltz. Absurd man.

The thought of waltzing with him had made the tears spring to her eyes and she had had to blink and fumble in her reticule and wonder aloud if it was an insect that had flown into her eye and set it to watering.

The walk back down the hill had been less strenuous than the climb. But he had been tired enough to lie down-with her at his side-when they returned home. But only for half an hour. He seemed unwilling to lie down for longer during the daytime.

Yes, faith was overcoming sanity. She had almost relaxed totally into it. She had almost stopped doubting and fearing. He was getting better. It was not just a respite. The disease had gone.

It was with a sick lurching of the stomach, then, that she awoke one night to me sound of his coughing. She sat up sharply. He was standing beside the bed, holding back the bedclothes on his side of the bed.

"I woke you," he said. "And in the worst possible way. I just had to get up for a minute. The cough was nothing. But I know it puts terror into your soul every time you hear it. Forgive me."

She knew he was right. The few coughs she had heard from him in the last week were different. They were not the deep, racking, gurgling coughs she had heard too many times during the journey from England. They were symptoms of nothing. They were merely coughs.

She lay back down and turned onto her side as he climbed back into bed. Life had been so very joyous for the past week that it was difficult to pick out one single thing that made her happier than any other. But perhaps it was this. This lying beside him in bed, feeling the warmth of his body next to hers, hearing his breathing. This knowing that she was his wife and had the right to lie here. She was glad she had lain in his bed the very night of their wedding and every night since. She had not asked permission to lie there. She had wanted to be near when he needed her. It was why she had married him.

He had never told her to go away, to lie in her own bed. She would never go away unless he asked her to. Yes, this was the greatest joy. She smiled when he turned his head toward her, though they could not see each other very clearly in the darkness.

"I disturbed you," he said. "You were sleeping so peacefully."

"I am happy," she said. "You cannot know how happy I am, John."

He turned onto his side too, and slid one arm beneath her head. With the other he drew her closer so that her body was against his. He felt less angular and fragile man he had felt in the nights after their wedding, when she had held him in her arms.

"Are you?" he said. "Are you, love?"

She lifted her head hopefully. She loved his kisses. Especially when she was lying down and her knees were not so badly affected.

He smiled at her and kissed her. She experimented. Instead of waiting for him to prod with his tongue through the seam of her lips, she parted them for him. And when she discovered the pleasure of moist flesh caressing moist flesh, she opened her mouth. His tongue came sliding hard and deep inside and she was very glad indeed that she was lying down. She would have disgraced herself utterly by crumpling into a heap on the ground.

And then she felt alarm and pulled her head back sharply. One of her hands shot up to touch his forehead.

"John," she said. She could hear her voice shaking. "You are fevered. You should have told me."

His chuckle seemed to mock her terror. "My love," he said. "My own little innocent. I am the big bad wolf in your bed, I am afraid."

She understood instantly. She lowered her hand and was glad of the darkness. She felt mortified.

"Adèle," he said, "you married me to nurse me to my death. I know you love me, sweetheart. I know, too, that you did not expect this ever to be a normal marriage, a consummated marriage. Perhaps you never wanted it to be. And if you still do not, I will respect your wishes. I will be forever grateful for the selfless love you showed in marrying me. But if you do not want it, you are going to have to remove yourself from my bed now or sooner-and stay away. You do understand me, do you not?"

She felt such a deep stabbing of longing that she did not believe she would be able to speak if she tried. But she did try.

"Yes," she whispered.

"Or I can move to another room," he said. "There is no reason why it should be you, is there, merely because this is called the master bedchamber?''

"Don't go," she said, clutching his nightshirt. "Stay with me. Make me your wife. Oh, please, John, make me your wife."

She was frantic with need then. She had expected to die a maid. She had thought about it and accepted it as a consequence of her devotion to him. She would never marry again after he had gone. She had decided that and had never felt any doubt that it was a decision she would never want to revoke. There could never be anyone else after John. Never.

And now-there was to be John?

When his mouth came back to hers, she opened her own eagerly and waited for what was to happen. She knew-even the cold reason in her knew-that it was going to be the very happiest night in her whole life.

He had woken up wanting her-and knowing that he was now strong enough to have her. But the matter was not as simple as merely reaching for her and taking her. He was not quite sure he had the right. Was he really her husband? In body certainly he was and in mind he half was-more than half. As the days went by he found himself thinking more and more as the Regency John. But the other one- the twentieth-century John Chandler-was still there. Which one was he, exactly? Which one would he be for the rest of his life?

He had just become engaged to Allison. He had had a number of women between the ages of seventeen and twenty-eight, but he had committed himself to fidelity when he had agreed to marry Allison. Was it right to sleep now with Adèle?

But she was his wife.

And he knew that if he had to go back to the twentieth century he would not be able to marry Allison after all. He thought with grim humor of the reason he would have to give her if he was going to be honest. He could not marry her because he was in love with a woman almost two hundred years old.

Adèle was a virgin. With his Regency self he had no doubt of that, even though his other self might have taken for granted that at the age of twenty-four she must have had a few lovers. Was it right that he be the one to make love to her first? Who would be doing it? But he knew the answer to that. It would be her husband. He was her husband.

But what if the other John came back as sick as he had been? Would it be better for her not to have known the consummation? And what if he left her pregnant?

But he knew that John Chandler, Viscount Cordell, had not died so soon. And he knew that the two of them had had children. Was it his own history he had learned? Or was it another man's? He felt dizzy again, realizing that he was seriously considering such a question.

It was his desire and his indecision that had driven him out of bed to pace for a while. He had decided to wait, to let more time pass, to be more sure that he was here to stay. But then he had had that brief coughing spell as he was about to slip back into bed, and she had woken up.

She was small and well-shaped without being in any way voluptuous. Every part of her was nicely in proportion with every other part. He had noticed that with pleasure since the first time he woke up to her in his bed. Now he noticed it with desire.

She was virgin and innocent and totally inexperienced. He had known that from the start. She had not even known how to kiss sexually. And now she lay still and passive, obviously not knowing either what to do or what exactly was about to happen to her. But there was a willingness and a longing in her stillness, even an eagerness. He could tell that. She wanted what was to happen. With him. Because she loved him.

He was fiercely glad that it was not the other John loving her tonight. Only he could give her everything there was to give. Only he could give her the whole of himself.

He found her inexperience wholly endearing and not a little exciting. She had thought he had a fever… And then her embarrassment at realizing the truth had been almost palpable.

He undid the buttons that held her nightdress closed to the throat and opened back the edges. He touched her breasts one at a time, stroking them lightly, cupping them, rubbing his thumb very gently across the nipples, pulsing lightly against them. And while he did so, he leaned his head back from hers so that he could watch her face in the faint light from the window. She looked back until her eyelids fluttered closed and she made soft sounds of pleasure.

She was exquisitely feminine. He had to close his own eyes for a few moments in order to bring his desire under control. He did not intend to do anything with her tonight that might shock her too deeply. He intended only basic foreplay and a more lengthy union of their bodies. But he certainly did not want to rush anything. He wanted to give her pleasure, and more than pleasure. He wanted her to feel herself loved and cherished and worshiped and-married.

He kissed her mouth, her cheeks, her temples, her eyes, her ears. He closed his teeth over one earlobe and felt her shiver. He lowered his mouth to her breasts, drawing the nipples one at a time into his mouth and sucking as he wanted his child to do in nine months or so. And he took her nightgown with both hands and moved it down and off her arms and down her body until he could toss it to one side. He pulled off his own nightshirt and sent it to join her nightdress.

"Don't be embarrassed," he said, drawing her back into his arms. "You are so very beautiful, Adèle, and I did promise at our wedding to worship you with my body, did I not?"

"I am not embarrassed," she said. "I want you to see me, John. I want you to touch me. I want you to know me. I want to feel you i-inside me. That is what happens, is it not?"

He had to draw a slow, steadying breath before answering. "Deep inside," he murmured against her ear. "Where we will share bodies and beget children. Where we will be husband and wife together."

He moved his hand over her as he spoke, feeling the small waist, the feminine curve of her hip, the firm, shapely buttock. He slipped his hand into the warmth between her legs, parting the folds with gentle fingers-stroking, probing slowly, giving her time to master the shock that had been indicated by a sharply indrawn breath, and to relax again.

"Mm," he said, his mouth against hers. "Wonderful. You are warm and wet. No, don't tense. It is as you should be. Your body has readied itself so that we can unite without discomfort."

But he knew there would be pain for her. He had no experience with virgins. He hoped he could be careful enough. It would not be easy. He was on fire for her.

She did not help him. She looked up at him as he turned her onto her back and lifted himself over her. But she did not hinder him either. She let him push her legs wide astride his and she slid her feet up the bed when he whispered the suggestion to her. She watched him steadily as he positioned himself and mounted her very slowly.

The passage was small and tight. He could feel his heart beating in his throat and in his ears. He ignored two warring urges-one to withdraw lest he hurt her, the other to thrust mindlessly inward for release-and opened her as gently as he could. He felt the barrier and saw the pain of it in her face as she closed her eyes and bit her lower lip. But then it was gone and he moved inward to his full length.

He had never really thought before of sex as a uniting of bodies. He thought of it now. It was as if he had fitted himself to the missing part of himself. It was a magnificent, heady feeling, despite the fact that he was still fully aroused and pulsing with the need to thrust himself to climax.

Her eyes had opened again. He kept most of his weight on his forearms.

"Am I hurting you?" he whispered.

"There could be no happier moment than this," she said. "If only I could keep you here forever and ever."

He smiled at her. And he held still in her, allowing her body to accustom itself to the stretching and the invasion, allowing her mind to adjust to this new status of her being. Then he withdrew slowly.

Her hands pressed against his waist. "Oh, not yet," she said. "Must it end so soon?"

He lowered his head and kissed her softly. "It is beginning," he said to her. "I am going to love you, Adèle. Relax and enjoy it. Or if you want to move, if there is anything you wish to do for your pleasure, do it. We are together-not master and servant, but man and wife. We are both lover and we are both beloved."

"Oh," she said, "I am so ignorant. There was no one to tell me… I did not expect… Oh!"

He had pushed firmly back into her.

He had always been an energetic lover and he had always had experienced, uninhibited women. That was true of both his persons. He had always been able to take his own pleasure in the confident knowledge that his woman would take her equal share. It had always been two separate people taking pleasure from each other. Even with Allison.

Having to think of someone else, having to remember that this was all new to her, having to hold back his own pleasure so that she would remember her first experience with joy-it was all paradoxically erotic. He had never desired as much as he did now; he had never enjoyed as much as he did now. And he had never before now, he realized, made love. He had had sex-marvelously satisfying sex in many cases, but never more than that.

He made love to Adèle.

He moved slowly at first so that her body could learn the beauty of rhythm. When the insides of her thighs pressed more firmly against his and her pelvis tilted to allow him greater depth, he moved faster, pumping deeply into warm, moist depths, almost delirious with his knowledge of her- biblical knowledge. He had never before thought of the term while having sex.

Despite the weakness of his body, he used a strength and a control he had not thought himself capable of, working steadily in her until her hands spread over his buttocks and her legs twined about his and she closed her inner muscles about him. She was making soft guttural noises.

Then he slowed, deepened even further, coaxed her to the orgasm he could feel coming, held firm in her while it came and blossomed about his hardness-and while she shuddered into quiet fulfillment. He reached his own climax swiftly, urgently, blessedly, and let his seed gush deep inside her. His body had become one pulse, it seemed. He relaxed down onto her.

She was crying helplessly, with deep, painful sobs, a minute or two later. He drew free of her body, rolled to her side, gathered her to him, and pulled the blankets over their sweat-dampened bodies. He smoothed one hand through her hair, kissed her tears, made soothing, shushing noises.

She was his wife. They had been one as he had never imagined two people could be one. He knew why she was crying. He was not alarmed.

"One body," he said to her. "We know what that means now, do we not?"

"John." His name was almost an agony on her lips. "What have I ever done that God has been so good to me?"

"At the risk of being sacrilegious," he said, kissing her nose, "I do not believe God had much to do with that."

"Oh, but He did," she said earnestly. "John. Do you know just how ill you were? Do you know that just a few weeks ago I thought the pinnacle of human happiness would be to have your name? That I wished for nothing else-nothing!-except the privilege of holding you in my arms until you d-" She choked on the word. "I would have thought myself well-blessed. I did think it when you agreed to marry me-I never expected that you would. Our wedding day was the happiest day of my life. I never expected-oh, I never expected marriage."

"It is what you have, nevertheless," he said, finding her mouth with his. "And what you will have for years and years to come, God willing. You had better get used to it. Once or twice a night for the next fifty years or so, not to mention the days-do you like the sound of it? Or will it become one of those wifely chores that women have to endure in exchange for the respectability of marriage?"

She giggled-he loved the way Adèle could giggle without sounding in any way childish but only gloriously joyful. "Only for fifty years?" she asked. "But twice, John? Is it possible?"

"Perhaps not for another week or two," he admitted, grinning. "I must confess to feeling close to exhaustion. But after another week or two… You had better prepare yourself."

Being Adèle, she had caught only one thing he had said. She moved closer, getting slightly above his level as she did so. She drew his arm away from her neck and put her own arm beneath his instead. She drew down his head to pillow it on her breast while her free hand smoothed gently through his hair.

"Sleep, my dearest love," she said. "No more talking. You are exhausted."

"Yes, ma'am," he said, feeling deliciously warm and comfortable and sleepy. "But it was in a very good cause, you know."

"Sh," she said, "and don't be foolish."

He was smiling as he slid into sleep.

She had always wanted to be John's wife. Certainly she had always known that she would never be any man's wife if she could not be his. But there had been a few years- perhaps about five after the age of fifteen, when she had actively dreamed of what marriage with him would be like. It had always been dream rather than hope. By that time he had been away from home a great deal and had treated her only with a careless sort of affection when he was home-except perhaps for that kiss on her seventeenth birthday.

And by the time she was fifteen she had understood the difference in their stations. He was the heir to a viscount's title and properties and fortune-he inherited when she was eighteen on the death of his father. She was the eighth and youngest child of a gentleman of no particular fortune or importance. When she was nineteen a great-aunt had taken her to town for a month of the Season. She had hated it. She had felt out of her depth surrounded by such wealthy and important people. And she had seen that John was a great favorite-and that he had something of a reputation as a rake.

The year after that he was ill.

Dreams-which she had never expected to become reality-had given way to despair. She would not be able to bear a world without John in it.

And then the dream had become a different one. One that had come achingly true just a few weeks ago. It had been such a narrow dream. She had not asked for much. She had been more grateful than she had ever been able to put into words for what she had been given. She had not been greedy.

Now the dream had expanded again like a glorious explosion of light, and she was happy beyond thought. And afraid.

The disease had gone. There seemed no doubt about it now. Although he had not seen a physician and she did not suggest it to him, she knew that he was getting better. She knew it no longer just with faith but with certainty. Every day he was stronger. Although he was still very thin, he was noticeably putting on weight and acquiring a healthy color. There were no more fevers and no more coughed blood. His eyes no longer looked on death but on life.

They walked now every day on the beach, sometimes almost briskly. They climbed the hills, pausing for breath as much for her sake as for his. They talked and read and wrote letters to their numerous brothers and sisters and to her mama and papa. They even argued-usually about the wisdom and comfort of leaving windows open. Those arguments always ended the same way. If she was chilly, he always said, grabbing her, she would just have to submit to being warmed-but not by closing the windows.

They made love so often-by night and by day-that sometimes her cheeks could become flushed just thinking about it and wondering if it was normal and proper. She decided that if it was not, she did not care for normality or propriety. On the few occasions when she hinted that he should not exhaust himself, he would laugh and tell her that she could cuddle him afterward as she had done that first time.

Making love, she had discovered, was a process that was taking a very long time to learn. Every time there was something new and something different. He was surely the best teacher in the world, though he claimed sometimes- she did not know how it could be-that he was also a pupil, that she was teaching him dimensions of the art he had never dreamed of before.

Making love, she had decided, was the most wonderful bonding experience imaginable. She could not understand how any two people could do those things when they were not married or even particularly devoted to each other. She could not imagine the pleasure being divorced from the love and the commitment and the union of hearts and souls.

As she had expected after their walk to Awelfa, they soon had company. People for miles around with any claim to gentility left their cards and returned for tea and conversation. The calls had to be returned. They issued a few invitations to dinner and cards. They accepted a few similar invitations. The dance at the assembly rooms above the tavern in the village was approaching and John seemed determined that they would go-and dance.

Adèle was more happy than she had known it was possible to be. She had had a month of married life when she had expected a few days, a week or two at most, of nursing a dying man.

But reaction was beginning to set in. Happiness had always been something to dream of, not something to be lived. She began to be afraid of happiness. What if, after all, he was merely going through a respite in his illness? What if there should be a sudden relapse and death? Could she bear it now that she had let down her defenses, now that she had tasted what life with him could be?

It was a fear she tried to ignore. If it was to be so, there was nothing she could do to prevent it merely by worrying about it. And surely if she did not live to the fullest now, she would forever regret it should she be left alone and grieving for the rest of her life.

Other fears were more nebulous, but they nibbled away at the edges of her happiness with equal relentlessness. He would tire of Cartref soon despite what he had said when he first began to recover. The house was small by the standards of his main home. There were not many families of his own social standing in the area. They were far from any social center. They had been in Wales for a month. He was going to be bored soon and restless. John had always been restless. And now, day by day, his energy was returning.

She feared that when they returned to England she would lose him. She had nothing with which to hold him except her love and her devotion to him. They had never been quite enough. She knew that in the normal course of events, if he had not been ill, he never would have thought of her in terms of marriage. He would tire of her. She had no doubt that he would always be kind to her, that he would always feel an affection for her, that he would always guard her from hurt. But she could picture how their life would develop. She would live in the country. He would join her there for a few weeks several times a year. For the rest of the time he would live in London or some other fashionable center. He would have mistresses, whom she would know about, though no one would ever tell her and he would protect her carefully from ever finding out.

They would tell each other and themselves that the arrangement suited them both.

She did not believe she would be able to accept such a life after this month of living and of loving. But she would have to accept it. She would have no choice.

She dressed for the assembly with a mingling of excitement and wariness. She had always loved dances, except perhaps the few ton balls she had attended in London with her great-aunt. And yet she feared that John would find this one unsatisfying and would begin to have a hankering to return to his old life.

She was wearing her wedding dress of silver gauze over white satin, with the pearls John had given her as a wedding present. She fingered them dreamily as her maid put the finishing touches to her hair. She remembered how she had felt when he had given them to her-the one and only gift she would ever receive from him. She had realized how she would prize them for the rest of her life.

There was a tap on her dressing room door and he stepped inside and held the door open to allow her maid to leave.

"Ah," he said, his eyes wandering over her after he had closed the door again. "Your wedding clothes, Adèle." He frowned for a moment. “Was I really that sick? It is almost hard to remember already. I thought you must be a harbinger of the angels who I hoped would soon be meeting me on the other side."

She bit her lip and felt the tears spring to her eyes.

"The pearls look good on you," he said. "Your 'something new' for your wedding." He smiled and stepped close enough to lift her left hand. He looked down at her rings. "And your something old and something blue." He frowned again, then, and paused for a while, thinking. "I have said that before-just recently."

"You said it the day before our wedding, when you put it on my finger," she said.

He continued to frown for a moment longer and then shook his head and smiled. "Yes, of course," he said. "And it was the something borrowed, too-yours for life and then to return to the family treasures."

He raised her hand and kissed the ring, and then turned her hand over to kiss her palm and her wrist.

"Did I tell you on our wedding day how beautiful you were?" he asked.

The tears were back again. "You were very ill," she said, "and using all your energy to try not to look it."

"I shall tell you now, then," he said, setting his fingertips against her cheek and bending to touch his lips to hers. "You are the most beautiful woman in the world, Adèle- in your wedding gown and without it." He grinned at her, looking quite like the old handsome John. "Especially without it."

She blushed. It seemed rather foolish to her that she could still blush at such words after two weeks of continual and quite uninhibited intimacies.

"I like making you do that," he said. "Are you planning to get up from that stool tonight, or shall I have the horses and the carriage returned to the stables? Horses and carriage-a slow and quaint method of travel, but very romantic."

She stood and picked up her shawl and fan. “That was a strange thing to say," she said. "Quaint?"

"Yes, it was strange, was it not?" he said, rubbing two fingers from the bridge of his nose to his hairline and back, and frowning once more. "I have been having strange dreams. I do not know what I was thinking. Are you ready?"

"Yes." She smiled at him. He was dressed in blue and silver and white. He had not yet, of course, regained his former splendid physique. Perhaps it would be months before that happened. But even so he looked splendidly handsome to her. "John, you look-gorgeous."

"Thank you, ma'am." He chuckled and made her an elegant bow as he offered his arm. "A gorgeous cadaver, perhaps. But gaining flesh at a steady rate. My valet has hopes of having to squeeze me into my clothes rather as into a second skin before too many months have passed. He despises being able to slide me into them with such ease."

She laughed and took his arm. She was going to put fear behind her, she decided. For now at least there were health and happiness to be celebrated. And an assembly to be enjoyed. And it seemed-it was-so ungrateful to be afraid.

He was going to waltz with her. She had never waltzed before, though she had learned the dance and had watched it being performed. And she had dreamed…

Tonight he was going to waltz with her.

He thought of Allison during the carriage journey to Awelfa. While he did so, he held Adèle's hand in both of his and played with her ring, twisting it with a forefinger and thumb.

How could he have forgotten even for a moment when it was he had spoken those words last? He had spoken them to Allison as he put the ring on her finger. He could remember it clearly now-though he could also remember saying the same words to Adèle the day before their wedding-God, he had been feeling ill.

He had to concentrate very hard to remember Allison's face. He knew she was tall and slender and elegant and blond. But he could not quite bring her face into focus. He thought of his car as the carriage lurched rather uncomfortably over the far from smooth track-calling it a romantic mode of travel had not been altogether accurate. All he could remember for the moment was that his car was red. He could not for the life of him remember what make or model it was. Allison had once accused him, half seriously, of loving his car more than he loved her. Yet he could not recall even the make of the car? Or her face?

He looked at Adèle, quiet and apparently relaxed beside him, though he knew that she was bubbling with suppressed excitement at the prospect of the assembly. He thought back on her as a child and as a girl and found the memories clear and detailed and filled with emotion. He had always adored her. He had not even realized that fully until now. His father had warned him against falling in love with her. His father had been more ambitious for his eldest son. And it was true that he had had wild oats to sow and had sown them with great energy and enthusiasm. But surely he had always known that there was only Adèle.

Or perhaps it was only his near-death experience that had shown him how precious love is, how unimportant in this life are anything and everything else but love.

Only Adèle mattered.

He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. "A penny for them," he said.

She looked up with luminous eyes, which she was trying to keep quiet and dignified. He knew her so well. He knew her thoughts. Adèle had always been a part of himself, the uncompleted part of himself until he had married her and united his body and his heart with hers.

"I have never waltzed," she said. "Perhaps I will disgrace you."

He smiled slowly at her. "You dance beautifully," he said.

"You have never seen me dance," she said. "We have never danced together."

"We have," he said quietly. He wished the carriage were not dark inside. He wanted to see her blush. "We move together perfectly. We always share the same perfect rhythm."

She looked at him blankly for a moment. And then he saw comprehension light her eyes. "John," she whispered. "Oh, for shame."

He lowered his head and kissed her. "As I thought," he said. "I cannot see the blushes. But your cheeks feel fiery hot."

"For shame," she said again. "Where are your manners, sir?"

But he knew she was pleased. She always called him "sir" when she was pleased.

He wondered suddenly how it was he had recovered from his consumption. He did not know of anyone else who had done so. For what sort of miracle had he been singled out? And why? It must have been done as a reward for Adèle's goodness. Certainly there was nothing he had done in his life to deserve such a reprieve. And then he felt dizzy- and remembered exactly what the miracle had been. Except that it seemed too fantastic and too bizarre to be believed. Had it really happened?

Their arrival at the assembly rooms was greeted with avid curiosity and great enthusiasm. The assemblies were open to everyone, he and Adèle had been told, there not being enough people of the upper classes to make them worth holding. There was a certain charm, he thought, about mingling with people of all classes, about watching groups of farm laborers performing an energetic and intricate Welsh folk dance, and about hearing the Welsh and English languages mingling in the conversations about them.

Not many of those present knew the steps of the waltz. Only two other couples apart from him and Adèle took the floor when the dance was announced. Everyone else gathered about to watch the new dance, which was reputed to be somewhat scandalous. Adèle looked rather alarmed.

There had been a time, he thought as the music started, when he had waltzed as an excuse to get a female body against his own-a body that he hoped to put beneath his own on the bed at his flat after the dance was over. He could not for the moment remember when that time could have been. But now he danced the waltz as it was meant to be danced, keeping Adèle at arm's length from his body, twirling her to the steps of the dance about the perimeter of the ballroom.

There were murmurs of appreciation from the nondancers, a smattering of applause. There was the exhilation of moving to music and no thought for the moment of his weakness. And there was the beauty and grace of his partner. She soon forgot her alarm at having to waltz for the first time before an audience. She kept her eyes on his and followed his lead as if she were a part of him.

He forgot the audience. He forgot their surroundings. He forgot they were waltzing. They danced together as they made love-in perfect rhythm, in perfect harmony, a world and a universe unto themselves.

He loved her. He had always loved her-from the beginning of time, it seemed. She was part of him, more a part of him than his own heart. Closer than that. She was all that was good in him, all that was loving.

It was over too soon. He was dazed when the music stopped and he realized that he had been merely waltzing with her in the assembly rooms at Awelfa. She was flushed and bright-eyed and so beautiful that he found himself looking around jealously at all the other men present.

She is mine, he foolishly wanted to warn them all.

"John." She stepped a little closer to him as a crescendo of applause and laughter greeted their efforts and those of the other two couples. "You are tired. Sit down for a while."

"Yes, little guardian angel," he said, grinning at her. But she was quite right, of course. His energy was not yet boundless.

He spent an interesting hour sitting and talking with a group of men on a variety of topics, including the state of farming in West Wales and the dangers of the coast for navigation. There was great need for lighthouses and other warning devices in the area, it seemed. Adèle-he scarcely took his eyes off her all the time-talked and laughed with other women and danced one quadrille with a portly tenant farmer who had two left feet and no musical sense at all. Yet she smiled at him throughout the set with sweet charm.

She was at home in this sort of place with this sort of people, he thought. As was he. The thought surprised him. He had always loved the country, but he had always been restless and eager to get back to the bustle and the sophistication of town life. He felt no such eagerness now. He still felt, as he had felt a few weeks ago, that he could stay here forever. Provided Adèle was here, his whole world was here. And perhaps there would be children. Now where had he heard recently that there would indeed be children? Who had predicted something so unpredictable?

But of course he knew it himself. He knew it from his own studies of family history. He found himself frowning. How could he have studied the future? But then it was not the future he had studied. It was the past. He was from the second half of the twentieth century. How could such a momentous fact keep slipping away from him?

It was long past midnight when he and Adèle finally rode home. She curled up against him on the carriage seat when he set an arm about her shoulders, and yawned.

"Sleepy?" he asked, rubbing his cheek against her hair.

"Mm," she said. And then she sat up hastily. "But you are the one who must be tired, John."

He chuckled and brought her head back where it belonged. "Did you enjoy the evening?" he asked.

"Yes," she said. "Everyone was kind and very friendly. Mrs. Beynon was trying to teach me some Welsh. But everyone went off into peals of merriment at something I repeated after her. I dared not ask what it was I had actually said." She giggled.

He yawned.

"John," she said, spreading a hand on his chest. "It must have seemed quite pathetic in comparison with ton balls. Did you find it very-provincial?"

He understood her insecurities far better than she realized. He had taken Adèle and her constant, unconditional love so much for granted in the past. He had given her no such constancy in return.

"I have never enjoyed a ball as much as tonight's," he said, shrugging his shoulder so that he could touch her lips with his own. "Because you were there with me, Adèle. Because all evening long I could feast my eyes on you and tell myself that you were mine."

"Oh." Her lips formed the shape of the word against his. He felt the warm exhalation of her breath.

He kissed her.

Sometimes, he thought, he could almost persuade himself that he had died and gone to heaven after all-only to find her there before him, waiting for him so that she could love him for all eternity.

And so that he could love her for an equal length of time.

He was going to bathe in the ocean. It was a dreadful thing to do, because the ocean water was always cold and there were always waves and breakers to take one unawares. He was just asking to catch a chill. He was so very much better-full of new strength and vigor, slender still but no longer painfully thin. But there was no point in tempting fate.

She told him all that and more until she was afraid of sounding like a nagging wife and he grabbed her and kissed her soundly and told her that was the only treatment a scold deserved. And he laughed at her-he dared to do that-his eyes sparkling with merriment and affection.

He took three large towels with him. She went, too, but she made it perfectly clear that he was to get no fancy ideas. Why did he need three towels? He bent his head and kissed her when they were still well within sight of the house and any servants who happened to be looking after them.

"Because I did not think I would need five," he said.

Sometimes he talked such nonsense. "Thank you, sir," she said. "I should have thought of that for myself."

They were going to walk along the beach and around the headland so that they would be out of sight of prying eyes. The tide was out again and it was possible to walk past the headland.

"It is the best place to go, then," she told him. "Only I will see your foolishness."

He laughed at her again. And then he grew serious. She could feel his eyes on her. "Adèle," he said, "I am going to tell you something. A story. A true story. It is the strangest, most bizarre thing you will have ever heard and you may well have me carted off to Bedlam when you have heard it. But I have decided that you should know-that everything I know you should know too."

He was going to make a confession. He was going to tell her about all the whores and mistresses he had ever had. So that he could clear his conscience and lay the burden of knowledge on her shoulders. She did not want to hear it.

"No," he said gently, squeezing her hand. "It is not that kind of story, love. It is the explanation of how this miracle happened. I know, you see. I know the how. I do not know the why. I think you have something to do with that. Your unfailing love, your devotion, your willingness to accept uncomplainingly whatever of life was offered you. But you can be the judge of that."

He knew how the miracle had happened? Had he been taking some strange new medicine that she had not seen and knew nothing of? She looked at him with eager inquiry. "Tell me," she said.

"After the swim," he said. "We will lie quietly on the beach and I will tell you."

She hated having her curiosity piqued and not satisfied. But it was something important. He wanted the moment to be right.

Finally they reached a point on the beach at which they could not be seen either from the house or from the road. He dropped the towels and began to undress, looking out with narrowed eyes to the water. It was a hot day. Even the breeze off the ocean was warm. She watched him strip down to his long drawers. Lean. That was how he looked now. Lean and healthy and handsome.

"You like looking at me?" he asked.

Despite herself she blushed. But she looked steadily back into his eyes. "Yes," she said. "Very much."

"I like looking at you too," he said.

The look in his eyes alerted her and she took a hasty step back. "No ideas, I said," she told him, holding out one staying hand.

But he was laughing and stepped easily past her defenses. Her bonnet went first and her hairpins, then her dress, and then her slippers and stockings. She was standing on the open beach in just her shift.

"John," she said, shocked.

"Much better," he said, looking at her.

"I shall sit here and watch you," she said hastily, trying to suit action to words. "I shall wrap-"

But she had suddenly lost contact with the warm sand of the beach. He had swung her up into his arms and was grinning at her like-oh, like a foolish, immature schoolboy.

"John," she scolded as he turned and set off for the water, ' 'put me down. You are not strong enough. Oh, you will not be content until you have done yourself an injury, will you?"

His feet were splashing in water. She felt one stray drop on her bare leg. It felt like a droplet of ice.

"John." She clung more tightly. "Don't. It is like ice. This is most indecent. You talked of forfeits once. Let me pay a forfeit. What would you like? A kiss?" She was desperate for him to take her seriously, though the effect of her plea was marred somewhat, she had to admit, by the fact that she was giggling helplessly.

"I would not let you fall in the water, my love," he said when he was waist-deep and had to hold her higher. "Trust me." He grinned into her face. "Kiss me."

She did so.

"Of course," he said, "you have been right all along. I do not have nearly as much strength as I thought I had."

Concern was just beginning to register on her face and on her mind when he dropped her. He was laughing like an imbecile when she came up gasping and sputtering and coughing. She found her footing with difficulty and went straight to the attack. The first great spray of water took him full in the face. She would have laughed with glee if she had finished mastering the shock of the cold. Instead she threw herself backward on the water and swam away from him.

And then he was beside her, matching her stroke for stroke, examining the blue sky above them and the few fluffy clouds, as she was doing. She remembered his teaching her to swim when she was five years old and terrified of water. He had taught her how to put her head under and how to open her eyes-and then he had taught her all the rest. He had been nine years old-totally dependable, totally adult.

"You wretch," she said when they were standing again in water that reached almost to her shoulders. "John, that was a dreadful thing to do." But she was putting her arms up about his shoulders and leaning her body against his and lifting her face for his kiss.

"John, you wretch," she whispered again, shocked, after a minute or so when she felt his hands hoisting her shift to her waist. He lifted her in the water, parting her legs to wrap about him. He was inside her with one firm thrust.

It took very little time. The mix of buoyancy and cool water and heat at their core was delirious. It seemed that the lessons would never end. There was always something new.

He floated onto his back when they were finished, and she swam beside him in a lazy crawl.

"You are going to be tired," she could not resist saying.

"No future tense about it," he admitted, smiling lazily at her. "Shall we go back to the towels?"

"Yes," she said. "We can lie there drying off in the sun and you can tell me your story."

They walked hand in hand up the beach. She knew he was tired. But it was the tiredness of healthy exertion. After he had told his story, she would let him sleep and she would stay awake to make sure that they did not bake too much in the sun.

He had decided to tell her his story. There should be no secrets in marriage, he thought, except perhaps details of one's past that could only hurt. She should know that the John who had recovered from consumption and consummated their marriage and lived with her ever since was not quite the same John she had loved all her life and married.

Perhaps she would not believe him. But he thought she probably would. She loved him and trusted him enough to know when he spoke truth to her.

Their flesh had chilled in the walk up the beach. They toweled off briskly and then he spread the dry towel on the sand so that they could lie down and relax after their swim and their lovemaking and be warmed by the sun. He held her hand in his, turning her ring between his thumb and forefinger. Life was very good, he thought, and had been very kind to them.

"John," she said, "don't fall asleep yet. You have a story to tell me."

"And so I do." He turned his head to smile at her.

"Well?" she said after he had been silent for a few moments.

He had had a story to tell her. Something important. Something he had felt she had a right to know. He frowned. His mind was a blank. "I cannot remember," he said.

"Don't tease." She shook his hand. "Tell me. It had something to do with the miracle that has happened to you."

"Oh, yes, of course," he said. Yes. It explained the how, he had told her earlier, but not the why. He knew the why. But what on earth was the how? "I-It has gone. It could not have been very important if it has gone, could it?"

She was gazing at him, her head turned to one side. "How did it happen, John?" she said. "You had consumption. In its final stages. You were coughing blood. It was a miracle. Nothing else could have saved you. How did it happen?''

How? He knew how it had happened. He concentrated hard and had fleeting images of her ring in a velvet pouch and of his being afraid to touch it; of a red horseless carriage; of a blond woman. Disjointed, meaningless images that would not form themselves into any graspable thought. And then he knew again. Of course. He looked at her in some relief.

"I have remembered now," he said. "It is this place, Adèle. When you were kind enough to marry me, to saddle yourself with a dying man, I had just one thought in my mind. I had to come here with you. It was madness. I had no strength left. I had only a few weeks left at most. But I knew that I had to come here. That if I brought you here the miracle would happen. I knew it. I had to come here with you as my wife and you had to be wearing the family betrothal ring. I swear I knew it. It is this place, you see."

Her eyes had filled with tears. Two of them spilled over and ran diagonally across her cheeks as he watched. "I knew it too," she whispered. "I thought you would die on the journey, John. You were so very weak, so very ill. But I knew that if I could only get you here to Cartref all would be well."

"The world would think us mad if we offered this as an explanation," he said.

"The world may think what it will," she said.

"Adèle." He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed the ring. "I know that for many years I was too busy to love you as you deserved to be loved. I had to be near death to understand how far more precious than anyone or anything else in my life you are. Will you stay here with me for the rest of our lives? Will you work with me here in this neighborhood? There is much we can do. There is a lighthouse to build, for one. Will you have our children here and bring them up with me here?"

Her eyes were soft and huge with wistfulness and love. "You will miss England," she said. "And London. You were always restless."

"No longer," he said. "I am where I belong and where I want to be-for the rest of my life. Why leave heaven merely to go back to earth?"

He saw final surrender in her eyes then to faith and trust and love. She finally believed in him. It was the greatest gift she could have given him. Though he almost changed his mind a few moments later.

"John," she said softly. "About those children. I think-I am not quite sure, but I think I am with child."

For all the heat of the sun beating down on their bodies then, he took her into his arms and held her close. He kept his eyes tight shut. He did not know how the miracle had happened or why. But it had happened. He had been given the gift of a new life and he was going to give back the gift of love for the rest of his life. Every day of it.

"My love," he whispered to her before drifting toward sleep. "Ah, my love."

"Some grand engagement day this is turning out to be," she said as he was waking up. "You fell asleep, John. How totally humiliating to have had that effect on a man." But there was laughter in her voice to temper the words.

Yes, he had been fast asleep. The first thing that struck him as he came floating up to the surface again was that he felt different. Totally different. Unaware of his body, unaware of his breathing, unaware of his weakness, almost as if he were healthy again. Or as if-as if he had died and was waking up to a new world.

He was healthy. There was sudden conviction in the thought and his eyes shot open.

He found himself gazing into Allison's accusing-and amused-eyes.

He knew her name. He knew her. He reached back cautiously and a little fearfully into memory and found that he had a memory that was not quite his own.

"Heavenly days," she said, "you must have been very fast asleep. Where were you? A million miles away?"

A million miles? Two hundred years, actually. He had fallen asleep in Adèle's arms. He had been very close to death. He had known that. He had wished he had the energy to tell her how much he appreciated what she had done for him, marrying him, surrounding him with her love so that he might die in peace. And yet, honest within himself, he had known that his own love, though real, was no match for hers. He had always loved her tenderly but without passion. Dear, gentle Adèle.

"Something like that," he said, turning onto his side, turning onto the tall, slender body of Allison-who was his fiancée. "Actually I was building energy. And don't try contempt on me again. You were sleeping too. It was a long journey." He was able to remember the journey and at the same time think of it in amazement. A red sports car-no horses. London to Cardiganshire in one day. Wow! What had the world come to?

"Energy." She set her arms about him and wriggled her legs out from under him, one on either side of his. She pulsed suggestively beneath him and smiled at him from half-closed eyes. "Interesting. Proof necessary. Lawyers are always armed with proof."

Energy. He felt his strength and vitality with something bordering awe. It had seemed an eternity since he had been able to do anything-even lifting an arm-without having to gather every last ounce of energy for the effort. And it had been an eternity-or two hundred years anyway.

They dispensed with clothes in a frenzied, undignified rush and made love on a gust of energetic and impassioned lust. He had never enjoyed making love more.

But then, he realized while they lay together afterward, panting and relaxing and smiling at each other, and while he found her hand and played with her ring with one thumb and forefinger, he had never loved anyone as he loved Allison. She was the perfect mate for him-as energetic and as restless and as ambitious as he. And as much in need as he of the anchor of love-married love.

"John," she whispered to him. "Without meaning to be in any way critical of past performances, I would have to say that that was by far the greatest. There were fireworks. And symphonies-with loads of percussion."

"I shall try an encore later," he said. "After dinner. Are you hungry?"

"Ravenous," she said.

He had eaten nothing but gruels and liquids for longer than he could remember, though he was also able to recall the vegetable curry he had eaten on the road from London earlier in the day.

"For food?" he asked her, leering at her. "Or for-"

She punched him none too gently in the stomach. "For food," she said. "But then later-dessert, please, sir."

Adèle called him "sir" when she was feeling light-hearted and pleased with him. It had not happened a great deal lately. Poor Adèle. Had he really died and been reincarnated? Was she grieving for him? He knew that Adèle would grieve in her own quiet, accepting way for the rest of her life. But that had been two hundred years ago.

And then, as he was tidying himself, ready to go down for dinner at the Cartref Hotel, he remembered something- with the memory of the twentieth-century John Chandler. The Regency Viscount Cordell and his wife had lived a long life here at Cartref. They had had children. He must have recovered from his consumption, then. He felt dizzy for a moment. Was he going to go back? Soon? He felt guilty, hoping not.

He was very deeply in love with Allison, he realized. He felt as if he always had been-or with the idea of her before he actually met her two months ago.

All that had been a week ago. They had spent their week in Cardiganshire on a sort of trial honeymoon, as they frequently told each other, laughing. But they had not spent all of it wandering the beaches and hills as he had intended when they came. They had zoomed all about West Wales in his car, seeing the countryside and the places worth seeing, like St. David's Cathedral and Pembroke Castle, sampling the quaint restaurants and pubs they passed on country lanes.

They had done one thing they had planned to do when they came, though-many things, actually. They had made love enough to exhaust them both for a year, they had agreed on one occasion before going at it again. He was going to have to make an honest woman of her soon, they had both agreed, too.

In fact, all week they had seemed to be in total agreement over everything. In total harmony with each other.

He was afraid at first that he was going to have to go back. He was afraid every time he woke up that he would find himself desperately ill again with Adèle nursing him with her selfless love.

He knew why he was healthy, of course. This John Chandler was strong and healthy and resistant to tuberculosis. And he knew what must have happened-what he hoped had happened. John Chandler-the twentieth-century one-had taken his place, taking his virtual immunity to the disease with him. He had recovered and lived with Adèle for many years.

Had he felt trapped in the past? Had he been bitter about the separation from Allison? About having to give up all the conveniences of late-twentieth-century living? Or had he found happiness with Adèle? Looking back into the memory of his new persona, John discovered that the other man had been having some niggling doubts about his commitment to Allison. It seemed that he had been unsure about his lifestyle being quite compatible with hers.

They were leaving at the end of the week. They were taking one last stroll on the beach before starting back. It was early. The air was cool, with the promise of heat later.

"Now the weather turns perfect," he said. "When it is time to go home." He stopped walking, her hand in his, and gazed out at the old lighthouse. It was still used, they had learned in the course of the week, though everything was automated by now, of course.

She set her head against his shoulder. "But you are not sorry to be going back?" she asked rather wistfully.

"Sorry?" He rested his cheek against her hair. "No, of course not, love. It was great to come here. We both needed the break. But I can hardly wait to be back at work. I left some cases that I want to conclude myself. I hate leaving loose ends for someone else to tie up. And I can't wait to start looking for a flat so we can move in together-and plan the wedding."

"Ah." It was a sigh of relief. "I thought when we came here that you would want to stay. I thought you were getting tired of London and were about to suggest opening a country practice or something horrific like that."

Yes, he had felt a bit that way when they had come. He smiled now at the memory. It seemed rather incredible.

"I think I was meant to come here," he said, "just to discover what it is I really do want of life. A week has been quite long enough."

"And you want London?" she said. "You are quite sure, John? It is not just because of me?"

"I made another discovery too," he said, turning to take her into his arms. "I want you more than anyone else or anything else in this life. I love you, Allie. Why do those words always sound so inadequate?"

"They sound quite adequate enough to me," she said, sounding almost shaken. "John. Oh, John, I have felt all week that it is true. It has been the most wonderful week of my life. But when we came here I was afraid. I don't know of what, exactly. We came here to get engaged. I just felt-well, as if you were not quite sure."

"We were meant to come here," he said, tightening his arms.

He was going to tell her then. All week he had been debating with himself whether he should. It was surely too incredible to be believed. But all week it had been becoming incredible even to him. Sometimes he had thought he must have imagined it all, become too involved in his own research into family history.

But he should tell her anyway. Perhaps she would believe that the John Chandler who held her now and loved her totally was not quite the John Chandler who had come here from London with her a week ago.

The trouble was that when he tried to form the words in his mind with which to tell the story, he could not for the life of him remember what story it was he had been going to tell.

He drew back his head and kissed her instead.

If it was important, it would come back to him, whatever it was. It could not be very important or he would have remembered.