I’m afraid,” she said as she walked over the grass. “Just a glimmer of crocuses under the elms.” She pointed towards the far end of the lawn, and he could make out the blur of white and purple and gold across the bare earth. “I think I’ve brought you under false pretenses. But you can smell the narcissi.”
He could. There was a delicate sweetness in the air, clean and sharp as only white flowers can be.
“I love the change between day and night,” he said, lifting his face to look up at the sky. “Everything between sunset and darkness. There is so much room for imagination. You see things in a different way from the glare of daylight. There’s a richer beauty, and an awareness of how fleeting it all is, how ephemeral. It makes everything infinitely more precious, and there is a sense of regret in it, an understanding of time, and loss, that heightens everything.” He was talking dreadful nonsense. In the morning he would be mortified with embarrassment when he remembered.
And yet it was what he meant, and he did not stop. “And at dawn, from the first white fin of light in the east, right through until the clean, cold white daylight, its pale mists clearing across the fields, the dew over everything, there is an unreasoning hope you cannot explain—or feel at any other time.” He ceased abruptly. She must be thinking him a complete fool. He should never have come. He should have stayed inside, talking polite rubbish until the bishop arrived and tried to coerce him into arresting Ramsay Parmenter and having him declared insane.
“Have you noticed how many flowers have their best perfume at dusk?” she asked, still walking a little ahead of him, as if she also were reluctant to go back to the warm room and the lights and the fire. “If I could have anything I wanted, I would live overlooking water, a lake or the sea, and watch the light on it every evening. The earth consumes the light. The water gives it back.” She turned to him. He could see the faint glimmer of her fair skin. “It must be marvelous to watch the dawn or the sunset at sea,” she said softly. “Are you afloat in an ocean of light? Please don’t tell me you aren’t! Don’t you feel as if you are half in the sky, a part of it all?”
He smiled widely. “I hadn’t put it in such excellent words, but yes, that is exactly it. I watch the seabirds, and feel as if I am doing almost the same thing, as if the sails are my wings.”
“Do you miss it terribly?” Her voice came out of the near darkness, close to him.
“Yes,” he said with a smile. “And then when I was at sea I missed the smell of the damp earth, the wind in the leaves and the colors of autumn. Perhaps you can have everything, but you certainly cannot have it all at once.”
She gave a little laugh. “That is what memories are for.”
They were walking close together. He was very aware of her beside him. He would have liked to touch her, to offer her his arm, but it would have been too obvious. It would break the delicacy of the moment. The cloud bank was deepening over the west. He could barely see her, and yet he had never felt more aware of anyone.
Suddenly the lights from the house shone out over the grass. Someone had opened the French windows. The bishop was silhouetted against the warm color of the room, staring out at them.
“Isadora! What on earth are you doing out there? It’s pitch-dark!”
“No, it isn’t,” she contradicted him. “It’s only late twilight.” Her eyes were used to it, and she had not been aware of the change.
“It’s pitch-dark!” he repeated crossly. “I don’t know what made you take our guest out at this hour. There’s nothing whatever to see. It was most thoughtless of you, my dear.”
The addition of the words my dear somehow added insult to the injury of rudeness. They were so obviously not meant, except to disguise the irritation behind them. Cornwallis controlled his temper because the man was a bishop and this was his house—or more accurately, his garden.
“It is my fault,” he said very clearly. “I was taking great pleasure in the smell of the evening flowers. I am still not used to the feeling of the earth under my feet.”