right behind him, apparently so that she could look at him. Of course her half-naked legs looked glorious, but so what? She had pulled her skirt down properly. It was no more than a fashionable flash of nylon-covered thigh.
He stretched out his arm along the old leather upholstery, and he laid his left hand on her shoulder, which she allowed, quietly looking at him with her immense and secretive gray eyes, and giving him something far more intimate than a smile.
He had avoided her the entire time they were in the village, and now he wondered why he had done that. Why? On impulse, he decided to do something rude and vulgar.
He leaned over, reaching out to cup the back of her head with his hand, and he kissed her quickly, and then settled back. She could have avoided it, but she didn’t. And when her lips had touched him, he had felt a sharp little pain inside, that now began to glow and to increase in intensity. Love you! Dear God, give it a chance again!
And no sooner had that reprimand come into his mind than he realized he wasn’t talking to her at all; he was talking to himself about her.
He settled back, looking out the windshield, watching the dark sky thicken and lose the last of its porcelain luster, and leaning his head to the side, he closed his eyes.
There was nothing stopping Rowan from falling madly in love with this being who could not wring monstrous babies from her, nothing but her marriage vows and her will.
And Michael realized he was not sure of either one. Perhaps he would never be sure again.
Within twenty minutes the light was gone. Their headlights forged through the darkness, and this might have been any highway, anywhere in the world.
Finally Gordon spoke up. The next road right, and left on the one immediately following.
The car turned off into the weald, into the high dark trees, a mixture of beech and oak it seemed, with even some light flowering fruit trees that he could not clearly see. The blossoms looked pink here and there in the headlights.
The second side road was unpaved. The woods grew thicker. Maybe this was the remnant of an ancient forest, the kind of grand, Druid-infested woods that had once covered all of England and Scotland, possibly all of Europe, the kind of forest that Julius Caesar had cleared away with ruthless conviction so that the gods of his enemies would either flee or die.
The moon was fairly bright. He could see a little bridge now as they drew closer, and then came another turn, and they were driving along the borders of a small and peaceful lake. Far across the water stood a tower, perhaps a Norman keep. It was a sight so romantic that surely the poets of the last century had gone mad for the place, he thought. Perhaps they had even built it, and it was one of those beautiful shams which were thrown up everywhere as the recent love for the Gothic transformed architecture and style worldwide.
But as they drew closer, as they swung round and came near to the tower, Michael saw it more clearly. And realized that it was a rounded Norman tower, rather large, with perhaps three stories rising to its battlements. The windows were lighted. The lower portion of the building was shrouded by trees.
Yes, that was exactly what it was, a Norman tower—he had seen many in his student years, wandering the tourists’ roads over all England. Perhaps on some summer sabbatical which he could no longer remember he had even seen this one.
It didn’t seem so. The lake, the giant tree to the left, all of this was too nearly perfect. Now he could see the foundations of a larger structure, wandering away in crumbling lumps and pieces, worn down by rain and wind, no doubt, and further blurred by mounds of wild ivy.
They drove through a thick copse of young oaks, losing track of the building altogether, and then emerged, surprisingly close to it, and Michael could see a couple of cars parked in front of it, and two tiny electric lights flanking a very large door.
All very civilized, it seemed, livable. But how marvelously preserved it was, unmarred by any visible modern addition. Ivy crawled over the rounded and mortared stone, up above the simple arch of the doorway.
No one spoke.
The driver stopped the car finally, in a small graveled clearing.