"Tell me," he said, "about your marriage."

She turned her head sharply to look at him.

"My marriage?" she said. "What is there to say that you do not already know?"

"How did you meet him?" he asked her. "Why did you marry him?"

Their steps had slowed and now stopped altogether. She slipped her hand from his arm and took a few steps to the side so that she could lean back against a giant trunk. He followed her, though he did not stand too close. He rested one arm on a low, sturdy branch. The trunk itself would have hidden them from the picnic blanket. But a glance over the top of the branch assured him that they were out of sight anyway. They had walked farther than he thought.

"We never had a fixed home," she said. "And there was never stability or security in our house. There was no lack of affection, but it was carelessly given. My father was very sociable, and he often invited gentlemen back to wherever we were living at the time. Always gentlemen, never ladies. It was of no concern to me until I was fifteen or so.

Indeed, I always enjoyed the company and the occasional notice the gentlemen took of me. I enjoyed having my father sometimes set me on his knee while he talked to them all. But after I started to grow up, I had to endure leers and risquГ© remarks – and a few surreptitious touches and pinches. Once a kiss. My father would not have allowed any of it had he known, of course. He had illusions about sometime giving me a Season and seeing to it that I met all the right people. He was a baronet, after all. But he did not know what was happening under his own nose, and I never told him. It was never bad enough to be dangerous, though it got worse as I grew older."

"You /ought/ to have told him," he said.

"Perhaps." She shrugged. "But I had nothing to which to compare my life.

I took it as normal. And Alice was always there to offer some protection. Then one day Baron Paget came home with my father, and he kept coming. He and my father were friends – they were about the same age.

He was different from the others. He was kind and invariably courtly and gentle in manner, and he started to tell me about his home in the country, where he spent most of his time, and about the park surrounding the house, and the village and neighborhood. As far as I knew he did not gamble. Then, one day, when we were alone together – my father had left the room for some reason – he told me it could all be mine if I would do him the great honor of marrying him. He knew I could bring no dowry to the marriage, he told me. It did not matter. All he wanted was me. He would make a generous marriage settlement on me, and he would love and cherish me for the rest of his life. At first I was dismayed – but only for a short while. You cannot understand, perhaps, the great temptation his offer was to me – for a life of security and stability in a rural heaven. He seemed to be a man like my father but with all the flaws stripped away. I suppose I married him more as a father than as a husband."

"What went wrong?" he asked after a longish silence.

She spread her palms against the trunk on either side of her.

"Nothing at all for six months," she said. "I will not say I was blissfully happy. He was an older man and I was not at all in love with him. But he seemed a /good/ man, and he was kind and attentive to me, and I loved the country and the neighborhood. I was with child, and I was over the moon with happiness about that. I was very contented, perhaps even happy. And then one day he went to visit a distant neighbor and did not come back for three days. I was frantic with worry and made the mistake of going to look for him. He was sweet and kind when I got there and called upon his friends gathered there – all men – to witness how much his new wife loved him. He laughed heartily with them and came home with me. He was quiet in the carriage. He even smiled at me a number of times, but I was frightened. I realized he must have been drinking, and I did not recognize his eyes. After we arrived home…"

She swallowed and paused for a while. When she resumed, she sounded breathless.

"After we arrived home, he took me into the library and told me very quietly that I had shamed him in such a way that he did not know how he would be able to hold up his head with his friends ever again. I apologized – more than once. But then he started to hit me, first with the flat of his hand, and then with his fists and even his boots. I cannot talk more about it. But two days later I miscarried. I lost my child."

Her head was back against the trunk, her eyes closed. Her face was barred with light and shade. It looked to have not a vestige of color.

"And that was not the only time," he said softly.

"No," she said. "Not for either the beatings or the miscarriage. He was two men, Stephen. No one could ask for a kinder, gentler, more generous man when he was sober – and sometimes he was sober for months at a time.

In fact, /usually/ he was. When he was drunk, there were no signs except for his eyes – and his violence. One of the neighbors, who once saw me when my eye still had the violet remains of a beating, told me that she had always suspected he had killed his first wife. She died – officially – after a terrible fall from horseback when she was trying to jump a high fence."

He did not know what to say, though he /wanted/ to tell her that it was a good thing she had killed Paget before he could kill her. Good God, the man had killed three of her babies.

"I used to think it was my fault," she said, "that he was so angry with me. I used to try to please him. I used to do all in my power not to do anything I thought might /displease/ him. And when I knew he was drinking, I used to try to hide, to stay out of his way or… Well. None of it worked, of course."

There was a lengthy silence.

"There," she said eventually, turning her head to look at him, a wan smile on her lips. "You /did/ ask."

"And no one ever helped you?" he asked her.

"Who?" she said. "My father died within a year of my marriage. He would have had no right to intervene anyway. Wesley did not visit often, and he never saw Nigel's bad side. I never told him about the beatings. He was just a boy. The only time Alice tried to intervene, he cuffed her and shut her out of the room and locked the door and then redoubled his efforts on /me/ because I was not wife enough to face up to my shortcomings and the punishment I deserved."

"His sons?" he asked.

"They were almost never there," she said. "I daresay they knew him of old. Though I suppose the first Lady Paget was tougher than I to have borne the three of them. Or perhaps in those days Nigel's sober spells lasted longer."

He would not ask about Paget's death. He had upset her too much as it was. He supposed he ought not to have asked at all. This had been a carefree afternoon until he had asked his question.

But his need to know her better and to get her to open up to him – or to /someone/ – had outweighed his desire to keep the atmosphere of the afternoon light.

"And talking of climbing trees," he said softly after a short while, as though nothing had been spoken of between them since they left the picnic site. "Have you ever done it?"

She tipped back her head to look upward into the great spreading branches of the oak above them.

"I used to do it all the time as a girl," she said. "I think I must have been born dreaming of escaping into a blue heaven or falling into it.

This tree is a climber's paradise, is it not?"

She pulled free the ribbons of her bonnet and tossed it to the ground.

She eyed the lowest branch, clearly considering the best way up onto it.

He cupped his hands as if to help her mount a horse, and almost without hesitation, she set her foot in them and he hoisted her upward. He scrambled up after her.

It was easy after that. The branches were wide and sturdy and more or less parallel to the ground. They climbed without talking until, looking down, Stephen realized they had come quite a way.

She sat sideways on one branch, her back against the massive trunk, and then drew up her legs and hugged them with both arms. He stood on the branch below and held a branch above while wrapping his other arm about her waist, beneath her own arms.

She turned her face to him, smiling and then laughing.

"Oh, to be a child again," she said.

"One can always be a child," he said. "It is just an attitude of mind. I wish I had known you when you were younger – before you armored yourself in cynicism and scorn to hide all the pain and anger. I wish you had not had to live through all that, Cass. I wish I could will it away or kiss it away, but I can't. I can only assure you that you will harm only yourself if you remain closed against all the possible goodness the world and life have to offer you."

"What is the guarantee," she said, "that life will not punch me in the eye again?"

"Alas," he said, "there is none. But it is my belief that the world is far fuller of goodness than it is of evil. And if that seems rather naive, let me put in another way. I believe goodness and love are far stronger than evil and hatred."

"Angels are stronger than devils?" she asked, smiling.

"Yes," he said. "Always."

She lifted her arms and set her hands gently against the sides of his face.

"Thank you, Stephen," she said, and kissed him lightly on the mouth.

"Besides," he said, "you know more about love than you realize. You became my mistress not just because of your own poverty, or even primarily because of it. You have a companion who is perhaps too old to find satisfactory employment, and you have a maid who is probably unemployable if she tries to keep her illegitimate child with her. You have the child herself. And the dog. He is a member of your family too.

You did it all for them, Cass. You sacrificed yourself for love."

"With such a beautiful man," she said, "it was hardly a sacrifice, was it?"

She was using her velvet voice.

"Oh, yes," he said. "It was."

She set her hands flat on the branch to either side of her and tipped her head sideways to rest against his chest.

"It is strange," she said, "how speaking of the unspeakable has released something. I feel very… happy. Is that why you did it? Is that why you asked?"

He dipped his head to set his lips against her warm hair.

"Are /you/ happy?" she asked him.

"Yes," he said.

"But it is not quite the right word," she said. "You promised me joy today, Stephen, and you have delivered. They are not quite the same, are they – happiness and joy?"

They stayed as they were for a while, and he found himself wishing that time would stand still, at least for a while. There was something about her that drew him. It was not just her beauty. It was certainly not her seductive ways. It was… He could not put words to what it was. He had never been in love, but he did not imagine that this was what being in love felt like. How puzzling human emotions could be at times – though he had not noticed it much before meeting Cassandra.

"Happiness is more fleeting," he said, "joy more enduring."

She sighed and raised her head.

"But then comes disaster," she said. "Someone goes off to drink for three days, and… And there goes happiness. Does joy remain? How can it?"

"One day," he said, "you will learn that love does not always betray you, Cass."

She smiled at him.

"You are the only person who has ever called me that," she said. "I like it. I will remember it – that private name spoken in your voice."

She kissed him briefly on the lips again and swung her legs over the side of the branch and joined him on his.

"This is the point," she said, "at which one realizes that climbing a tree was not such a wise idea after all. One has to go back down, and descending is always ten times harder than ascending."

But she laughed when he would have offered assistance and swung her way down to the ground as if she had been climbing trees every day since she was a girl. She was smiling up at him when he jumped down onto the ground to join her, and he thought he had never in his life seen anyone lovelier.

Cass joyful.

It was a picture he would carry with him for the rest of his life.

Very close to his heart. /Dangerously/ close.

For despite everything, she had killed her husband, and there was no denying that as a dark, heavy burden she must carry with her through life.