Zenia stiffened. "Now?"

"If you wish," he said. "It can be done here-your friends the lawyers tell me thatthis license is good for any time or place.""It's snowing," she said nervously."I don't mind," he murmured. "It won't take long to bring them." He rocked her back against him. "On the other hand, I'd be perfectly pleased to be snowed up here withyou for days, if this weather turns to a serious storm."

"Snowed up? Trapped here, do you mean?" she asked, pulling away."It's not likely," he said. "But there's no danger. The place has stores and fuelenough."

"Elizabeth!" she exclaimed. "I can't be trapped here!"

"Beth is right as a trivet, and perfectly happy. You left her with Mrs. Lamb, did younot?""Yes, but-" She reached for her clothes. "Oh, these are still soaking wet!""You aren't going anywhere tonight," he said as she shook out the dress, flinging drops of water. "Zenia, don't be a fool.""If there is to be a snowstorm! I cannot abandon her for so long!"He pulled the dress from her hand and tossed it over the chair. "Perhaps you should have thought of that before you started north."Zenia snatched the gown back. "It's your fault! You lured me here!""You came to marry Jocelyn," he growled. "Precious perfect as I'm sure he is, he's got no more control of snowstorms than I do.""I want to go!" she cried. "I want to go to Elizabeth!""All right," he said. "I'll take you. By way of the vicarage. I want us married before we leave."

"There is no time for that," Zenia said, squeezing water from one of her stockings."It may already be snowing too hard."He pulled a lantern down from a hook on the wall and lit it. Striding to the door, he opened it to a swirl of wind and cold and stepped outside."It has stopped," he said, holding up the lantern.Hugging herself against the frigid air, Zenia peered around the door. His shirtsleeves were plastered against his arms in the wind, his breath a bright frost in the circle ofthe lamplight. No snowflakes fell, and the lamp only sparkled on a dusting of lessthan an inch on the ground.

"It might begin again," she said, retreating toward the fire as he came back in. She

sat down and began to work the damp, unpleasant stocking onto her foot "We

should leave now.""And lose ourselves on the moor at night in a storm? A great lot of good that will doBeth. If you insist on making a start tonight, we'll go as far as the vicarage atGrosmont-I can find that. The priest can marry us on the spot, and we'll put upthere for the night. Then we can take the train tomorrow."

"You dare not!" She looked up. "They will arrest you for attacking the train!""No they won't," he said."You can't be sure of that!" She stood up."I can be sure that I own half the bloody railway."Zenia gasped. "You own it!"He gave an impatient nod, reaching for his cloak. "I don't interfere in the thing-but no doubt they would think twice about prosecuting their leading stockholder.Particularly when I didn't do anything but ride alongside and get shot at.""And pull me off!""My wife," he said. "I have a right to do that."

"I'm not your wife.""Well," he said, with a dangerous gleam in his eyes, "we are about to remedy that,are we not?"

She avoided his hold. She gathered her shift up onto her shoulders and hugged

herself. "I'm sorry. I should not have-I don't wish to do this."His face changed, transforming from suspicion to a black rage. "I knew it!" He flungthe cloak away. "I knew this wasn't about Beth! What have I done?"

Instantly, hysteria rose to her tongue. "I was wrong! I'm tired! I won't marry you! Iwant to leave!" She could hear her mother in herself, but it only made her morefrantic. She burst into frenzied tears. "Let me go, let me go."

"No," he said, his voice a cold knife amid her weeping."I want to go," she cried."So you'll leave me," he said with a sneer. "So we all pay the price of your crazy fears! Beth too. Just like your mother made you pay for her pride.""I have to go. You have to let me go.""No," he said."You're going to leave me!" Her voice reached a shrill of panic. "I'll be alone!""My God, you claim I'm the one who has to be free-but it's you!" His voice rose to match hers. "You have no faith in anyone but yourself! I've found what I washunting out there! I found you. I don't need to search anymore.""Don't, don't," she said, shaking her head. "That's not true. I can't believe that."

"What can I do to make you believe it? What can I say?"

"Nothing!"

"Nothing!" he shouted. "You've been living as my wife for two years; I want to marry you; you let me-" He pointed. "In that chair-that was hardly a rape, by God! What are you going to do after that-marry Jocelyn?"

"Yes!" she screamed. "I'm going to marry him!"

"You're out of your mind! He won't have you now!" he said with a wild bewilderment.

"He will!" she screamed recklessly. "He will, he will! You could give me a hundred children, and he would still marry me! He wants children, but he doesn't want to do what you do!"

He stared at her. "You're as mad as your mother."

"I'm not!" she shrieked, covering her ears. "He wants children!"

"And what am I, then-the stud service?" he shouted. "Is that why you let me-" His raging voice broke off. He took a step toward her. "Is that why?"

"Yes," she screamed, "yes, yes, yes!"

She was shaking all over, hunching with her hands to her head. Her eyes were squeezed shut. In the long silence, she fell to her knees, weeping.

There was no sound in the cottage, nothing but the wind hissing past the walls and muttering in the chimney.

"Very well," he said in a voice of ice. "Get dressed. I won't importune you any further, madam."

Though she was chilled in her damp dress, he had wrapped the bed quilt about her, and she barely felt the wind as she rode before him out onto the cloud-lit moor. They had come so far from the railway that Zenia had expected it to be a long distance to anywhere. But it hardly seemed more than a quarter hour before she realized that the dark mass the mare was approaching was not a grove of trees clustered at the end of a shadowed valley, but a house.

The wind howled about it. It stood alone on the edge of the moor, outlined by the dull glow of snow and sky behind it. As they drew nearer, the tearing breaks in the cloud cover let moonlight through to glitter on a double row of dark tall windows.

It was not a huge house, like Swanmere, but still it was imposing, rising black and silent from a treeless prospect. He turned the horse in between stone columns and rode across the level expanse, the mare's hooves crunching in the snow crust. Instead of stopping at the bal us traded double staircase, shimmering with streamers of snow that blew from each landing, he guided the horse around the corner to a smaller set of steps. He dismounted, leaving Zenia, and strode up to pound on the door.

After a long interval, someone opened it. The gleam of a light fell across the steps and the snow. She could not hear what Lord Winter said, but a man came quickly down with him, the collar of his coat turned up, carrying a lantern.

Zenia held the quilt about herself as the servant guided her up the steps and then left her with Lord Winter inside the door. They stood in a dim, paneled passageway full of trunks and boots.

His face was remote. He held a brimstone match to several candle sconces. As the golden glow rose in the hallway, he lowered his arms.

"I suppose you saw that the clouds were breaking," he said, shaking snow off his cloak. He did not look at her. "It's not going to storm tonight. If you can possibly bear it, I suggest that you remain here until morning, and I'll have Mr. Bode drive you to the station then. Your case from the train is here, so you have dry clothes now."

"Where are we?" she asked in a small voice.

"My house," he said shortly.

"Oh. But I thought-"

"Welcome to my burrow," he said shortly. "My aunt left this to me years ago. JTiere are mines and sheep, and the railway-an income independent of my father, bless her." His face was grim, but it lightened a little as an elderly housekeeper came into the passage, hastily adjusting her cap. "Mrs. Bode," he said. "Can anywhere be made fit for her to sleep?"

The housekeeper gave a little creaking bob of a bow, showing the hump in her back as she dipped her head. She managed to produce a strange combination of fluttery nervousness and authority as she said, "I'm sure my lady must go in the mistress's old room, though if the chimney will draw I can't say."

Zenia stood in her quilt during a conversation about the chimney and Mr. Bode's ability to start a fire-Lord Winter did not wait for the other man to return, but took up a load of firewood from the box by the door while Mrs. Bode fluttered and protested in a way that showed she had not much hope of preventing him. With the housekeeper carrying a candle ahead, Zenia followed them down the passage into the house.

It looked as her father's house in Bentinck Street had, everything covered in sheets and the doorways all closed, but this had an air of permanent disuse, an undusted and unused smell, the corridors lined with boxes and obscure items of furniture, the cold saturating the house as if no fires were ever lit there. Upstairs, the bedchamber Mrs. Bode opened was dark and frigid, the wind rattling the windows, one sill dusted with snow where a pane had broken and been stuffed with cloth.

"She can't sleep here," Lord Winter said impatiently. He looked about the room with a frown. "I beg your pardon, ma'am," he said in Zenia's direction, "this is something of a bachelor house. Mrs. Bode, I hope you will see to that window tomorrow. At least the shutters should be closed."

"Yes, sir," she said, with a glance at Zenia, one woman to another. As Lord Winter passed out into the hall, the housekeeper said under her breath, "Nor he hasn't paid me the least mind when I told him about that the shutter had fallen off, ma'am, and him and Mr. Bode all taken up with that gamekeeper's cottage like they been this past week, I don't know what he thinks I'm to do but take a ladder to it myself, and break my neck too." When Zenia nodded politely, the housekeeper seemed to take it as a gesture to unburden herself further. "A bachelor house it is, ma'am, and no but meself and Mr. Bode left, and at our age there's this great old place falling down about our ears while his lordship gads up and down the world, never here from one year's end to the next. I do me best, ma'am, but I've seventy and six years, and not even a girl to help, and I beg you'll forgive the state of the place."

"Please don't concern yourself, Mrs. Bode," Zenia said. "I'm sorry to put you out. I'm only staying the one night, and any place you can find for me will be quite all right."

"Oh, are you going off so soon?" the old lady asked, wringing her hands in disappointment. "I had hoped-with a new mistress-it was used to be a fine old place, it was, when Lady Margaret was alive, rest her soul."

"I'm sorry," Zenia said, "but I'm not-" She found that she could not bring herself to tell this fragile old woman that she was not the new mistress. "I'm sure it was very pretty."

Mrs. Bode went ahead toward the stairs, with Zenia following. "I assure you that it was, ma'am. But if a gentleman lives in two rooms of it like a hermit, why-" She lowered her voice as they began to descend. "The creeping damp will carry him off, I vow, as Mr. Bode and meself both tell him again and again, but he is-I'm sure you know what he is, ma'am. A good, generous master, but no sense of what is due to the house. He don't think a thing of it but a roof and four walls. He could live under a bridge, I daresay, and never know the difference. I tell you, ma'am, I took pity on him from the day he come here, with a lot of books and guns and nothing else-a reserved, shy gentleman like himself-I was mortal pleased to hear he was married and would have a lady to see after him, because he was right set to turn into one of them strange old queer gentlemen who never speak to a living soul, but only collect things and sit all alone in their rooms, only I'll never live so long as to have to worry about it much, but I thought it a shame."

Lord Winter came striding out of a doorway off the staircase hall, dusting wood chips from his sleeves. "This will have to do," he said. "Mrs. Bode, I'll find myself somewhere to sleep, if you'll bring her case here and clean bedclothes and all that sort of thing." As the housekeeper hurried away, he glanced at Zenia. "This is the best we can do, I'm afraid," he said abruptly, indicating the door.

Zenia walked through into a paneled room lined by books and strewn with a diversity of articles: rolled maps and boxes of shells and traveling tokens. A folded, tassled and embroidered umbrella of gold and red silk, the type used to shade a pasha on his camel, leaned against one window bay. Next to it, pinned to the somber green curtain, a huge cobra's shed skin dangled down to brush the floor.

Already a fire blazing up behind the elegant brass fender was taking off the chill in the library. Lord Winter picked up another log and threw it on, watching the flames.

The light pulsed on his face and a gilded clock set among pieces of broken statuary on the mantelpiece. Sheafs of handwritten notes waved gently in the fire's draft, stuck beneath a cracked marble head and a blue-and-white Chinese vase on the mantel. Zenia recognized a hijab, an amulet that would hold a charm to ward off evil, hung on a leather thong about the sculpture's stone ear.

Beyond him, in a corner near the fire there was a Turkish sofa piled with cushions and wrinkled sheets. Mrs. Bode came in with fresh linens folded atop Zenia's traveling case.

As she bent to begin remaking the sofa bed, Lord Winter turned his rapt attention from the fire and said, "It should be warm enough in here. I will bid you good night."

He walked past Zenia and left before she could answer him.

"I beg your pardon, ma'am," Mrs. Bode said. "But his lordship's right enough; this is a good cozy room if you can bear with foreign snakes and that. Would you like me to have Mr. Bode take the snake out, ma'am?"

Zenia looked at her dubiously. "Do you mean the skin?"

Mrs. Bode burst into a quavering laugh. "Oh, yes, ma'am. That awful old thing. I don't mean to say a real snake, I declare! We aren't that bad!" She tucked in the blanket. "But bad enough, for all that. I wish I'd had word that the new mistress was to come, and I would have hired some girls and turned the place over right, and paid for it out of me own jar if I must!"

"The snakeskin is fine," Zenia said. "And I have slept in far worse places than this, Mrs. Bode."

The housekeeper gave the sofa a last pat. 'That's kind of you to say, ma'am. More than kind. Would you like some buttered toast?"

"No, thank you. I'm very tired."

Mrs. Bode made her creaky bow. "The bell's there, then, ma'am. Perhaps we'll have a blue sky in the morning, and you'll see the place in a better light."

There was no blue sky in the morning. There was only a leaden gray through the cracks in the curtains. Zenia sat on the sofa in her traveling dress, uninterested in the tray of toast and tea Mrs. Bode had brought, reading Lord Winter's note.

He told her the time she must leave to meet the train, that the carriage would be ready, and asked her to allow a moment to speak to him about a business matter before she departed.

She waited as late as possible. She sat looking about at the jumbled library, the desks and notes and maps; it was not homelike; it had more the appearance of a large closet used for random storage, and yet she breathed his familiar scent, in the room and on herself. Inside her.

She knew that he would not ask her again to be his wife. She had gone too far; she had made her final choice. The creature of last night, that had screamed at him and cried, seemed distant now, and yet she felt the source of it still within her, driving her away from him.

It was an intimate anguish, a grief she had known forever-she longed to be with Elizabeth to assuage and forget it, and yet she knew that it would be there, unalterable, underneath all the happiness she could contrive. It was a pain that seemed more safe and familiar than happiness itself: happiness that she could lose, that would slip away, and leave a mortal wound for having once existed.

She understood her mother now in a way that she never had before. Lord Winter was right. Knowing that her father would not-could not-stay, her mother had forced him away. There was a terrible rage inside Zenia too, and fear. She picked at the dark fur on her muff, afraid even to see Lord Winter, with no certainty whether she would shriek at him or plead forgiveness for what she had said to make him let her go.

Finally it was Mrs. Bode who came to tell her that he wished to see her, and led Zenia into the next room, another elegant chamber that had been filled with books and odd objects. Here there was a long dining table, half devoted to maps and atlases spread open, and the other half cleared but for a coffeepot and the remains of breakfast upon it. In the dull places where paintings had once hung on the walls and over the mantel, an array of polished guns rested in well-kept racks: Frankish rifles and pistols, along with weaponry of the East, beautifully chased muskets and golden scimitars.

He stood beside the single chair at the table, dressed as she had first seen him at Dar Joon, in a sporting coat and high boots. "You must leave in a quarter hour," he said, without greeting her. "I want to come to an understanding about Beth."

There was a dangerous edge to his voice, a determination that seemed intensified by the gleaming armory that surrounded them.

"I thought about this all night," he said. "I don't know what you expect of me-what sort of agreement you have made with Jocelyn-but if it is in any expectation that you and I would"-his jaw was rock-hard-"continue as lovers, while you are married to him, that is impossible. If our-if last night results in another child, then anything we agree upon now about Beth applies to that also. Do you understand?"

Zenia nodded. She could hardly lift her eyes from the plates on the table, where it appeared that he'd had even less interest in eating than she.

"I want Beth to know who I am," he said.

"If you insist," she said. "If you think that will be best for her."

"Don't presume to tell me anything about what's best for her! Damn you." Then he shut his mouth hard, as if he would have said more and refused to allow himself.

"What else?" Zenia asked.

"I want to see her. Daily, if I like."

Zenia shook her head. "No," she said emphatically.He turned to the window. "Are you so afraid I'll steal her?"She was afraid of that; she was afraid of seeing him herself. "I think visitations would be too difficult. For her. She might learn to care for you-depend on you to come-and then be hurt when you don't.""When I'm not allowed to," he said, low and savagely."Will you be staying in England?" she asked.He did not answer that. Evidence of his traveling, drifting life lay all about them.

"So I am never to see her again?" he asked coldly. "Even once?""I will speak to Mr. Jocelyn about it, and see what he suggests. I'll have to considerit."

She half expected him to fly into a fury, but he only stood still, staring out thewindow, his face remote. "There is the carriage," he said, at the sound of wheels andhooves in the icy snow.

Zenia's heart began to beat very hard. She gazed into a cup of coffee, still full, that

had gone cold on the table."I suppose," he said, "that you are right, and I will be leaving the country." As hespoke, his expression did not change, and yet he seemed to withdraw entirely fromhumanity. He looked out the window with an unblinking detachment. "T supposethat you are also right, that it is best for your daughter and all of us if I do not seeher again."

"It would be less painful.""Would it?" He smiled, a small inhuman smile. "Excellent.""I must go," she said desperately.He turned, almost as if he had forgotten she was there. The mantel clock began to chime as he stood looking at her. "Yes, of course."He opened the door for her, and followed her across the front hall. Mrs. Bode was there, peeping out onto the steps. "Mr. Bode has put in a hot brick, ma'am," shesaid, keeping her eyes down as she held open the door.Stepping out into the wind, Zenia saw that the Arab mare was blanketed and tied to the carriage. She glanced at Lord Winter."Shajar al-Durr belongs to Beth," he said, the cold wind blowing his hair. "She is Elizabeth's to keep. Not yours or Jocelyn's. Mr. Bode will see that she has a box onthe train."Zenia nodded."Good-bye," he said, with a small bow. He turned and went back into the house.

CHAPTER 29.

Zenia entered the carriage with the image of his face as he had turned away from her: dark and austere, showing nothing, not emotion or anger or regret. In the daylight, the house was a solitary gray rectangle with tall handsome windows, standing entirely alone on the moorside, the stables and outbuildings tucked in the valley below.

She heard Mr. Bode speak to the horses. The chaise pulled away, grinding over the snow. Beyond the gates, it turned to lumber slowly downhill, following a narrow drive cut into the side of the hollow.

She tried to think of Elizabeth, of the journey ahead, but she could not banish the image of him as he had closed the door. It would be the last thing now; the last memory, to overlay all the others. She put her gloved hands up to her temples and her face, breathing in short gasps.

It would pass. She knew this would pass, and leave her empty and safe. This was the worst. In London there would be Elizabeth waiting.