They made love again, and this time she looked at him, and she held him close, knowing the shadow had been taken away. Later, after another swim in the cool, clean water, they lay on the grass and let the sun dry them. Campion, naked to the flawless sky, had her head on the saddle, while Toby, propped on one elbow beside her, traced a finger down her pale, slim body. “You’re very beautiful.”

“Your mother says my breasts will get bigger if we make love.”

He laughed. “We’ll have to measure them. You know how fathers measure their children growing with notches on a doorpost? We’ll do the same with you. I can show guests.”

She laughed, turning to look at him, and loving the feeling of his fingers on her belly. She reached out with her right hand and plucked one of the dark red hairs from his chest. “He loves me. Does that hurt?”

“Yes.”

She pulled another, still damp. “He loves me not.”

“Stop it, I’m a tired man.”

“I can’t stop now.” She tugged a third. “He loves me.”

He put his hand on hers. “We’ll leave it at that one.”

“If you want.” She smiled at him, happy. They kissed, then lay with their arms about each other.

The Seal of St. Luke lay discarded with their clothes, forgotten for this moment, as far away as the war from this private, warm place. She tasted his skin with her tongue. “Will it always be like this?”

“If we want it.”

“I want it.”

The stream ran clean beneath a flawless sky and Campion knew peace.

Twenty-eight

“The rain,” Lady Margaret announced from the window, “will delay itself until tomorrow.” This was not an opinion, rather an order to Almighty God who, from Campion’s sleepy view in bed, had different plans. The sky over Oxford was gray. September had started with bleak weather.

Lady Margaret stood over the bed. “Do you intend to lie there all day?”

Campion shook her head. “No.”

“It is a quarter past six, child, and I have delayed breakfast till half past.”

“I shall be there.”

Lady Margaret looked down at her. “You’re looking much better, child. Whatever my son did to you a week ago was obviously long overdue.” With that she swept from the room, shouting for Enid, calling downstairs to the kitchens, stirring the household into what would be its busiest day. She left Campion amused and a little astonished. Amused because Lady Margaret so obviously approved of her son prematurely deflowering his bride, and astonished that she herself had been so transparent. She had tried to hide the shadow across her life, and now she knew that it had been observed all along by both mother and son.

The shadow was gone, and that was proper because today should be a day of no shadows. Today was the day that proved even the wildest dreams could come true, today she would marry.

Lady Margaret at breakfast, was less optimistic. “He may not turn up at church, dear. I ejected him from the house last night and I have great doubts as to his sobriety this morning. He’s probably fallen in love with a tapster’s daughter and eloped. I had a third cousin who once fell in love with her father’s chief stable-man.”