The day before the wedding Thorn dispensed with his customary Saturday chores at the Embassy and took Katherine for a drive in the country instead. He had been deeply disturbed by their argument and the strange lovemaking that had followed it, and he wanted to be alone with her to attempt to sort out what was going wrong. It appeared to be the right medicine, for she seemed relaxed for the first time in months, enjoying the drive, the simplicity of holding his hand as they wound their way through the English countryside. At noon they found themselves at Stratford-Upon-Avon and attended a matinee performance of King Lear; Katherine sat enrapt, the play moving her to tears. Lear's soliloquy over the death of his child: "Why does a dog, a rat, have breath . . . and Thou no breath at all. . .." struck a chord deep within her, and she wept openly, Thorn comforting her in the silence of the theater long after the play was over.

They returned to the car and drove on; Katherine held tightly to Thorn's hand, the release of emotions having created an intimacy that had long been absent in their relationship. She was vulnerable now, and as they stopped by a stream her tears came again. She spoke of her fears, her fears of losing Damien. She said that if anything happened to him, she would not be able to carry on.

"You won't lose him, Kathy," Thorn gently assured her. "Life couldn't be that cruel."

It was the first time he had called her Kathy in a long while, and it stung, somehow accentuating the distance that had come between them in recent months. They sat on the grass beneath a towering oak tree and Katherine's voice came in a whisper as she watched the . movement of the stream. "I'm so afraid," she said. "There's nothing to be afraid of." "Yet I fear everything."

A June bug was crawling beside her and she watched it wind its way across the vast landscape of grass.

"What's to fear, Katherine?" "What isn't to fear?" He gazed at her, waiting for more. "I fear the good because it will go away ... I fear the bad because I'm too weak to withstand it. I fear your success and I fear your failure. And I fear that I have little to do with either. I fear you'll become President of the United States, Jeremy ... and you'll be saddled with a wife who isn't up to it."

"You've done beautifully," he reassured her.

"But I've hated it."

The admission was so simple, yet it had never been said. And it somehow cleansed them.

"Doesn't that shock you?" she asked.

"A little," he replied.

"You know what I want for us more than anything?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"I want for us to go back home."

He lay back in the grass, staring up into the leaves of the great oak.