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Tristan and I sat in silence for a long while, and I leaned back in the bath chair, staring at the clouds that passed slowly overhead and the changing shapes and shadows cast by the trees. I tried not to look at what Tristan was painting – it seemed almost akin to reading someone’s correspondence over their shoulder, and Father had always hated that. I tried not to look at him at all, although his face drew me like a magnet, with its high cheek bones, white, white skin and pouting, pink lips.
‘It must be strange,’ he said at length, startling me out of my reverie. ‘To lose one’s past. That’s what’s happened to you. Strange but, in a way, exciting. You have the opportunity to start again with no ties or boundaries. You could be anything. Anyone you wanted. Is that not wonderful?’
‘I...’ I stuttered and struggled for words. ‘I hadn’t thought of it. I suppose it would. Well, it would depend on what I had forgotten.’ I fiddled with the fringe on my shawl, rolling it between my fingers and looking at it intently. ‘It wouldn’t be just me who lost my past. It would be the past who lost me, too. Don’t you think?’
‘That’s true.’ Tristan paused in his drawing and stared at his paper. ‘I shouldn’t like to leave Mother. But everyone has things they would rather forget.’
‘I suppose they do.’
He threw down his brush and paper and lay back on the blanket, staring up at the sky. He was perfectly placed for me to look at him. The long column of his neck was stretched out, almost as pale as his linen shirt, open just enough to reveal a hint of the fine bones at the top of his chest. I caught myself looking and blushed furiously. What had happened to me that I had become so voyeuristic? I wondered if it was part and parcel of becoming a married woman, and having one’s eyes opened. But more likely, I feared, it was part of my transformation into a being of vice and evil. I couldn’t stop myself from looking at him again, his long legs stretched out over the blanket, his delicate wrists and long, artist’s fingers. He cleared his throat and I worried he’d caught me staring, but he began to speak.
‘There was a girl, you know.’
‘Oh. You don’t have to tell me anything.’
He smiled weakly.
‘It seems only fair – I’m trying to find out things about you.’
A shot of heat suffused my belly, and I felt myself blush again.
‘She was a friend of mine – our families were friends, all my life. My first love, if you like.’
Jealousy. It shot through me, burning my throat and clenching my stomach. It was as though I had regained consciousness as a different person. I had been jealous before, but never so powerfully it shocked me. Never about a man.
‘We were engaged. The happiest people alive. Do you know that feeling? Sorry – you probably don’t remember. But I wanted to see the world, and I ended up in the army. Didn’t even see any action. Too late for the war, and when I returned it seemed I was too late in that as well.’
‘What do you mean?’
A muscle in his throat contracted, and he raised a pale hand to cover his eyes as he turned his face away from me.
‘She had married someone else while I was away. I was only gone a year but... She’d promised she would wait for me.’
I was surprised again by the pang of hatred I suddenly felt for this girl. I stopped looking at vulnerable, beautiful Tristan and lay back in my chair.
‘How awful,’ I whispered.
‘Yes. But maybe it was for the best. I tell myself that. That we probably wouldn’t have suited. That we would never have been happy, that we would have fallen out of love and made one another thoroughly miserable. But that’s the thing – I’ll never know how it could have been. There are so many roads we leave untraveled. So many paths our lives could take, filled with options we never explore. Have you considered that, Alice?’
Tristan sat suddenly and twisted to face me.
‘That every choice we make alters our lives in some way? Whether I salt my dinner, whether I go to town this day or the next, it seems like nothing of moment, but it alters the path of our future, and we don’t know how much. Who would I have met that day? What money did I spend that I could have saved if I’d gone the next day? It’s enough to drive a person mad, wondering what might have been.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ I chose my words carefully, wishing to have his eyes on me for longer, with such fervour in them. I couldn’t look away from him. ‘I wonder what could have been different in my life that I wouldn’t have ended up here. I shall never know.’
He smiled then, and I was glad.
‘But the unfortunate circumstances of your injuries aside, let us just be happy then that you are here, for the moment.’
I thought he might kiss me. We looked at one another, smiling. Him so pure and good, me so sinful and vile. I looked away, leaned back and closed my eyes. I heard him sigh, then there was the tinkling sound of him washing his brush in the water jar.
It would be easy to forget who I was. Easy to go along with my lie, to pretend never to regain my memory and stay here forever. I could marry Tristan, maybe, and we could travel the world together, and nobody would ever know I was a murderer, or had all these vile thoughts. Maybe the memories would fade, and I would become the person I longed to be. Clean and new, refreshed by Tristan and Edwina’s innate goodness.
But there would always be the threat of discovery. God only knew how close I was to Gabriel’s house, where at least his mother and his servants still knew of me, and my villainy. My picture would be in the London papers. There was probably a price on my head. All of a sudden, the trees and the house and even the air around me seemed very close, closing in around my neck like a noose. I didn’t trust that Edwina and Tristan could remain in ignorance for long.
That night I dreamed again of the strange man in my room. Only once, and briefly, marking the divide between two of my nightmares. The blood and the bridle, the fear and the pain. I expected him to look like Gabriel Raynor. Who else should I be haunted by but the face of my dead husband? But even through the darkness that covered his face, I could make out that he was taller and broader than my lean, sparse husband. His jaw seemed squarer in the gloom, and he was a hulking presence I did not know whether to fear or hope for. I almost felt that he was protecting me, but that could never be so. He withdrew into the blackness as I felt our eyes meet, and I felt his loss. Then the blood returned.