Time was a series of moments, which became hours, which became weeks. They were mostly quiet, painful, and comfortable moments, if pain could ever be comfortable. Verity grew used to it, constantly prickling her side. Perhaps she had been born with it, and only dreamed what it was like to live without it. Her day was nursing the baby, and if Neil was ill, nursing Neil, or if he was not, spending her time with him in silent companionship.
He was not often ill these days. After his late-autumn cold, he recovered well. He continued to gain weight, and his fevers grew less frequent. He was keen to walk the grounds, even in the chilly weather, to teach his lungs to brace again. He was not keen to be cosseted and cosied. Sometimes Verity would walk with him, up and down the garden paths, carrying Anne, carefully swaddled, in her arms. They never talked much. When either was tired, they would find a place to sit down, and she would carefully press the baby into his arms, and he would jog her slightly, if she was awake, or just sit and watch her sleep. It broke Verity's heart every time, watching the tenderness with which he held their daughter, the tentative caress of his fingers.
"Do you love her?" she asked, one chilly day in November, when it was beginning to seem like winter.
He met her eyes for a moment, wide with surprise. "Yes." He dropped his gaze again to the baby. "How could I not? She's ours."
The two words were unexpectedly painful to Verity. Perhaps he saw something of it.
"I treated you so coldly after she was born â I'm sorry. I â I was very confused. I wanted to help her, but I had to leave, and come here, because I needed â to remember. Do you know, I had a son, and I hardly remember losing him? I remembered it, right after they told me she was a girl. When they put her in my arms, the only thing I could feel was fear that I would hurt her. I couldn't love her at first. I was so scared, and confused. But I wanted to protect her â and I ran away, here, from her, and from you. I'm sorry."
Verity bowed her head. "Thank god you came to love her."
"I'm sorry," Neil repeated helplessly.
In early winter, Anne took ill, with one of the coughing, crying illnesses babies get. Verity nursed her through several sleepless nights, full of the strange terror of loss. Babies were so delicate. Neil, in the next room, shuffled in several times in the night, to check on them both, to take vigil with her, or to walk up and down with the fretfully coughing baby in his arms, and give her a chance to rest. One morning, she woke up to find him sleeping on the bed next to her, in his dressing gown. It was almost like before the shipwreck. She pulled the blanket gently over him. And then the baby started crying to be fed, and waked him.
"I think she's getting better," Verity said in relief, jogging her. "She's hungry. Hold her while I loosen my nightdress."
And he had held the baby, and Verity had untied the neck of her nightdress to feed her. When he handed the baby back to her, his cheeks were pink.
"You've seen all of me before," Verity reminded him gently. "Even if you don't remember it. And I can't stand on ceremony. I won't. If you come into my room when I am sleeping, you must accept seeing my private moments."
"We are husband and wife," he said. "I just... did not expect you to undress."
"There is not much other way to do it."
Verity went to stand by the window, and face away from him. Dawn was breaking. The servants would be up soon, and she could leave the baby to their attention for the morning, and sleep. She was safe to sleep now, properly, for hours. She felt as though she hadn't slept in weeks. There was always someone to take care of.
She thought perhaps she had offended him, for he was very quiet while she stood there. But he neither moved from the bed, nor averted his eyes. After a moment, he said,
"I'm a little embarrassed, I admit â but it is still the sweetest thing I have seen in my life."
On Christmas Eve, Neil took her out with him in the carriage, and made her leave Annie at home. Any other time, she might have protested, but it was snowing heavily, and a wind was rising. He had a job to convince her to come with him at all, especially when he refused to tell her where they were going.
"Are you sure we should be going out?" she asked him anxiously, in the carriage. "You had a fever last night, and it is such awful weather."
"Yes," he insisted, and pulled the coach blanket over both their knees. "I was well this morning, and I shall not get better huddled in bed. And you need to see something beyond a sickroom, or you'll catch it too."
It emerged their destination was her father's old cottage, which had been all but abandoned after his death, for the landlord had been unable to let it. When the groom opened the door, and she saw where they were, she looked at Neil in horror.
"Come. It will be quite alright." He jumped down from the carriage and took a lantern from the groom. "We won't be long, George. Wait in the carriage, out of the snow."
There was little choice for Verity but to follow Neil through the snow into the cottage. When they were inside, her chest tightened, and she drew a breath in sharply.
"You do not like this place?"
"I have many bad memories here." She shook a little, staring round at the empty room, yellow under the light of the lantern. "Why did you take me here?"
"It's your Christmas present."
"Flowers would have sufficed â or weeds, if none are in bloom."
"You misunderstand. The cottage is my present to you. I have bought the deed. It is yours."
For a moment, Verity was dizzy. "Oh." She made a motion towards him, but contained herself. "Ohhh. Please. Please, Neil â I would like to leave. Please â can we leave?"
"Yes. Of course." He was white, confused. In the carriage, he said quietly,
"I am sorry. I can see I have done wrong."
"No â it's just that place â I don't like it." She reached out, and took his hand. Her own was still shaking slightly. "It was a very thoughtful gift â if you would, have the place destroyed."
"You want it gone?"
"Yes." She tightened her grip on his hand. "Demolish the building, and let the wild flowers grow there. Neil â it was the unhappiest house in the world. The best thing, is to let it be forgotten."
The cottage was gone the next week, though not as if it had never been. Verity remembered â and always would, though the colours of her memory were fading with time.
It was not many weeks later that she finally realized he was not going to die. More than a year since she had been told he was dead, nearly a year since she had heard he was not dead but dying, and every morning at breakfast he stood before her, still a little thin, but not too much, with colour in his cheeks, and the scar on his temple fading. It was that realization that snapped Verity. After a year of ceaseless tension, of ceaseless care-giving, of ceaseless hoping, the tension suddenly left her. She was in church at the time, standing and singing the hymn, when she noticed just how strong Neil looked, just how steady his voice was, and just how faded the scar at his brow was. The fear of him dying left her, and with it, the strength that had carried her through that fear. She faltered in her singing, and reached out to him as her breath left her. She touched his arm. He turned. And then she fell, and his arms came around her just in time.
"She's fainted, she's just fainted," Neil said, as their pew neighbours stopped of singing, and leaned over. The rest of the service, unconcerned over such a common event, continued to sing. "Mr Simpson, will you run and tell my carriage to be fetched? I must take her home."
She revived on the carriage ride home, leaning against Neil's shoulder. He was holding her hands, in her lap.
"I'm really not ill," she said slowly, as they arrived home. "I'm just..."
"Spent," he finished softly. "Not that I haven't been able to see it for months. All this time, you've been running after me, and you haven't had time to catch your breath. I am going to hire a nurse. Don't argue. Annie is crawling everywhere, and you need some hours of peace. Just a nurse, not a wet-nurse, mind."
He helped her out of the carriage. "Now, do I have to order you to bed?"
"I don't think I need to go to bed â I feel much better."
"Then I must. Rest. Complete rest, for one day." He went with her to her room, where Annie was being attended to by the chambermaid who picked the longest straw that morning.
"But I don't need to sleep," Verity fretted.
"Then you can stay awake, in bed, and rest." He pushed her firmly down upon the bed. "I'll take Annie with me in my study. We'll be fine there, together. You haven't looked in a mirror. You don't know how pale you are."
To her surprise, he bent and kissed her temple. It was the first time he had kissed her since she had arrived back in Houglen. "Please," he said. "Just a few hours of rest."
It was later that night when they were both down in the study, playing with Annie before bed, that he confessed to her he had stopped trying to remember the past.
"I think I've got all I will, anyway. There's a collection of half-formed memories there, some feelings, that still swim to the surface, but I don't think anything will bring it all back."
They were sitting on the floor, and Annie was crawling between them with a soiled linen dolly in her mouth. There had been much argument between Neil and Verity as to what the dolly was. Neil thought it was a camel. Verity, who was suspicious of the existence of camels, believed to be a chicken. It satisfied neither description, for it had three legs, and possibly two heads, but Annie was taken with it, far more than she was any of the nicer toys given her.
Verity plucked at the dolly, but Annie held firm. "Then, you'll never know all that happened between us."
"But for what you tell me." Neil distracted Annie by pulling out his buttonhole and waving it before her. She grabbed for it, and in her excitement dropped the dolly. Her next amusement was to tear the buttonhole to pieces. Verity abstracted the dolly and hid it behind her, where it would be forgotten. "I can't remember the good things, you know. It's mostly the sad, and frightening things that stuck with me. But you can tell me the good things."
Annie had torn the wildflower to shreds, and was beginning to look for further entertainment. She gabbled in her own private language, and crawled to Neil, and when he picked her up, began to chew on his cravat. Hastily, Verity brought out the dolly again. The distraction was complete, and the silk was saved. Neil brushed it down ruefully.
"It is definitely time to put her to bed â if she will sleep."
"Tonight, she's going to make trouble. I can sense it."
"Which is why you do need a nurse. At least for the mornings, to give you some peace." She still didn't like the idea. Reading the look on her face, he added, to distract her, "Tell me something good that happened to us."
"Well..." She thought hard. "What was very good, I thought, the first time, really, that I thought I might fall in love with you â it was on the boat to France. I was dreadfully sick. I can't stand voyages. But one night, one of the last nights..." She felt her cheeks burn. "It was the first time you ever really kissed me. I don't know why you did. You were about to leave the room and then you turned back and kissed me, fully. And then again after that. I hadn't really wanted you to kiss me, I thought we might never..." She picked up Annie, pulled her onto her lap, and juggled her a little. "It was the first time I realized that you were taking me seriously- and that I liked it." She was aware that it was the kiss on her cheek that had awakened that memory, and shot an urgent glance at Neil, but he only looked rather curious.
"I suppose that fits," he said, and she did not understand. "It fits now too." He smiled at her. "You hadn't really wanted me to kiss you. I suppose that changed."
She let Annie go again, and the child crawled steadfastly over to Neil, her eyes attached determinedly on his cravat. Neil's eyes were sparkling with humour, and Verity was almost sure that he was flirting with her.
"I didn't think I wanted to," she corrected. "I didn't know what you were like. You were very patient, and very gentle. And very good at it."
Neil disentangled the baby's grasping fingers from his cravat. "She has a taste for white silk. I have a feeling she will be very expensive to dress when she is older." Suddenly, Verity did not believe that he was flirting with her. She felt a little embarrassed. He was only curious.
But perhaps there was more to it after all. That night, after putting Annie to bed, he kissed her on the cheek before he went to his own room. That night, and every night following. It never went further than a kiss on the cheek, and she constrained her own desires to press herself against him and take it further herself, but, importantly, it was never forgotten.
~~
A/N: Just one more chapter and an epilogue! Technically this is the last chapter already, but only the first half of it.