Page 33 of Now Comes the Mist

“Miss Lucy, wake up!”

I jerk awake, half falling off the bench. A pounding pain knifes through my temples as I look into the face of my maid. “Harriet? How long have you been here?” I ask, looking around in a panic. I cannot imagine what she must think of the scene she has just taken in: me sprawled in a stranger’s lap with his hand on my thigh, my hair mussed and nightgown almost to my waist. But the space beside me is empty, and when I put my hand on the seat, it is chill.

It was only a dream. I have been sleepwalking again. The realization is both a relief … and a disappointment.

I press a hand to my heart, allowing myself to slowly regain full consciousness. My pulse is racing as though I have run all the way up the cliffs.

“A noise woke me,” Harriet says. “I found the door open and saw you wandering up the cliffs. I was terrified you would fall into the sea! But you only came up here and sat down.”

“You saw no one else?” I ask, though I know the answer. I gasp in air, still breathless from the dream and the feeling—so veryreal—of the stranger’s hands and lips on my body.

“No one, miss,” Harriet says, her face strained. She wraps a light shawl around me, unconsciously echoing the man’s actions. “Let’s go back. You shouldn’t be out here alone.”

But I wasn’t alone, I think as she steers me home. I reach up and find the half-torn white flower in my hair, where I had dreamed that the man tucked it.I wasn’t alone at all.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Do you have everything you need for the night, miss?” Harriet asks, standing in the doorway with a bundle of laundry in her arms. “Can I get you anything else?”

“No, thank you. I will be fine,” I say impatiently, for she has been stalling her departure from my bedchamber for half an hour now. “Good night.”

I have been in a flurry of distraction all day, thinking about the man and the dream I can remember in vivid detail. I burn with the need to see him again and to relive last night on the windy cliffs. Mamma wished me to pay calls with her all afternoon, and at each acquaintance’s home, I dropped a glove, lost track of a conversation, or spilled my tea. My mother believes I am coming down with a summer cold, and I am in no hurry to convince her otherwise.

Harriet is still lingering by the door. “Miss Lucy, I don’t think I should leave you alone.”

“We’ve already discussed this,” I tell her. “I am in no danger whatsoever.”

“But how can you be so sure?” The poor maid looks as though she would like to wring her hands had they not been full of my clothing. “I don’t think Madam would want—”

“Youpromised,” I say sharply. “You gave me your word you would not tell Mamma.”

“I know, miss, and I will keep it. But I don’t like the idea of your wandering alone on the cliffs at night. I would blame myself if anything happened to you.”

“You are not to be blamed for anything,” I say in a gentler voice. “You brought me home last night and have taken good care of me since. You have done well.”

“But perhaps if we put a chair against the door? Or if I slept on this sofa and—”

I throw my hands up. “Harriet!”

She leaves in a hurry, closing the door behind her.

Sighing, I nestle against my pillows. My room is darker tonight, as the clouds that covered the sun all day have remained to obscure the moon. In preparation for any stroll I might take this evening, I am in bed with my slippers on, a light robe tied over my nightdress, and my hair in a plait. If I am to meet the man in my dreams again, I will at least look more presentable.

I lie on my side, gazing up at the night sky and thinking about him. Even after waking up from our encounter, I had felt as though a part of me were still with him. The memory of his kisses and his hands on my body fill me with both frantic desire and the need to giggle like an enamored schoolgirl. I have never been alive until now. I have never been awake until he awakened me. Somehow, in the most remote recesses of my unconscious mind, my frustrated longing has created this man—this delicious escape from reality.

I twist Arthur’s ring on my finger. All day, I have berated myself for betraying the man I love, and yet … I have done nothing wrong. My meeting with the stranger took place inside my head, the natural result of my loneliness and unsatisfied yearning for Arthur.

I glance at my dressing table, where the flower the man tucked over my ear has been steadily wilting all day. I know that I put it in my own hair as I dreamed of him. The encounter was not real. My mind knows this, and yet my heart, my soul, and my skin—which now knows the touch of his hands—wants desperately to believe that ithadtaken place, against all reason.

I can explain my deep connection to this man no more than the stars can express why they hang aloft in the heavens. It is as inevitable as the pull of the moon upon the tides. I think of his warm voice, his sympathetic gaze, and how he had held me as I had always longed to be held, and I am suddenly so cold and so sad at the certainty that a man who could so thoroughly understand me, who could see and accept everything that I am, cannot possibly exist. But it is better to have him only in dreams, I tell myself, than not at all.

It takes me a long time to fall asleep … or at least, I assume that I sleep.

One moment I am in bed, thinking these puzzling thoughts, and the next, I am climbing the cliffs and smelling the clean scent of the oceanonce more. It is as though my mind has glided from one place to the next without any connecting memory in between, and thatshoulddisturb me. But instead, I am elated and hurry up the path beneath the spreading midnight sky.

The wind is stronger tonight. The heavy clouds have heralded the coming of a storm, and I smell rain in the air as I run with my heart in my throat. I do not linger by the old abbey tonight but make directly for the stone bench like an arrow loosed from a bow.

I see at once that my hopes have not been in vain.

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