No Sweeter Heaven: The Pascal Trilogy - Book 2 (25 page)

A violent shiver ran through her in memory and her fingers crept to her mouth. When he’d kissed her, she’d thought she’d go up like straw. One more second and she would have lain down on the ground with him and let him do whatever he pleased to her. But she would not give in.
She would not.
Her self-respect and her loyalty to her brother were all she had left to her, and she would remain true to both.

Her eyes dry and her throat hot and constricted, Lily pulled herself together, called for Bean, and started home, only remembering her book and her basket at the last minute.

Just now life felt not worth living, and yet she had never felt so alive. It seemed an impossible paradox.

“Lily
, hand me the balm of echinacea, would you?” Pascal extended his left hand as his right moved over the burned area of little Jeannie Moreau’s arm. She’d been shrieking when she first came in, scalded by a spilt pot of water, her skin in some places violently red, in others covered in blisters. Pascal had immediately doused the arm in cold water mixed with an extract of chamomile, and now the blisters were subsiding along with Jeannie’s pain.

Lily gave him the balm and he applied it, then covered the area with a fine linen cloth. “Jeannie will be fine in two or three days,” he told Madame Moreau. “Keep the dressing clean and dry, and don’t let her pull at it. If you have any worries, don’t hesitate to come.” He refused payment, as always, and after the door had closed behind them, he leaned back in his chair, stretching his back.

“I think that’s it for the night,” he said, looking over at the pot. “What’s for supper? I’m starved.”

“Plucked chicken,” Lily said wickedly. “My specialty.”

Pascal groaned. “Singed feathers again?”

“Not quite so many as the last time around. I
am
improving, Pascal, believe it or not.” She cleaned up the table, put the soiled bandages aside to soak, ready for washing in the morning, then went outside to fetch a lettuce from the garden.

It was a beautiful evening, the sun barely topping the trees, casting a soft glow over the valley below. She cut a particularly nice lettuce, the leaves still soft green and tender. Her heart caught painfully as she straightened and her gaze was drawn to the turrets of the Chateau de Saint-Simon, shining mellow gold in the evening light. She tried to avoid looking at it, with its dark windows and deserted air. It had been well over a month since Jean-Jacques had written to say he’d be home within the week.

She missed him terribly and she wanted him to see his vineyards, bursting with fruit. She wanted to see him, to see his dear face, flushed with his own financial success. She just wanted to be near him, to be reminded of her family, to be reminded of the other world, the one in which someone called Elizabeth Bowes had lived a lifetime ago.

And yet … Lily closed her eyes, trying not to think about that qualifier. If she had a choice, she knew she’d choose that other life filled with beautiful dresses and parties, courtiers and laden tables, respectful servants bowing to her every need, and most especially a husband who allowed her to go her own way.

Or would she? What about Madame Moreau and her sweet little Jeannie? Or Alain, or the dozens of others who had visited their humble cottage with runny noses, aching bones, sore throats, and upset stomachs? What about Jean-Pierre Hubert, who had broken his arm so badly that the splintered bone had poked out of his skin?

What about tiny Marie-Claire, all of six months, who had been brought by her frantic mother, the baby’s lips blue as her face. Pascal had cut a hole in her windpipe and inserted a tube, and the baby had begun breathing again. He’d then dislodged the stone of a plum from deep in her throat with a long skinny metal thing he called forceps. Lily had helped him, holding Marie-Claire down.

She loved it, her work alongside Pascal, the nights of studying, learning all she could, making ready the supplies, waiting for Pascal to open the door in the early evening as a sign that the people were welcome.

And in the end, what about Pascal?

Lily was more torn than she’d ever been in her life. Everything she’d been brought up to believe, to think important and worthy of respect, was disputed every day by her experience with the villagers, by Pascal himself, though he remained her single greatest fear.

Nothing made sense any more. She looked forward to each day, to each new challenge. But more than anything, she looked forward to Jean-Jacques’s return. He would make sense out of everything. Seeing the château come to life with his presence would restore her sense of balance and order and put that old life that she missed so much into proper perspective. It had to.

Pascal paused in the act of rolling clean linen strips into neat bundles, arrested by the sight of Lily sitting in a chair by the fire, her hair shimmering in the last of the light as she bent over an English translation of the ancient
Pen Tsao Ching,
Shen Nung’s classic book of herbal prescriptions, her feet tucked up underneath her. Open next to her on the table was Culpepper’s
Complete Herbal and English Physician.
The pink tip of her tongue poked out of one corner of her mouth, worrying back and forth as she read, hypnotizing him. He could think of other ways for her to occupy her tongue.

His groin stiffened as he watched her, pushing painfully against the front of his trousers. That was nothing new—in fact, it was so old it was becoming second nature, but that didn’t lessen the need for her that grew daily.

Lily flipped the page, stroking two tapered fingers over the paper as lightly, as intently, as he wished she would stroke him. His forehead broke out into a sweat, and he dragged his gaze away from the sight of Lily by the fire, trying to think of something other than how she would look and feel and taste if he walked over to her, took the book out of her hands, and pulled her to the ground.

Pascal swore under his breath as he fumbled and dropped the roll of linen. Keeping his hands and his heart to himself was driving him to distraction, and living inside of his own body was becoming sheer torture.

He found himself watching her all the time, taking simple pleasure in her natural sensuality, the easy grace with which she moved. He loved the slow smile that spread over her face and lit up her eyes when something pleased her, or the grin that came and went like a streak of quicksilver when she was amused but trying to hide it from him. She was good at that, hiding her feelings from him. He was just as good at chasing them down.

Lily had surprised him in the last month. She studied constantly, stood at his side when the patients came in, supporting, fetching, doing whatever was needed without question or complaint. She saved her questions until they were alone, listening carefully to his answers—and almost always retaining what he told her.

Best of all, Lily hadn’t once looked at him oddly, nor even seemed to notice that he had an extraordinarily high success rate with his patients. She accepted everything that happened as a normal part of medicine.

He wasn’t going to question her acceptance. He wasn’t going to question anything at all. He was far too happy watching her coming to life, just as the land had been coming to life—at first starved for sustenance, then gradually warming, stretching, putting out the first shoots, then flowers, and now bearing healthy clusters of fruit. She had blossomed in the fresh air and sunshine, the satisfaction of hard work and the steady warmth of kindness and companionship—not that she would admit it.

He risked glancing up at her again. Her concentration was absolute, her breasts rising and falling with the rhythm of her breathing. There was a new beauty to Lily, something that had gradually grown in her as the weeks passed. She’d turned the cottage into a home, putting vases of flowers about, taking pride in keeping the place clean—she’d even made curtains out of some pretty material that Madame Lascard had given them after Alain had recovered.

Lily had become domestic … content.

And he continued to love her even as she kept him at a distance—or so she thought. She had no idea how very near he was to her, always. But he couldn’t intrude, not until she opened the door herself. In the interim he wished there was a way to stop aching for her.

He wondered what she was thinking about. She hadn’t turned the page in minutes, and her eyes were focused on some distant thought.

As if in response to that silent question, she looked up at him, her smoky eyes narrowed in thought. “Pascal?”

“Hmm?”

She tucked her chin on the heel of her palm. “What made you go to China and Japan and all those other places you said you’d been to?”

He put down the bandage on the clean sheet in front of him and picked up another. “I wanted to examine new types of plants, thinking to import them to Europe.”

“How did you find out about Chinese medicine? It’s different in so many ways, and you were a botanist, not a doctor.”

“Well,” he said, dodging the issue, “the two aren’t so very far apart, being linked by plants.”

“Yes … I suppose that’s true.” She closed the book on her lap. “But still, you seem to know a lot about it.”

Pascal paused before carefully answering. “Certain aspects of Western medicine leave something to be desired, so in every country I visited, I learned what I could about the local healing methods. I discovered an interesting commonality among the Asian traditions.”

“Really? Such as what?”

“Well, let’s see. In India there are the Ayurvedic healers—also herbalists; in China, I found many of the formulas to be the same. I confess I still don’t know much about the practice of Asian medicine, so if you’re asking about the different pulses, the yin and yang, all the elements and functions and so on, I can’t help you.”

“What about the energy paths described here?”

Admiration surged in him for Lily, a swelling of pride in the way she absorbed knowledge, valued it as much as he did. “I suppose the most I ever saw of that put into actual practice was in the use of acupuncture,” he said. “The results were impressive. I was fortunate to watch a difficult surgery conducted with needles placed to deaden the pain. The patient never blinked.”

“Oh … yes, I’ve been reading about that,” Lily said. “No, that’s not what I meant. I don’t understand why nothing is mentioned anywhere in these books about the colors.” She rubbed her neck and yawned. “I suppose some of these books are so old that the authors weren’t aware of the scientific value of certain descriptions. Or perhaps they took them for granted.”

“The colors?” he asked, as casually as he could manage.

“Yes—you know, those very subtle colors that come from your hands when you’re working.” She frowned, looking uncertain. “You do know what I mean, don’t you? It was blue just now when you were working on Jeannie’s burn. I thought you must have learned how to do that in China. I’m not imagining it, am I?”

Pascal stared at her. Only one other person he’d known in his life had seen colors when he worked, and that had been a monk in Tibet. Yet here was Lily the scientist behaving as if the unexplained phenomenon was merely another fact to get straight. “No, you’re not imagining it.”

He suppressed a strong desire to pick her up and crush her to him, overwhelmed with relief and love and a feeling of kinship. Lily could see auras, and since no one had ever told her that she shouldn’t, she didn’t know that it wasn’t a normal thing—that
he
wasn’t normal.

“Pascal, why are you looking so self-satisfied?”

“Because you are a star pupil, Lily my love—a genius.”

“I can’t think why. It seemed an obvious enough remark.”

Pascal grinned, still filled with elation. “Yes, but not everyone can see the way you do. It takes a special talent that very few people have.”

Lily flushed with pleasure. “Really? Why?”

“It’s not a physical talent so much as an inner one. What you are seeing is different energies. The colors change because each one has a different purpose, a different vibrancy. Usually there’s a heat that goes along with them, although not always.”

Lily’s gaze became distant, thoughtful. “I think I understand. In the meadow, when you did that—that thing, there was light, clear and white, all around your body. It was … well, I don’t know what it was, only that it was different from this. When you work on people, it’s very focused. Is that right?”

“Yes. That’s exactly right.”

“Oh, good!” she said, looking extremely pleased with herself. “Maybe I will be competent at this someday.”

“I think you’re already competent. You’re learning very quickly, and you’re more help to me than you realize.”

“I enjoy helping you. And I enjoy helping the people who come. They’re always so grateful. It’s nice to feel needed and appreciated.”

She smiled mischievously, the sparkle in her eyes and the provocative curve of her mouth drawing his gaze, holding it. “I must admit I love opening the door and discovering the things left outside,” she said. “Food is always nice, but my very favorite was Monsieur Lascard’s bedstead. I thought I’d expire with delight.”

“To this day I don’t know how he knew we were without a proper bed,” he said, the very mention of the damned thing driving him to distraction.

“I told him,” Lily said, as if it were self-evident. “He kept going on and on to me about how he could repay you, since you refused to take his money, and since he is a carpenter, I told him that a bedstead would be greatly appreciated.”

He forced his gaze away from her mouth, willed his blood to flow smoothly instead of pulsing wildly through his veins. “You can’t ask people for things, duchess. That defeats the purpose.”

“Pascal, be sensible. Monsieur Lascard was miserable about not being able to show his appreciation, and he didn’t feel that Madame’s fabric was enough of a gesture. So I did what was practical, and now he’s happy, because he knows his bedstead was something we needed, and he’s repaid you for his son’s life. You can be far too stubborn.”

“Stubborn?
That, coming from you?”

She nodded. “You are proud and impossible, especially when it comes to asking for things. It’s a good thing that you have a wife to be sensible for you, or we’d be in a terrible pickle. Really, Pascal, you must try to understand people better.”

There was nothing to say to that, short of bursting into laughter at her assessment of herself. Pascal managed to control himself though, a discipline born of three months of life with Lily. He turned away to bottle the infusions that she had been steeping in the sink that day.

She’d already become accomplished at gathering and drying plants, and had recently begun making infusions and tinctures and balms. The cottage always smelled of something interesting, although he’d prefer to forget the day that Lily had inadvertently gathered great quantities of the wrong species of hawthorn and crushed the leaves. The entire place had smelled like the bubonic plague, and it had taken two days to air it out. She hadn’t made that mistake again.