THE CAVERN OF DEEP HARMONY

PART EIGHTY:

Eden came back to herself slowly, lying there on the big bed trying to decide if she'd fallen asleep. Her eyes roamed the walls of the room, more than half- expecting to see scattered particles of her being dribbling down the wallpaper towards the wainscoting. She had exploded. Under his hands, after a long, long time, she had simply exploded.  Not completely clear as to whether it had been Marshall's intention, the result had been that now as she gazed around
at what was their bedroom, she knew she had already become irretrievably connected with the fiber of this house. He had done it. He had taken her hesitancy and blown it asunder, had blasted it apart, sending the cellular structure of her soul into the house itself.

She became aware his hand still rested on her thigh and turned her head to look at him. He lay on his back, completely unclothed, and sound asleep, his lips curved into the slightest of smiles. Letting her eyes roam freely down the length of him, her own lips curved broadly. He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. He was, though, beautiful to her not just in this body that lay beside hers, but in himself. He...was beautiful...everything that made him, visible, invisible, all of it.

The late afternoon light, muted by the heavy weight of January, braved its way through a giant bay window that overlooked a very private back yard. The glow highlit for a moment something very russet draped over a slipper chair not far from the window. Carefully, she rose from the bed and walked across the deep pile of the emerald green carpet, stopping to finger the material. It looked like a woman's robe. She knew Marshall had had all his parents' things taken out of the master suite. It must be for her. Picking it up, she let the heavy satin of it flow like melted chocolate over her skin as she put it on.

"Thank you, darling," she breathed, looking back at her sleeping husband.

There was still enough light, though it seemed to be fading rapidly, and she tucked herself up atop the wide window seat, pressing her nose to the glass as she tried to get some idea of what the area behind the house looked like. A series of low terraces, made of flagstones, fell gently away from the house down a slope to an area of what she thought might be hemlock trees. Between the terraces and the trees lay an expanse of lawn where she could easily imagine Marshall playing as a boy.  There were perennial borders, not much to look at in the depths

of winter, as well as lots of shrubs and other trees.  She wondered where his willow was. You couldn't see it from here.

Knowing he'd like to be with her as she saw the house for the first time, she decided to limit herself to areas she had already been with him. That pretty much left only the hallway and

the living room, so she padded softly in the direction of the fireplace. Wadsworth heard her

and came out of the kitchen just as she stopped to examine the portrait over the mantel again.

"Hullo, boy," she murmured, scratching behind his ears before she turned her full attention

to Francis Hardin Sinclair. The eyes were Marshall's still, but now even that had changed.

Now she knew that whenever she passed through this room and the painted eyes were looking

at her, now she knew that she would always remember Marshall's scooping her up in his arms and taking her to the bedroom, their bedroom, to gaze at her. There were no tears that needed blinking back.

She jumped, startled, at a touch on her left shoulder.

"I see you found the new robe," Marshall whispered into her hair, his hand sliding over the

satin covering her arm.

"How...how did you know where I was?"

"I followed your scent," he smiled. "You leave a soft trail of roses in the air."

"You were asleep. I came out to look at...."

"At great grandfather, eh? He'd have loved you, you know. All the Sinclair men would have loved you."

She knew he had to be thinking, then, of Jeffrey and his father, both of whose lives had been such an integral part of this house. "Would you show me your room, darling, your old room?"

It wasn't until then she turned to face him and saw he was still naked. "Sylvie's not here, is she?" she asked quickly.

"Not today. I wanted us to have the house all to ourselves when you first arrived."

"Whew!" she sighed dramatically. "You're not leaving much to the imagination right now, I hope you know."

"Is that not good?"

"Oh, it's good, it's very, very good. In fact, it's so damn good that if you don't put a robe on, I shall ravish you right here in front of the fireplace, mister."

He grinned. "Later, when the fire is lit."

"Then put something on because the flesh is weak and so is the spirit right now and your virtue is in grave, grave danger."

He chuckled. "My virtue has never been in danger in this house before."

"Not once?"

"Not once."

"You never....?"

"Not here, no."

"So that...in the bedroom...that was...?"

"Yes," he replied, kissing her ear. "And now I'm not sure we really have to wait for the fire."

"It looks like there's a fire laid. And I see long matches."

His lips had moved from her ear down to her throat. "I don't need matches."

She gasped as his tongue found her flesh. "I don't...don't...'spect that you do."

"Wa...Wadsworth?" she croaked. "What about Wadsworth?"

"Kitchen!" he ordered.

"Poor Waddy."

"He'll live.  I, however, am in serious danger of spontaneous combustion."

"We...we can't have...that."

He tipped her back onto the thick, sculptured area rug that lay in front of the hearth. She found herself looking over his shoulder straight into the eyes of Francis Hardin Sinclair. "Great grandpa is...watching," she sighed.

"He'll just have to get used to it, now won't he?"  Then his lips moved lower and she forgot about everything but feeling what he was doing. He was such a 'giver' during their lovemaking. She'd come to know that he preferred to gaze at her first, moving his hands and lips over her in slow, lingering motions so that he felt every inch of her body come to life under his touch, felt like she was satisfied that she was 'seen', that he was satisfied that he was aware completely of her in that moment. It was only after that that the real give and take of lovemaking came into play. But he had done that there in the bedroom, knowing that she especially needed to feel

seen by him this afternoon. So now she pressed enough on his shoulder for him to understand

she wanted him to roll over onto his back. Her robe lay across the nearby coffee table, its sash come loose and coiled just out from her hand. Her fingers found it and, using its satin end very like the daffodil, she took him where she wanted, there in his first time in front of the fireplace, not once thinking of Francis Hardin Sinclair.

"Is it auburn?" he asked later. "I wanted it to be auburn, to match your hair."  He was letting the satin sash slide over and over through his fingers.

"It's definitely auburn."  How clearly she remembered back to what seemed a lifetime ago when he was explaining about colors to her, how he got some sense of them. He'd talked about standing on a hilltop with the sun low in the sky and hot on your face, about how you wait there while it disappears a moment behind a cloud, then was suddenly there again...just briefly before it set with a flow of warmth on your face after the chill. That was auburn, he'd said, soft and comfortable, somehow deeper and richer than just the regular heat.

He took the sash and wrapped it loosely three times around her lower arm then three around

his own.  "In Celtic weddings they often used ribbons as a sign of bonding, of the man and the woman joining together. 'And so the binding is made',"  he quoted almost in a whisper.

"I am," she replied, her voice husky with emotion as she buried her face in his chest, "completely and utterly bound to you."

They lay like that a long time, just breathing together in the silence as the last bit of daylight muted then faded into darkness.  Finally she opened her eyes, disoriented in the blackened room. "I can't see a thing."

She heard his chuckle. "Neither can I."

She'd lifted her head, but now let it lie back against him again. So, was this what the house was like for him? No, not really. For him it was a familiar place, with familiar things in a familiar absence of light.

"Listen," he whispered.

She became aware that the only sound she'd been hearing was his heartbeat under her ear and that had been enough, had been a sound the parameters of which defined her own livingness.

But now, because he asked, she turned her head, waiting for the house to speak to her as it

spoke to him. From the corner to the right of the fireplace came a steady, rather solid-sounding, tick-tick-tocking. She vaguely remembered a tall grandfather clock standing somewhere there.
It was a large tick, suitable for the pendulum of a large clock. If she listened very carefully, she could make out that muffled creak of old wood settling like old bones for a winter night. The furnace kicked in and hummed mechanically for a while. The house seemed to respond to the fresh inflow of warmed air by settling in slightly different patterns. There was a little scritch-scratch of sound against a front windowpane.

"The pink dogwood," Marshall explained when she asked. "It insists on growing a little too

close to the house."

"I expect you hear memories, too."

"Lots of memories. Birthdays, Christmases, little boys, young men. But we are making new memories, you and I, Eden, and they will become a part of the house."

She thought about feeling splattered on the bedroom walls not long ago. "Yes," she agreed, "I can already feel that happening."

From the kitchen came the click of dog claws on the floor and a tentative whuffing noise. "I bet Waddy needs out," she said, starting to rise. "He's part of the sound of the house, too."

"I'll get him, darling. Why don't you see if you can get the fire going? I'll be right back."

He helped her to her feet. "Wait just a second."  Passing easily around the coffee table, he switched on a lamp near the couch for her, then he was off for the kitchen.

The fireplace screen on this side was one of those metal curtain ones with chains you pull to open. She struck one of the long matches and found that the fire had been expertly laid with

lots of kindling so that it caught immediately.  Pulling the chains again, she settled back on the rug, not putting on her robe since he didn't have his with him. She'd heard the kitchen door open and close then the clink of some glasses. Before long Marshall returned with a bottle of wine tucked under his right arm, two goblets in one hand and a platter of cheeses, olives, small crisp breads, and a dip in the other.

"Sylvie thought of everything," he grinned, setting the platter on the coffee table.

The fire was crackling and spluttering as it caught. "Ah, pine," he said, pleased. "Pine is not necessarily the best firewood, but it's probably the noisiest. They always used it a lot for my sake. Nice 'n sappy."

After the fire had gotten going, she'd turned off the lamp so that the only light in the room came from the flames. As he settled beside her on the rug, she was glad for just the fire, enjoying the play of light over his body.  He held out his right arm and she nestled into the curve of it.

"Home," he sighed, "I'm really home."

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