As for agreeing to walk with me to the cloisters… I grimaced, as the obvious explanation hit me. Of course. Joan. It wasn't that he wanted to stroll through the moonlight — or what would have been moonlight if the moon had been a little more cooperative — with me. He just needed a pretext to flee his hostess's predatory grasp, and I had provided him with an ideal excuse. The visiting historian (in my mind's eye, I sprouted tweeds, brogues, and bifocals) needed to be taken to see local objects of historical interest. There was no other type of interest involved.
The white wine I had drunk to keep the vicar company tasted sour on my tongue.
Right. I gathered the tattered shreds of my ego around myself, even though they afforded even less shelter for my lacerated pride than Serena's pashmina did for my frozen arms. Well, I wasn't here to flirt with him, either. So there.
I was beginning to regret the whole ill-conceived adventure. I should have behaved like a good little academic, and stayed back at the house, hunched over a table full of documents in the meager light of the desk lamp, rather than letting myself be drawn in by the echoes of long-dead romances and a strong dose of wishful thinking.
I wasn't turning into one of those desperate singles who fancied that every man she met was flirting with her, was I? The very thought was horrifying. Soon, I'd start reading great meaning into the way the counter guy at the convenient store across the way from my flat counted out my change, or imagine a hungry gleam in my landlord's eye as he descended into my basement bower to empty the electricity meter.
Have I mentioned that my landlord is fifty-something and paunchy?
I twisted to look back at the house, wondering if I should suggest we go back. I could leave Colin to the tender ministrations of Joan, and as for me… there was always the bar. And the vicar. Not that I thought the vicar was interested in me, of course. He was just someone to talk to. At the bar.
"You know," commented Colin, grabbing my arm as I stumbled, "you would probably fall less if you walked forwards instead of backwards."
I could feel the warmth of Colin's hand through the thin rayon of Serena's dress, seeping through the fabric, combating the November cold.
I removed my elbow from Colin's grasp. "Are these cloisters of yours much farther?" My voice sounded sharp, strained, and stridently American. "I wouldn't want to keep you out here too long."
"I don't mind."
"Someone else might."
"The vicar? You and he did seem to be getting on." Before I could respond to that, Colin's flashlight beam shifted abruptly to the left, catching on an object several yards ahead of us. "There are the cloisters."
"Where?' I said dumbly.
No, it wasn't because I was looking at Colin rather than the tiny circle of light. I was just looking in the wrong place. I had expected… well, a building, at least. Stone walls around a courtyard, maybe even a small church of some kind. I didn't expect them to be intact, but some sort of structure was to be expected. Was this all an elaborate practical joke that they played on visiting historians? Perhaps Joan was in on it, too, and the vicar. I dimly remembered some sort of sci-fi movie along those lines, where everyone in town belonged to the same alien race except the unwitting heroine, although I did have to admit that feigning the existence of medieval buildings was quite different from being able to pull off one's skin and transform into a reptile creature.
"There," repeated Colin patiently, lowering the beam a bit, and this time my eyes picked out the lumps in the landscape that were nothing to do with nature.
"This is it?"
"Sad, isn't it?" agreed Colin, flashlight beam drifting across a window that had been rendered redundant by the absence of walls. "Half the buildings nearby were built of Donwell stone."
"I suppose you could look at it as recycling," I said, surveying the depleted ruins, "but it still seems like a waste."
There wasn't much left to the old monastery. I'm sure what there was must have been picturesque in summer, with greenery creeping over the tumbled masonry, but in the autumn dark, the bare, ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang were more forbidding than quaint. Once, a series of arches must have marked off the peripheries of a courtyard. Now, only half-buried stones and the occasional vestige of a pillar remained. Knee-high walls preserved the memory rather than the reality of rooms, and occasionally, among the wilted weeds, one could see the outline of something that might once have been a paving stone in a past life.
As we grew closer, and the area encompassed by the flashlight expanded, I could see that the walls grew higher as we went on, rising shoulder high in some places, higher than my head in others, peaking and falling again. Only one room, all the way at one end of the cloister, maintained the majority of its original walls. There was even a bit of ceiling remaining, made of heavy stone that sloped inwards like the hull of a ship turned upside down.
It was into that remaining room that I followed Colin, picking my way gingerly across the floor. It was more intact than those farther along the cloister, the majority of the floor stones still in place, but they were weathered and uneven, cracked in unexpected places. In other words, hell on heels.
"Get me to a nunnery," I said lightly, just to say something, and felt like an idiot as soon as the words were out of my mouth. Get me to a nunnery? That was nearly as bad as the "I carried a watermelon" line in Dirty Dancing. And it had been a monastery. Not a nunnery. Not the same thing. My medieval history professor would be having palpitations. I had once confused the Carthusians with the Cistercians and had been afraid we were going to have to rush him to Harvard University Health Services for emergency care.
"Not much of a nunnery these days," replied Colin with amusement, though it was hard to tell whether he was amused with me or at me. The beam of the flashlight swooped in a circle along the floor, picking out signs of recent habitation. An empty Coke can, a discarded packet of cheese-and-onion-flavored crisps. "It's quite popular with the local youth."
"Popular?"
"I came here a time or two myself," he added with a reminiscent grin.
"Ugh," I said, wrinkling my nose at the cold stone floor. "That can't be very comfortable. Or sanitary."
Colin lounged back against one of the remaining walls in a position of supreme masculine smugness. Thinking of conquests past, no doubt. "You'd be surprised. A few blankets, a bottle of wine…"
"Spare me the tales of your depraved youth," I said repressively, turning away and tracing a hand along the embrasure of the window, running a ringer over the chips and chinks in an elaborate fleur-de-lis.
"Yours wasn't?" His voice was warm, teasing.
I glanced back over my shoulder. "I don't kiss and tell."
"Or just not in cloisters?"
"I don't see the appeal." I dug among my collection of misremem-bered quotations for ammunition. " 'The grave's a fine and quiet place / But none I think do there embrace.'"
"Ah," said Colin, setting the flashlight down on one of the recessed benches so that the light fanned out against the wall, "but this is a cloister, not a grave."
"It is a sort of a grave, isn't it?" I argued, licking my lips and taking a little step back. It had been so long since I'd flirted with anyone, I'd practically forgotten how. We were flirting, weren't we? "It's a grave of lost hopes and ambitions. You wonder how they must have felt when the monasteries were dissolved, suddenly seeing their whole way of life go the way of… well, the grave."