Covenant With Earth ...Part 3 ...Smouldering Fire

There was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if
the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

The terms of mother's will left me confined to the house and grounds but I could hardly call it an imprisonment.

Emily was busy overseeing a controlled burn of the oak savannah on the ridge above the pond but I was the one burning with desire and consumed with an uncontrollable urge to see her.

Over the next few days, I’d use every occasion to stop and chat with Emily. She wasn't simply hired help—she had an ethereal quality about her that drew me and I found her enchanting and irresistible.

I wanted to romance her but since I couldn’t leave the property, so I went on line and purchased a row boat and phoned the market and had them make me up a picnic basket lunch.

I had gotten to know Emily’s routines, so on this lovely golden afternoon I waited until she took her break and then whisked her away with me, down the long winding path to the pond.

“Where are you taking me?” she giggled. She left me breathless and I’d have gladly traded a thousand days for the surprised look on her face when I showed her the boat tied up in the shallows.

“I have no idea how to row, but if you’re willing to risk life and limb we can sail off to Key Largo.”

“Key Largo, huh?” Her eyes danced. “But there’s no outlet from the pond to Lake Ontario.”

“Well, it’ll just have to be a tour of the pond with a picnic later on the side of the hill.”

I pulled back a picnic blanket covering the wicker basket. “There’s a chilled bottle of champagne as well—if you’ve nothing against bubbly.”

“I’m not averse to spirits,” she smiled.

We got in the boat and I used an oar to push off from the bank. Within minutes we were in the middle of the water with a swirling sky of cumulus above, reflected in the glassy surface of the pond below.

She reached out and touched my arm. “Oh look, Jay! How lovely the house looks from here.”

It was a moment so intimate and touching—the tender way she whispered my name.

I held onto her arm, pulled her close and pressed my mouth down on hers. Her lips were soft and full and I never wanted the kiss to end.

“I’m sorry, Em,” I said, “you’re just so lovely.”

“There’s nothing to forgive, Jay. I think this was meant to be.”

After a while we rowed back to shore and spread out the blanket on one of the plateaus on the path leading down the hill.

It was a glorious June afternoon with a slight breeze—just enough to stir the trees and dapple her face with shadowy leaves.

“It’s so beautiful here—I don’t know why I never noticed it before,” I confessed.

“You were young and reckless—you didn’t notice me either.”

I put down the champagne flute. “You were here, back then, before I left?”

“I was,” she whispered.

“I can’t believe I could be so blind. Did we ever speak?”

“No—you were unreachable then—like a dark fire smouldering beneath ashes. You were very fierce—you frightened me.”

“I’m sorry. I was headstrong and unruly.”

“Your mother and I would sit on the back verandah in the cool of those summer afternoons and she’d confide in me. She loved you, Jay, but couldn’t seem to find a way inside you.”

My heart broke then—all the tears I didn’t shed, or wouldn’t allow, I shed now. I felt Emily’s arms around me—and Mother’s as well, in the softness of a woman’s heart I had shut out.

We spent a long time on the hillside and shadows were deepening and the pond was dark when we finally made our way back up the path to the house.

I was shivering, so Emily built a fire, and we sat there staring through the windows at the setting sun lighting the western sky like a forest fire.

We sat spellbound as the sun lit up the room with its dying rays, and in the magic of its afterglow.

I felt I had finally come home but there was still something missing—something elusive and indefinable that troubled my otherwise perfect peace.

© 2019, John J Geddes. All rights reserved

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