Free Snow Angels by Elizabeth Gill Page B

wasn’t something he could help. She threw insults at him and Gil begged and pleaded with her not to marry Robert. How scornful she was, how unforgiving. The worst part of all was that she loved him. She liked Robert well enough, she saw it all clearly, and she knew that marriage to him would be comfortable andeasy because of his money and independence; but the young man in front of her was the person she always looked for when she walked into a room. All those evenings when they hadn’t talked and hadn’t danced didn’t matter as long as he was there. When he wasn’t there, every party was boring. He had nothing to recommend him: no breeding, no talents; he didn’t even love her. She was to be his escape from a love which he could not have and she thought that she could not bear that he should want Helen more than he wanted her. Yet without him there seemed little point to anything. Her pride brought despair to his face.
    ‘If you ever cared for me at all, don’t leave me like this, please.’
    Abby thought she would go to her grave hearing him say that and she told him airily, while the snow provided a white carpet, that she would marry Robert and he could go to hell. Which was, she thought later, exactly what he did.
    *
    People began to leave as the snow fell heavily, but all the Collingwoods had to do was walk up the hill towards the Harrison house, where they would spend the night. Helen and Edward were not having a holiday. He planned to take her to Paris in the spring.
    ‘Besides, Toby and I are going to the Solway to shoot geese at the end of the month,’ Edward had said.
    *
    Gil’s room had a big fire and huge floor-to-ceiling bay windows which looked out over the darkness of the river where the castle and cathedral were outlined as gigantic shadows against the white sky. They frightened him, those buildings. Anything frightened him which could exist for hundreds of years when most men were dead at sixty. How many suffering souls had looked on those same walls and made no impression? For how many more generations would they stand while people died in athousand different ways? Gil hated buildings that lasted. They should fall as men fell, it was only decent.
    Helen and Edward had gone to bed. In a room across the hall, his brother was enjoying his first taste of a woman who did not belong to him. It was as though Helen committed adultery, except that no one else but him would know the wrong of it. He tortured himself thinking of her in his brother’s arms while his memory, or his imagination, or some part of his mind, gave him her laughter and the happiness of them both and the child inside her, his child, the only one she had. He could feel her, taste her, yet his arms were empty and the longing hurt so much that he would have cried to ease it except that he couldn’t.
    The snow laid a heavy look on the night. The fire died slowly in the grate. He didn’t go to bed. He stayed by the window, saw the night through and told himself that it would never be as bad as that again. His brother would have deflowered his bride by now and you couldn’t do that twice.

Chapter Six
    Abby had not been kissed before and didn’t know what to expect, only that the timing was wrong. She was still upset about Gil. It was sweet enough, standing in a shop doorway with Robert, quite alone with him, and having him put his mouth on hers, but she kept thinking back to Gil and wishing she had said different things.
    She and Robert had lingered on the walk to where they were staying with friends, dropped back from the others.
    ‘I want to make you mine,’ he said. ‘Will you marry me, Abby?’
    Her first instinct was panic and refusal, but she had known for some time that he had been leading up to a proposal; he would not have spent so much time with her or asked her to go with him to London.
    ‘May I talk to your father about it?’ he said.
    Henderson, she knew, would be delighted. He had not thought about such things as an