"Cosimo, this is the third morning in a row you have met me in the market. We have got to stop meeting like this. People are beginning to talk." She had lingered at the Rialto end of the bridge nearest the vegetable market hoping he would turn up.
"Well, Claudia, we could always finish what we planned to do twenty years ago and elope."
"Cosimo," Claudia scolded him sharply, "for once could you please stop being silly? Father is dead, and my brother doesn't care. He's too busy making the new ice boxes and chests which are all the rage these days—and dreaming of prosperity and maybe a young wife. But I can't marry you. There is no dowry set aside—it's gone with the first marriage. And while we are getting by, there isn't anything extra."
Cosimo lost his grin. His body language quieted. Even the air of jubilant euphoria that engulfed him stilled. "Claudia, twenty years ago, we did not care about a dowry, and we did not care about how we would make a living. Now I am a physician who likely will never open another surgery. But I don't need to. I have other income these days. And even if I didn't, we could survive on what I have in letters of deposit. So the only dowry I need is a bit of happiness for the rest of my life.
"But in fairness . . ." Cosimo almost seemed to wilt, like a water starved plant in an untended parched garden. "I must tell you . . ." He paused and seemed to not want to go on.
She looked into his sky-blue eyes and felt like a giddy girl again.
At last he continued in a voice so full of fear, that it was hard to hear. "The rest of my life is likely to be measured in months instead of years. I've come home to die."
Claudia gasped and brought her hand to her mouth. Her eyes flared and almost seemed to swallow her face.
"It seems I have consumption. In Grantville, by some electrical system that still seems like magic to me, they actually made a picture of the insides of my lungs. What they found growing there they called cancer. Which is nothing to do with the stars and everything to do with the Dutch love of New World tobacco not agreeing with me. So I haven't seriously asked you to marry me because it would be unkind and unfair for you to marry just to then bury me."
"Is there nothing they can do?"
"Alas, no."
"How long?"
"A few months, they said it was likely. Maybe a year, two at most, but they said there was no way of knowing and—"
"Cosimo," Claudia placed her hand softly over his mouth, shutting him up. At the same time, she kept the hard eye contact and stared unwaveringly into his very soul. "I am a widow now, and the last of my children passed with the plague. I most likely will live out my life cooking and cleaning for my brother and his apprentice. And my brother most likely will not marry, especially if I am living with him over the shop."
She drew closer to her tall Dutchman, shifting her head to look up as she did, never breaking eye contact. "My husband was a pig and best forgotten. I will never speak of him to you again. Suffice to say it was not a happy marriage. And I do not look forward fondly to a lonely old age. A year or two of happy memories to see me out is more than I have expected or even hoped for in years. If you will have me with nothing but the clothes on my back, I will marry you if you ask. I have been happier these last three mornings than I have been since I was a maiden with a head full of foolishness. If we only have a year together, it will be a year to remember in a plain and drab, even dreary, existence.
"So, while you have not asked, when you do, if you do, the answer will be yes."
Standing nearly nose-to-nose in the market square, drawing stares they did not notice, they were in the middle of a bubble of quite unlikely quiet. Lost in a soul lock, Claudia got a gleam in her eyes. Cosimo's aura of exuberance engulfed her and in a tone of voice much like what he used in making his outrageous flatteries, she said, "And if you break my heart again by running off to another world like you did last time, after promising me you would marry me, I swear to you, we will never speak again."
Claudia's mouth pinched in a moue. Her eyebrows met, making a vertical line over her nose. Neither of which touched the gleam in her eyes. "Now that I think about it, you did ask me to marry you. I said yes, and then you ran off for twenty years. Herr Van Castre, I demand that you make good on your offer or I shall seek out a solicitor and sue for breach—"
Claudia suddenly had trouble talking past her blocked lips. For that matter, he was holding her so tightly she would have had trouble breathing, if she stopped to notice.
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