Exchange of Love, page 16
“Edward is sound asleep,” Penny said. “He sleeps like the dead after he has been with me.”
“So, you are back together? Reconciled?” John asked.
“And very happy.” She smiled fondly. “Although there have been grievous times for both of us; more for him than for me. We have both sinned. We now forgive and start again.”
John hoped she would explain, but instead, silence seemed to stretch into an age.
“How is it that we can meet like this?” John eventually asked. “I thought it was only possible at Peverell.”
“And the baking house in Bath. We can meet in any place that exists in both our worlds.”
John was finding it difficult to concentrate on Penny’s words; her beauty and allure had always been a distraction to him, even though he knew any relationship was impossible. There was a passion for Penny that clawed at his heart; so different from the warm, almost familial love he felt for Judith.
Oblivious to John’s agitation, she continued. “The Stanning family bought this ruin years ago and Nick’s father converted it into a house. Since her husband’s death, Gertie moved in here with her family. She cannot bear to be in the manor house with all its memories.”
Penny explained about the grievous wounds Nick Stanning had received at Bristol, his lingering death witnessed by Edward, and their decision to travel to Cornwall to sustain Gertie with her young child.
“It’s no worse for her than hundreds of other women, but at least she has money and property.”
“And good friends,” added John. “And you have forgiven Edward?”
“How could I not? I would have done the same with you if you had taken advantage of my misery. I was more than tempted, John.”
“I still am.” John realised that his hands were trembling now, and turned himself slightly so that she wouldn’t see. His yearning for her was like an illness, an obsession.
“You would lie with me even with Judith asleep in your bed?” she asked.
“Yes,” he continued earnestly. “We both love elsewhere; her love as hopeless as mine. We are good friends, we enjoy sex together. We may even have children, but will not marry or live together.” The concepts of civil partnership and the co-parenting they had discussed were too complicated to explain to Penny.
“Do not dismiss what you have with Judith,” Penny said, stroking his arm softly in sympathy. “I have said to you before, I have friends in desperate, loveless marriages who would sell their very souls for the happiness you have, however unconventional it may be.” Penny shook her head sadly. “I have all the love a woman could expect and I have realised that everything is so fragile, particularly with this senseless rebellion by parliament. Edward could easily have been killed or maimed at Bristol, along with his friends. So many men we knew died there.”
Penny then went on to tell John of the attack on her carriage; how she had shot a man dead and wounded another; how she had shot a mere boy and handed him over for execution. John tried to picture the carnage as Penny talked matter-of-factly of war. It was so different from modern war, but the utter shattering of lives was the same.
A loud voice boomed from Penny’s bedroom, breaking the spell between them.
“Wife! Where are thee? Skulking in the privy? I need you here!”
Softly, Penny whispered, “I will leave you, John. I hope we can speak again!” She leapt from the chair, kissed him full on the lips, and bounded away to Edward.
“Remove that ridiculous garment, woman, it is not winter!”
John heard struggles and giggling and backed away in embarrassment.
“Christ, John, what’s happening?” Judith ran across the room to grab him, dragging him over to the bed. “I’ve been looking for you.”
He blinked in the glare of the main bedroom light, struggling with the transformation across centuries.
“You came through the bloody bathroom wall!”
“You must’ve been dreaming.”
“I wasn’t bloody dreaming. I’ve been looking for you for ages, even searched downstairs, and when I checked the bathroom you weren’t there, so how the hell did you just walk through the wall?”
What could he say? He slipped down onto the bed, pulling her into a sitting position beside him.
“John, please tell me.”
“You know this place is old, right? Very old.”
Judith nodded.
“Well… I went back into the past.”
“To The Priory?” she asked, incredulity in her voice.
“Yes, but to the 1600s. Penelope Peverell once stayed here.”
“That bloody woman again. You’ve been with her?”
“Not like that.” John felt hopelessly entangled with his mixed emotions and the need to calm Judith.
“Did she offer you sex again?” Judith was surprised at how jealous she felt. They were still supposed to be unattached free agents, despite her co-parenting plans. Judith had been so hurt by Mark; she couldn’t take it again.
“No, no, she’s made up with her husband.”
“Then she’s a fool – once men go off the rails, it never stops.” She paused. “Tell me John, if you had screwed her; had knocked her up, would you have stayed in the past? What about your commitment to our happy family?”
“I didn’t, and I won’t. Please let me explain.” John did explain, and as he did so, he could feel Judith moving away from him, physically and emotionally.
Judith’s chest felt tight. Had she been betrayed just when she thought trust and a true solid relationship was building between them? “I can’t live with this, John, this constant uncertainty.” She supressed a sob. “If it was just going off for a ‘quickie’ that’s one thing, but what if you get her pregnant?”
“It won’t happen,” John said soothingly. “I can’t change the past, can I?”
“We don’t know that – any time, any place where Penny has been…” Tears were beginning to fall now. Although she knew John was trying to reassure her, she was getting more and more distressed as possibilities occurred to her. “What if you just disappear from my life one day, like Mark? Utterly gone; back four or five hundred years. I’d never know. I thought we really had something…”
John put his arm around her shoulders and said quietly, “We still have something, Judith. Nothing’s changed. It was me who brought up the need for commitment. Anyway, I don’t think anything I take to the past would stay there. I know I can’t bring anything back to our time.” He smiled at the memory.
“Oh, did you try to steal a gold doubloon?”
“No,” John grinned, “it was horse shit from the streets of Bath.”
“Whatever turns you on – bog water from Dartmoor or horse shit from Bath. Seriously, though, what about diseases, plague, smallpox?”
Suddenly, Judith leapt up from the bed and began to pace the room with nervous energy. This was getting them nowhere.
“Tea?” she asked desperately.
John nodded and a silence descended as the hotel kettle boiled. She opened their pack of biscuits; anything to keep her hands busy.
Sitting back alongside John, she blurted out, “And there’s the jealous husband!”
“He’s no cause—”
“So what? He wakes up in the middle of the night, finds his wife snogging or making love to another man – try explaining that! You may not bring a bullet back with you, but there will still be a bloody great hole if he shoots you.”
They looked uncertainly at each other and realised everything was getting out of hand.
“Sorry, John, I don’t mean to go on, but once deserted, always suspicious.”
“Tell you what,” smiled John, “if I see Penny again, I’ll tell her to bite my ear to see if it’s still bleeding!”
“I’ll bite something more important than your ear if you don’t stop talking about her!”
They continued sitting side by side on the bed in an oppressive silence, faces fraught.
Finally, Judith said, “There is nothing more to say, is there? Things are as they are and I’ve just got to accept it.”
“No. Look, nothing’s going to happen.”
“Too right. I’m not leaving you alone where that woman can get to you.” Inwardly, she grimaced. Being in the same room with John tonight hadn’t stopped anything. She continued, “Right now, we need some sleep if we’re doing a long walk tomorrow.”
“Back to the chair?” John suggested, wrung out by emotion.
“Not, it’s too far away. I want you here with me so I can keep hold of you.”
CHAPTER 22
The trauma of the night and Judith’s distress at Penny’s ghostly visit had faded away with the dawn. John and Judith seemed to have recovered their composure and their comfortable relationship. The day started well with a cooked-to-order breakfast and a good weather forecast: overcast but warm, a breeze but no wind or mist; ideal walking weather. Dave, the owner of The Priory, took John on an interesting tour of the building, with details on dates and building styles. Meanwhile Mary, his wife, had suggestions for the day’s walk.
“One of Dave’s routes,” Mary said as she pointed it out on the map as if visualising each tor and stream. “You should be fine up there today. It would have been difficult in yesterday’s mist. You OK with a map and compass?”
Not sure how she should describe John, Judith said, “I thought I was, until my pal out there marched off into Fox Tor Mire.”
Big smirk from Mary. “You’re not the first to get that wrong. The marked path is fine, but if you detour up on the tor rocks and short-cut northwest,” she indicated on the map, “then you can easily catch the west edge of the mire.”
“We did. John trashed his phone with its GPS app.”
“They’re good for positioning, but not routes,” said Mary with a sad shake of the head. “Don’t take into account rough ground or bogs.”
“Well, John’s one doesn’t even do that now. He dropped it in half a metre of filthy bog water.”
“Best place for it!”
“Out of interest,” asked Judith, warming to their friendly landlady, “I think John’s tent is broken and his kit waterlogged. Would you have any rooms so we can stay another night?”
“Your one’s free until Friday, so you could have it tonight and tomorrow night. It was a last-minute cancellation.”
“Do you have a second room free?”
“No. We are fully booked, busy season.” She looked confused. “Sorry I thought you were a couple, but now I remember Dave said you asked for separate rooms.”
“We are half and half, I suppose,” Judith explained, slightly embarrassed at how strange it would seem “It was OK for one night. John spent most of the evening sleeping in that antique chair.” She paused. “I thought a few days away together might sort us out, one way or another.”
“Take it from me, single tents and separate beds isn’t going to sort out anything!” laughed the landlady.
“You should try sleeping with him. He—”
“A few years ago, and I might well have. Fine man like that, I don’t think I’d kick him out of bed.”
“It’s the snoring and thrashing about… it’s like sharing a bed with a donkey.”
“Sounds good to me!”
“Oh, the excitement’s OK – but trying to sleep afterwards… and he’s so picky – everything so neat and tidy. Leave the lid off the milk or your pants on the bathroom floor and there’s a major crisis.”
“If he’s worried about the milk when you’re all passionate…”
“Exactly.”
“So, it’s not just the snoring?”
“No. We just live our lives in different ways,” explained Judith.
“Because, if it’s snoring, you don’t do so badly yourself. The pair of you sounded like a two-tone siren last night!”
“I don’t! Well, not that bad…” Judith admitted sheepishly.
John and Dave returned from their excursion.
“I’ve booked you in for another night here,” Judith said. “Only one room. My tent’s fine.”
John grimaced but didn’t respond.
The rest of the day went much as Judith had hoped. They avoided mentioning Penny’s ‘visit’ and instead discussed parenting – how it might work – along with Judith’s new job after the quarry, and how her career might develop over the next few years.
“I’d want you to be a hands-on dad,” she suddenly blurted out.
“Of course! That’s what I want too.” He sounded confused. “I didn’t know we’d formally agreed to be co-parents yet?”
“We haven’t,” she said with a laugh. “I’ve just taken out a five-year option.”
“Five! I’ll be thirty-six by then. Getting a bit late for me if you back out. I’d have to start looking—”
“Easy, just put an ad on the internet: tall, good-looking, virile male, own business, good income etc., seeks woman to be the mother of his future kids.”
“That’s daft.” As realisation dawned, he laughed, “Is this a wind-up?”
“Of course, I’m just teasing. But seriously, I don’t think you’d have much trouble finding someone. As I said last night, there’s even a specialist website for singles who want to co-parent.”
“I’d rather imagined a family life with someone I like, not a commercial arrangement.”
“Typical man. Never pay if you can get it for free! Cuts both ways – you might fall in love with someone. Helen might come back, or you might leg it back to the seventeenth century and Penelope Peverell!” She realised immediately as she saw pain in his face that her banter had gone too far. “Sorry, John, that was below the belt.”
They walked on in silence towards a pile of rocks that were one of Dave’s waymarks.
“No, it’s a fair point to consider. What would you do if Mark came back?”
“It won’t happen.”
“How do you know?
“My sister-in-law has seen him out with a new woman. He’s moved on from me.”
They abandoned the discussion and concentrated on the beauty of the moor landscape. Judith realised how little she knew about John. He was an orphan brought up by an aunt and uncle; he had a sister and a cousin about whom she knew little. She didn’t think his childhood had been particularly happy, and he rarely spoke of it.
“I thought Mark and I both wanted children, a proper family,” she said softly. “Now I don’t know. Oh, I don’t know, John. I feel we’re more like mates who have sex together – not lovers. But that’s better than what half my friends have ended up with: divorced, broken homes.” She touched his hand, hoping for some response, and got a hug in return.
“The point is,” he pressed on, speaking over her confused words, “if we do have children, we will need commitment; commitment to be parents, not a quick fling and a poor lonely little sod brought up by Simon or my sister Ann while we bugger off with new lovers. Being an orphan was bad enough, being abandoned…”
Judith could think of nothing to say.
They walked on, almost as if avoiding each other, until Judith grasped John’s arm earnestly and said, “I’m sorry, I got that out in the wrong way, John. Blurting things out as if I don’t rate you much as a dad.”
“I got a bit overheated, too,” he agreed and, grabbing her shoulders, kissed her cheek gently. “I suppose it’s because it’s so important for us.”
“Let’s think it over for a few months; not get caught up in the details.”
“Eight happy kids!” he joked, but she still looked very tense.
“Be serious. First, we decide what we want, then we define details.”
“Three happy…”
Judith gave him a shove, beginning to relax a little. “When we are really sure we want to go ahead, we’ll think about everything else.”
“You sound just like a manager briefing a project. People don’t plan families like that.”
“Then I’m an alien who just happens to be a bloody good screw. I like to plan ahead, John.”
“Talking of planning ahead,” he said after a while, “in fifteen minutes we stop for a snack and a drink.”
“OK.”
“And you’re not really sleeping in your tent tonight, are you?” John asked slowly as he slipped the rucksack off his shoulders. His back was aching from sleeping in the chair and he needed to stretch out.
“No one’s made me a better offer yet, but I could grow to like sleeping in four-poster beds!”
“So you’re both stayin’ on,” said their host knowingly when they arrived back at the guest house.
“I couldn’t resist dry bedding and that thick mattress,” replied Judith with a grin.
“Could be a bit more peaceful, too. Todd at the Plume said he’s got several school groups camping out tonight and over the weekend. A lot of furtive footsteps after dark as kids swap tents!”
They chatted with Mary for a while, explaining the route they had taken and how much more enjoyable Dartmoor was when the sun shone. Their room looked even more inviting tonight with warm late afternoon sunshine filtering in through the bay window. On each bedside table lay a packet with a handwritten label that read: Present from Dartmoor.
“Bit bloody presumptuous!” exclaimed John, expecting condoms.
“It’s earplugs,” laughed Judith. “Disposable earplugs. I haven’t seen these since Mark left me. Cheeky woman!”
John laughed along with her. Their hosts were evidently prone to humour.
