THE CHAINS OF FATE an utterly compelling and romantic historical saga (The Heron Quartet Book 2), page 25
I liked Tom very much, but he was no substitute for Francis. And January gave way to February, and February to March, and still he did not come. Every day I gazed expectantly down the drive, or returned to Goldhayes from one of our jaunts in hopes of finding him arrived in my absence — all in vain. It began to seem as if all my life with him had been made up of saying farewells, and waiting, ever waiting, for him to come back to me. Now, yet again, history was repeating itself. And the most wounding injustice of all was to see Meraud’s smug, smiling face as letter after letter came to Goldhayes, addressed to her in Charles Lawrence’s quick untidy scribble, and all presumably bearing impassioned words of love. It seemed so unfair, that her amours should be running so smoothly when once she had done her best to wreck mine. Somehow, I kept my feelings hidden, for I knew, none better, the misery of life at Goldhayes amidst the bitterness and malice of a family quarrel. Once, long ago, Francis and Simon had thus ruined the tranquil, lovely atmosphere of the house, and I was not going to start it again by launching a feud with Meraud. It was bad enough to see Jamie, normally so ebullient and cheery, sink into utter despondency whenever a letter arrived, and his yearning, hopeful, hopeless eyes following Meraud’s every move like a hungry dog at the dinner-table. I would not interfere: and besides, I longed most desperately for Francis.
For the first months at Goldhayes, I seemed to move in some kind of limbo, my soul suspended, numbly inanimate, while the shell of Thomazine Heron spoke and laughed and flirted like an actor in a stage-play, repeating well-remembered and meaningless lines in a long-familiar scene: lost without my lover. Then, as the newsless weeks went by, I began to grow anxious: and really worried when a letter arrived late in March from Simon, telling us that Francis had come to Oxford a week after we had left, in good spirits and health, with his horse Hobgoblin, and had stayed but a few days before setting out for Suffolk. ‘I trust he is safe with you now,’ Simon wrote, ‘and pray convey to him and to my mother and all at Goldhayes our sad news, that my dear wife has again miscarried, of a child that would, had it come to full term, have been a boy. Though she is very low in spirits, yet she accepts that it is God’s will, and that His ways are mysterious to us. Pray give my humble regards and affectionate wishes to my lady mother, and to Master Trevelyan, and to the child …’
It could not possibly have taken two months for Francis to travel from Oxford to Suffolk, even over winter roads. Something must have happened, I knew, with a sick feeling in my stomach as I laid down the letter, hands suddenly unsteady. Illness, or soldiers, or footpads — or death. But I would know, I thought wildly, I would surely know if he were dead; for that night in Oxford when he was nearly killed escaping from the castle, I had known, I had woken from a dream of horror and thought that I had shared his death. If he were dead now, it seemed inconceivable that I would not have known of it; but his ghost had never visited me, nor had my sleep been shattered by nightmare.
As usual, I took my troubles to Grainne, and her father-in-law, listening, had a practical suggestion to offer. ‘I hev to go to Cambridge next week on that road, and I can easy enough ask for news of him, thass no trouble. He still ride that little owd black mare, do he? Well, that shoon’t be too hard to find word of what’s become of him, and that’ll kill two birds wi’ one stone, collect the Lady Day rents from they two manors by Cambridge, and look for Master Francis for you. And I’ll tell you this, Mis —, Lady Drakelon, I’ll be suffen glad to see him here. That Master Trevelyan, he be a godly man I suppose, but he don’t know nawthen of farming at all.’
‘Neither does Francis,’ I said. John Sewell shook his head. ‘Thass true enough, but he know he don’t know nawthen. Master Trevelyan think he know suffen, and thass dangerous. And Francis, he be sharp as a needle, he don’t let nawthen slip by him.’ And further than that cryptic remark he would not go.
He was obviously worried about Richard Trevelyan, and at first it was difficult to understand why. There were no signs, to my indifferently experienced eye, of bad management either in the house and garden, or at the Home Farm. Everything was neat, tidy and prosperous; assessments and taxes, fifteenths and twentieths seemed to have had little effect. The cows were sleek and fat, the fields weeded and sprouting green with the summer’s harvest, the farm buildings in good repair, the village tenants thriving. War had scarcely touched Suffolk: the only signs were the soldiers quartered in Bury, and the paucity of riding-horses to be seen about the place. They had taken most of Edward’s beloved breeding stock, even the ageing Arabian stallion, The Saracen, for the Parliament’s army; but The Saracen’s best offspring, the grey Boreas whom I had named, and who was also Hobgoblin’s only foal, had fortunately proved impossible for them to handle. He lived now in the orchard paddock by the Home Farm, lazily cropping the lush grass, his only exertions the occasional gallop around his domain, and covering the mares belonging to Goldhayes and to neighbours and farmers from some miles around who wanted to improve their stock.
In the week of John Sewell’s absence I went down to see the stallion, walking down the path as the child Thomazine had done, eleven years before, with Tom Sewell and Francis Heron, turning somersaults to impress them. I wondered wryly if I could perform such a feat now, at the ripe age of twenty-one, and after having borne a child. I was on my own: no one was in sight up or down the narrow, hedge-lined path, and no one was likely to see my probable humiliation. Feeling ten years younger, and sillier, I took off my shoes and stockings, remembering too late that although the sun was warm, it was only just April and the ground was damp and chilly. Then, hoping fervently that there were no curious eyes in the hedge, I kilted my skirt up to my knees, breathed deeply, and ran. I had forgotten, but my body had not: muscles and skills long dormant came to my rescue and I achieved, I was never sure how, something resembling an airborne somersault, and managed to land on my feet, even if I did fall over immediately afterwards. Swearing at my own foolhardiness, I picked myself up and beheld Grainne’s son, staring at me in some astonishment. ‘Damn!’ I said, with feeling.
‘It’s all right,’ Jasper assured me, ‘I won’t tell anyone if you don’t want me to. Could I do that, if you showed me how? Please?’
‘It’s the first time I’ve done that for ten years,’ I told him, ‘and I don’t think I could show myself how to do it again, let alone you. I don’t mind if you tell people: I did manage to do it, even if it wasn’t very good.’
Jasper, unbidden, sprinted back to fetch my shoes and stockings, and politely turned his back while I put them on. ‘Have you seen the horse yet?’ he asked.
‘Boreas? I was just going there now. You remember Hobgoblin, Francis’s black mare? He’s her foal. Do you know, he’s two years younger than you are?’
‘He’s much bigger than me,’ said Jasper wistfully, flicking his orange fringe out of his eyes. Despite Joan’s claim that he resembled his father, he grew daily more like Grainne, with her long oval face and high, prominent cheekbones taking shape under the round curves of childhood: and of course those extraordinarily vivid green eyes, blazing with curiosity and eagerness. ‘Isn’t it funny, that he can be younger than me and still bigger?’
We came to the gate of the paddock, where Boreas stood, ears pricked, and watched us. He had the short straight back, proud plumed tail, and charmingly dished face of the Arabian, and the coat that had been so woolly and dark at his birth, when Francis and Edward had laid bets as to whether he would be black or grey, was now sleek and delightfully dappled, his long mane and tail a silky, shimmering white. He regarded us thoughtfully, and blew through his nose. Jasper climbed up on to the gate and reached to pat his neck, while I tried not to appear alarmed. ‘I wish I could ride him,’ he said. ‘But Grandfather said I couldn’t. Good boy, beautiful boy, have an apple?’ He held out a shrivelled tiny fruit that was hardly fit even for equine consumption, and Boreas, the North Wind, took it with all the graciousness of a king. Uneasily, I said, ‘You know he’s not broken, don’t you, no one’s ever been on his back. That’s why he’s still here, the Parliament men would have taken him if he hadn’t been wild and dangerous.’
‘No, he’s not,’ said Jasper, turning a mischievous grin on me. ‘Grandfather told me about that. He has been ridden, often, but of course Grandfather didn’t want them to take him, so he got Joan to let one of the farm dogs out when they had him in the yard to look at him, and Boreas doesn’t like dogs, so he kicked out all over the place, and they decided they didn’t want him after all.’ He giggled. ‘So he’s quite safe, aren’t you, Boreas?’
The stallion tossed his head under Jasper’s stroking hand, and turned restlessly away. We watched him showing off his beauty, as if he were fully aware of our admiration, prancing, tail high, through the new-growing grass. Jasper, watching as intently as once Francis had watched Hobgoblin in the same paddock, drew a deep spellbound breath and let it out in a long sigh. ‘Oh, I wish I could ride him!’
We walked back down the path, and listening with half an ear to Jasper’s chatter, I bethought me again of Richard Trevelyan. Why was John worried? The estate was not suffering, the land was well managed — John’s doing, that — there was no sign of the draining of resources like timber that was supposed to be typical when someone was milking an estate.
But then, of course, I realized, Richard Trevelyan would not milk Goldhayes. He had the running of it, he and his wife enjoyed the monies from it, it was as if it were his own land. But not for ever. Sooner or later, unless tragedy or unforeseen disaster intervened, Simon would return to claim his lands: and accounts would have to be rendered.
At any rate, Richard thought that Simon would return: I suspected that neither he nor Mary knew enough of her eldest son to guess that he might prefer to go into penniless exile rather than make his peace with rebels and traitors. And even if Simon did not return, there was Francis, and after him, Jamie. It was already beginning to seem unlikely, after three miscarriages, that Nan would bear Simon any children: and I realized suddenly that Francis was bound to me, and that Jamie was painfully, obviously, in the first throes of calf-love with Meraud, despite her recent interest in Charles Lawrence.
Simon might have no children, would be disgraced, in exile; Meraud knew his character, even if her uncle did not. Francis was an uncertain, dubious quantity, quixotic enough to take a sudden fancy to going off to the Americas or the Indies, and moreover in love with a woman already married. And so Jamie, heedless, naïve, gullible, enthusiastic, was the key to Goldhayes: I thanked God that Meraud’s efforts were directed elsewhere, for surely she had only to beckon to have him for ever enslaved at her feet. And if Simon did come back, I would be willing to wager that Richard Trevelyan had managed to abstract a tidy sum of money from the estate and invest it somewhere against that rainy day when he would again have to fend for himself, and with a wife and child to keep. How many manors had he bought thus?
I was suddenly frightened by these Machiavellian complexities. I told myself sternly that they only existed in my mind: I had absolutely no proof that Richard Trevelyan had stolen any money at all, and certainly the idea of marrying Jamie for his prospective inheritance did not appear to have entered Meraud’s scheming silver-gilt head, although I suspected that might only be a matter of time. I did not trust Richard, and his niece even less, but I could not believe he would stoop so low as to cheat his stepsons of their rightful possessions.
‘Thomazine? Thomazine, are you listening?’ Jasper’s insistent voice, rather whistly at present because he had no front teeth, broke in. I looked down at him, grinning, and consigned the Trevelyans and their supposed iniquities firmly to the back of my mind. ‘No, sorry, I was miles away. What were you saying?’
‘You’re not miles away, you’re here,’ said Jasper cheekily. ‘And Grandfather said that Blackie, you know, his youngest dog, she’s going to have puppies in a few weeks and I can have one for my very own!’
‘That will be lovely,’ I told him, ‘now you’ll have a friend, like you always wanted.’
‘Another friend,’ Jasper said seriously. ‘Don’t forget, there are all the Jermyns too.’ One of the great advantages of a return to Suffolk for Jasper had been his discovery of Sir Thomas Jermyn’s children at Rushbrooke. Tom, the eldest, was a dull priggish child, but Henry, always called by his given name to distinguish him from his uncle, the notorious Harry Jermyn, was a round-faced, fair-haired scamp of ten who led his sisters and little brother Charles, a year younger than Jasper, into all sorts of mischief. Into this new world of childish companionship Grainne’s son had been cheerfully absorbed, and the fact that he made so little of all his exciting wartime experiences in Oxford and Scotland delighted them. I was pleased that he had made friends so easily, for I knew that Grainne had been worried about how readily he might fit in with other children: and it was a solitary life at the Home Farm for an energetic small boy, however much his mother and grandfather might indulge him.
*
John Sewell returned two days after this, and when he had delivered the rents safely into Richard’s hands, came straightaway to me, still muddy and tired from his journey. ‘I’ve no news for you, I’m afraid, nawthen at all, though I asked at every village and inn from here to Cambridge and beyond.’
I kept my hands still by clamping them together, and from somewhere dragged the voice to say, ‘Are you sure, John? Nothing at all?’
‘I’ll tell you exactly what I did,’ said John, sitting down on the chair I indicated in the Long Gallery, where we could not be overheard without our knowing. ‘I asked in pretty near every inn and alehouse between here and Cambridge and got nawthen. Hev you seen a young gentleman, I asked, tall with fair hair, riding a little black Arabian mare? And none of them han’t seen nawthen, nawthen at all. I even went two-three mile past where I had to go, but din’t get nawthen for that. I don’t know what’s happened to him, my lady, I can’t think on it, and thass a fact.’
Nor could I think. Had he had second thoughts after leaving Oxford and returned to Montrose? It did not seem particularly probable; I knew him too well to believe him capable of such an inconsistency as that. The only certainty was that somewhere on the road between Oxford and Cambridge, two months ago and more, something had befallen him; accident, illness, death, the possibilities jostled frantically in my mind and threatened to overwhelm me. I fought them down and thanked John gratefully for his kindness and help: wishing that I could make the journey back again along that road to Oxford, to find out myself what had happened.
But I had months of agonized waiting, in bitter and anguished frustration, for now the jaws of the trap forged by Fairfax and Cromwell were set to close upon the city, and there could be no question of travelling that way yet. In March the remnants of the King’s army in the west had surrendered to Fairfax, followed by the last Royalist force in the field, a mob of raw Welsh and Worcestershire levies under the veteran Lord Astley. The King, astonishingly, gave himself into the hands of the Scottish army besieging Newark; and at the end of June, Oxford surrendered. The war was over at last: and still there was no news or sign of Francis, and I despaired.
In early August, after the most miserable six weeks I think I have ever experienced, worse even than Catholm, two letters arrived. One, a brief note from Simon brought by one of the Suffolk men who had joined his troop at the beginning of the war, told us of his intention to go with Nan into exile, following Prince Rupert and Prince Maurice, and carry on the struggle from overseas. It would not, he told us, be a lonely existence, for there were Suffolk friends aplenty to join him: Harry Jermyn, now elevated to the peerage, and his brother Thomas were already in France. Tom Blagge had surrendered Wallingford — on terms so advantageous to himself that his officers all but mutinied, or so we heard later — and was also going abroad, leaving his wife and small daughters to fend for themselves in England. Simon apologized for deserting his own family in such a manner, but wrote that he could not in all conscience do otherwise: and my forebodings were confirmed.
So Simon and Nan set off for Holland, and I looked in vain for signs of satisfaction from Richard: so sincere seemed his expressions of regret that I began to think that I had misjudged him. But Meraud was another matter: I did not think it was purely my imagination that interpreted her reactions to Jamie as being rather more encouraging than before. A subtle change had occurred since the news of Simon’s exile, a change from indifference to the kind of sweet, innocent-seeming friendliness that only Meraud could use to such effect: and wholly spurious. My disquiet was increased when a letter from Charles Lawrence arrived and was treated by Meraud with a casual brevity very different from the avid lovelorn way she had read his previous epistles. For was not Goldhayes, the jewel of all Suffolk, a greater prize by far than poor Charles’s scant acres and insignificant house?
And then all such thoughts were driven for a while from my head, when Lucy in her turn received a letter: from Daniel Ashley.
It had come by the Post, now restored almost to its pre-war efficiency, and John Sewell picked it up with other letters that had as usual been left for our collection at the Angel in Bury. When Lucy beheld it, she turned first scarlet, then white, and looked to my concerned eyes as if she were about to faint. I pushed her into one of the chairs in the Long Gallery, where we had been sewing, placed the white oblong in her hands, and said, ‘Open it.’
‘I can’t,’ said Lucy, ‘it might be … it might be saying he’s forgotten me.’
‘Be logical,’ I said ruthlessly, ‘he wouldn’t be writing to you if he’d forgotten you, now would he? Come on, open it.’
Lucy, with shaking hands, slipped a fingernail under the seal. I said, ‘Do you want me to leave you alone? I will, if you —’
‘No, stay, please,’ said my cousin, her eyes greedily devouring the Captain’s neat, simple hand. She let out a great sigh of relief and delight that warmed my heart: for, awkward though it was for her to be so enamoured of an enemy Roundhead, I knew now that he was the one she would love until death. And I could not be so mean-spirited as to fail to wish for her happiness, for after all, had I not also fallen in love with an equally ‘unsuitable’ man?
