On Bended Knee, page 4
part #6 of Wicked Worthingtons Series
And handsome. Heavens, had she ever seen a more beautiful man? Perhaps it was the mystery of his sudden arrival but she had the oddest sensation something important had just happened.
Who in their right mind would take on a fully grown ram? A man perhaps well-conditioned to ferocity, she mused. A soldier, one who still carried the battlefield in his soul.
"I believe he should be brought to the manor. I must keep an eye on him overnight." She stood and several hands reached to aid her rising. She retreated a few steps, and the villagers flowed into the space she had left like water when a river stone was removed.
"You hurt yourself, then?" The voice came from one side of her and Gemma smiled at the familiar brisk tone.
"It's only a sprain, Jennie. I landed wrong on my wrist. It could've been worse. It could be me they pulled from the wreckage."
"Aye, that was a good thing, him flingin' you out, though too roughly done."
From beyond Jennie, Gemma heard a giggle. Two of the village girls gazed rapturously at the unconscious newcomer. "Oh he's a fine one, ain't he?"
Gemma remained composed, although she had just been thinking the same thing. I don't think I have ever seen such a magnificent man.
Beside Gemma, Jennie sniffed. "Fine is as fine does." Jennie crossed her arms over her maternal torso. It was clear that Jennie would be delivering the fifth Gosling child in a matter of weeks — and tilted her head as she gazed narrowly at Gemma. "You'll be wanting to take care of him, I suppose. Like you take care of every crick and crack in this village, even down to the dogs and cats." Jennie shook her head. "I'll not try stoppin' you, because it won't do a bit of good. But you watch that one. We don't know him and we don't know his people."
Gemma glanced at the spot where she'd landed, which was really quite astonishingly far from the dangerously broken wreckage. He is so strong. "He saved me, Jennie."
Jennie spared another suspicious glance at the limp fellow now being lifted on a section of shattered planking. "You wouldna needed saving if he hadn't happened by in the first place."
Gemma smiled at Jennie, for she was greatly fond of the outspoken farm wife, though Jennie was a few years older than herself. "Not back'ard at comin' for'ard" Farby denizens said of Jennie Gosling, but Gemma understood her. Jennie saw the village and the entire dale as an extension of her own little cottage and her own hearth.
She wasn't far wrong. The people of the Dales had been wedding amongst themselves for very long time. Most families could call each other cousins of a sort from one end of Swale River to the other, down the long valley it cut through North Yorkshire.
To be frank, Gemma's favorite thing about Jennie was that Jennie spoke to her as an equal, woman to woman, not as a farm wife to a lady. It likely broke every rule of class distinction, but Gemma most assuredly didn't care. Alone of all the people of Farby — respect her as they might, even look after her as they sometimes did, as she looked after them — only Jennie spoke to her instead of deferred to her.
Gemma hadn't noticed her isolation so severely when her husband was alive, for Edmund and his medical practice had been company enough. Furthermore, Dr. Oakes had enjoyed a vigorous correspondence with other physicians and doctors in England and afar. Those respected colleagues had visited now and again, often bringing wives and children to fill the big house with guests and energetic discussions of medicine, hunting, whiskey, tobacco, mothering, sibling rivalry, and "Gemma, darling, when are you and the doctor going to start a family of your own?"
Never. It had never happened, and with the carriage accident that had taken Edmund from her, it never would.
She was a lady alone in the dale, surrounded by Yorkshire farmers and shepherds, roughly respectful but keeping their distance. The local women shifted away from her when she entered the shop, giving her first place in line when she stopped at the little desk run by the postmistress, ducking their heads and keeping their gaze on their shopping.
How she hated that wordless moving aside, the scuff of rough shoes on the floorboards, the rustle of heavy skirts and stiff aprons. Even the way her own shoes sounded different, as her outdated but still fine skirts swished more silkily and her voice came more softly and lightly. She did not truly wish to be a Swaledale farm wife, for that would deny all that she had learned and accomplished in her thirty-four years.
What she did wish for was acceptance. That would never come, for this community that she loved so dearly seemed as closed to her as a locked room.
"We've loaded him in the cart, Missus. Best be headin' back now so we can tend to your arm."
Gemma turned to find her manservant Mr. Bing at her elbow. He'd pulled off his cap and stood with one shirtsleeve mopping his forehead, although she knew perfectly well he'd not lifted a finger to load the newcomer into the pony cart they had arrived in. Mr. Bing was never inclined to physical labor when there were younger, stronger folk available. He was very conscious of his prized position as the late doctor's majordomo and now as the primary — only — staff to Mrs. Oakes. He considered himself a cut above the dale folk, for he was from the fine town of Whitby, perched on the sea, which seemed to increase its sophisticate value, and therefore his own, at least in Mr. Bing's mind.
Of course, that did not stop him from joining the farmers and shepherds for a pint or three in the public house, which was really just a room off the sundries shop. There were very few businesses of that sort in Farby, population not yet one hundred souls. The postmistress, in addition to selling the sundries, was also the local alewife and brewer. Most people wore several hats in the small community. And being near them all, so did she. Arbiter of womanly disputes, primary purchaser of the aforementioned sundries, herbalist, healer, puller of bad molars and soon, by the size of Jennie Gosling's belly, midwife.
Over the past winter, the dale's midwife, old Mrs. Hirst had died at the age of eighty-two. Lofty and self-important Mrs. Hirst had archly allowed Gemma to attend several births in Swaledale, but she was only permitted to watch. Frustrated by the woman's medieval methods and superstitious practices, not to mention her abysmal lack of cleanliness, Gemma had been forced to hold her tongue in the face of the fearful worship the women of the dale had held Mrs. Hirst.
Now that Mrs. Hirst had gone to her reward, Gemma would have a chance to prove herself to the mothers of the dale. Jennie, knowing of Gemma's determination, had been the first to ask. When Jennie's child was safely delivered, Gemma knew that the other women would come around as well.
On the common, Gemma moved carefully through the scattered remains of many a farm wife's prized vegetables and flowers. Mr. Bing tut-tutted at the wholesale destruction.
"The smith ain't even 'anded out t' ribbons on them yet. And there'll be no dancin' now. Poor Jem Toms has gone and polished up his fiddle for nowt. T' village lads'll not be fond of your new stray, not now. Whoever he is, you'd best patch him up and send him on his way, before one of t' lads decides to take out his woman's tears on that toff's posh hide!"
"I don't think it was his fault," Gemma said quietly, for Mr. Bing's ears only. "I think he's a soldier, like you. He went so strange and dark after he was thrown from his horse. The way you were sometimes, after the war."
Bing shot her a sharp look. "Aye, I saw that too. I think he's some worse than me, belike. Mayhap it ain't his fault, but these folk won't understand. Not a single one of theirs came back from t' war."
Gemma looked around at the hard-working people of Farby as they began to pick up the pieces of their festival, just as they had solemnly and stoutly picked up the pieces of their families after losing so many sons to Napoleon's troops.
"Then we shall just have to understand for them."
LYSANDER LAY VERY STILL. His head pounded with such breathtaking ferocity that he counted that fraction of a second between the spikes of pain and cradled it, waiting for that absence of agony as other men might wait for a moment of pleasure.
A cool cloth touched his face and it did soothe the ache. The rest of his body seemed to be very sore as well. His ribs protested with every breath, and any slight shifting seem to bring on hot twinges that made no sense in the muscles of his shoulders, back and legs.
Perhaps if he'd been able to maintain a thought for longer than a fraction of a second between the hammering in his head, he might have remembered how he came to be lying somewhere dark, on something soft, covered by something warm, being touched by something cool. Yet every time the dimmest impulse of curiosity struck him, that curiosity was slammed out of his thoughts by the reverberation of his own pulse through his aching head.
There was a sound. He could almost hear it through the hammer blows. What was it? It was nice, low and soft and sweet.
He couldn't hear words. Just a soft singing.
Oh it hurt.
The pain reminded him of something bad, but honestly he could not even recall what it was, except that it was something he would probably rather not remember.
Focus on the sound. It made him feel better. Calmer. What was it?
A sweet lilting voice. It was a song. A moment of memory, and then a faded image of a woman rocking a tiny flame-haired infant.
Iris. His mother.
Sister. He had a sister.
Oh my head.
A sweet song. A soft comforting song in the dark. So soft. Warm. Like something from before the thunder and the mud, the blood and the rain.
A cool hand stroked back his hair. The cloth, refreshed with chill water, draped over his brow. The sweet, breathy voice sang on.
Warmth. Touch. Music.
He slept, a true healing sleep this time.
THE STRANGER SLEPT PROPERLY now. Gemma let her soft song fade away to nothing. It was an old trick, known by women through millennia most likely, anyone who would ever soothed a fussing child or wounded man or an ill elder knew the trick of distracting someone from their ills long enough for them to gain a bit of rest.
She set the folded cloth back into the pan by her side and took a moment to stretch in her chair. As she rolled her neck she winced at the soreness in her shoulder and the way her wrist ached.
She was certain that Mr. Bing thought her safely in her stillroom downstairs, far away from the outsider. Mr. Bing would not approve of her nursing the stranger by herself. He was protective of her, even fatherly in his gruff way. But her aches had kept her from her tasks and she admitted, at least to herself, to an abiding curiosity about the man she cared for.
It certainly hadn't been a romantic moment, being tossed from beneath the collapsing roof of the pavilion like a sack of flour. She understood that it was only a physical response, so she tried not to give credence to the way his effortless strength now made her catch her breath in memory. Yet to find herself lifted and held for that fraction of a second had been the first time she'd been touched by a man in years.
Her husband had been killed in a carriage accident more than four years ago, but Gemma felt he'd begun dying a long time before. He'd not reached out for her once in his last few years.
Seven years since she'd felt something like what the stranger aroused in her. Her gaze lost focus for a moment as she recalled it. Big hard hands grasping her waist, lifting her high.
Heavens, he is strong.
Furthermore, he smelled incredibly good. Not of cologne but of horse and leather and clean male skin.
Mr. Bing had stripped the fellow's clothes and dressed him in one of Dr. Oakes's old nightshirts. It was a pity that the voluminous linen did nothing to lessen the square solidity of his shoulders and the muscles rippling down his body.
He'd been beautiful and wild and strange, grappling with the ram, a medieval hero battling a dragon.
Now she was just being fanciful. Who would believe it? Anyone who would had ever met Gemma Oakes would never think to describe her as whimsical. But surely under her own roof, in the privacy of her own mind, she could have a moment of fancy?
It wasn't as though she had any attachment to this striking, otherworldly fellow. She suspected he was quite broken. A broken beautiful man. And she was quite sure she knew, more or less, what it was that had broken him.
When she had been young and foolish, and swept up in the deepest admiration for the man she had wed, she'd believed herself intrepid. Fearless Gemma, the doctor's right hand, his student, his assistant, his bride. Dr. Edmund Oakes had been a brilliant physician and a good, ethical man. He'd been much admired for his analytical mind and gift for difficult diagnosis.
Not a fiery lover, though. Perhaps his intellect prevented a certain warmth, or at least excused the lack of it. He'd been ardent in the beginning, at least often enough for her to believe herself admired and wanted. He was her world and all was right with that world.
And then they had gone to war.
Battlefield surgeon and his battlefield bride. She'd been mad, that was all. Mad for her husband, obsessed with proving herself to him, proving that she was good enough for him, willing to suppress all dread, all fear, all recoil as she'd waded through blood and mud and gore, stepping past bodies blackened by fire, broken by cannon and torn apart by shot. Dying, moaning, screaming men and boys, some so young she could not believe anyone had thought it wise to wrap them in woolen uniforms and give them firearms.
Although she'd never served outside the medical tents, sometimes the front line had come so close that she could hear the boom of cannon fire, and the cries of the wounded and dying carried by the wind, along with the smell of smoke and burning flesh. She still dreamed of the strange, heavy odor of blood so strong it became a taste in her mouth.
So yes, she'd seen the broken, the shattered and the stunned.
"Commotional," Edmund had called it. The strange state of a mind so battered by death and destruction that it could no longer carry the same soul and personality that it once had held. Over-reacting to the world, that broken soul, as sensitive as the newly born, as mindless, sometimes, as the truly mad.
Foolish, unwise, fearless Gemma. She had spent herself on those fields of blood, much the way that Edmund had. The pace, exhaustion and failure — more often than success — had broken him in a different way. When the war had ended, he'd wanted nothing more than to return to the house left to him by an aunt. He'd spent a few summers in Yorkshire as a child. "It is clean there," he told her.
It was clean, she'd thought when she'd arrived, because it was damned empty. In time, she had come to love the wide sky and spacious dales. The village worshiped her husband. Dr. Edmund Oakes could have had a prosperous city practice but he stayed in Farby. He had grimly devoted himself to the people of Swaledale, but the war had stolen his passion for healing.
And his passion for her as well.
That was the past, as cold and gone as Edmund himself. He left her with this house, a small income and just enough knowledge for her to help in some small way the people of her dale.
As well as newcomers to Swaledale. She looked down at her unconscious companion. Her days had been much the same for a very long time. She worked hard and it was rewarding work. She told herself that she was fortunate, reminded herself that many a widow had been left with nothing but sad memories and a sadder lack of prospects.
The magnificent newcomer, with his air of mystery and obvious urban sophistication, was like a change in the wind. She felt on edge, something long buried in her spirit stirring.
Jittery … as if she felt a storm brewing.
Perhaps it was not the stranger himself that disturbed her, but simply the reminder of a world outside the Dales, a world where people like the ones that she used to know laughed and talked, drank tea together, sang and danced, made love in the dark of night, made children, made families.
She had once believed it was her duty to mourn Edmund eternally. Now she found herself less sure of that.
Perhaps I am not so terribly old. There might still be something like that for me somewhere.
Yet how could she leave here? How could she go beyond these dales to find companionship of the sort that she did not have here? Should she leave before Jennie birthed her child, with no one but Shepherd Gosling and his silver-haired mother to help her?
The spring storms were coming and the river would swell. It was a dangerous time for the children as well. Could she walk away from the broken bones and the childhood fevers and leave her people with nothing?
For they were her people. She'd not been born in the Dales, but far away in Cambridgeshire. She was no duchess, no lord's wife. She had not been born into a position of noblesse oblige. Her father had been the Head Librarian for Cambridge University. A learned gentleman indeed, but not one to concern himself with stature.
Yet here she was, the accidental Lady of the Dale, dispenser of medicines, binder of wounds, birther of babes. And here she must stay, or she could never again meet her own gaze in a looking-glass, knowing she had deserted a community that needed her so desperately.
The Lady of the Dale. Alone in her castle — well, rambling manor house, with a leaky roof and far more rooms than needed. Her acres were rented out for grazing and farming and she was not terribly forceful about receiving those rents, especially during the recent lean years. All those sons who had not come home had left their families so profoundly bereft of help and hope.
Gemma sighed and brushed her hair back from her forehead with the back of a damp hand. She might be a gentleman's daughter, but she was a bit over-qualified to be a lady of leisure, and at the same time felt terribly under-qualified for the rest of her role.
Look at this fellow before her. This man might be beyond any help she could give. How was she to heal those inner hurts? Should she even try? Should she bind up his head, put him back on his fine horse and send him on his way?
For the rest of her life she would wonder what became of him twenty miles farther down the road. Mr. Bing was quite correct about one thing. She was rather too liable to take in strays, although she had never taken in one quite as handsome as this.
