Wintercombe, page 71
part #1 of Wintercombe Series
‘It won’t work, anyway,’ said the girl, ignoring her protests. ‘You can’t stop me telling anyone else, can you? Not unless you kill me too.’
Slowly, Silence sat down, wondering how she could keep calm under this sort of onslaught. And the pity of it was, she could understand only too clearly the girl’s desperate, grief-stricken enmity. Rachael was hitting out at her most immediate and vulnerable target, not caring if what she said was preposterous, so long as it struck hurtfully home. In her situation, I’d probably be the same, thought Silence unhappily. But how, how to win her over? Especially since her own, still-kicking Puritan conscience seemed to welcome the accusations. She was an adulteress, a whore, she had betrayed the trust of her husband and her children, and the shock of discovering this had undoubtedly led directly to Dame Ursula’s death.
Oh, yes, she was guilty, but her guilt could not be undone; and her practical side, inherited from that grandmother who had urged her to make, do, mend, was telling her forcefully to salvage what she could from this wreckage. Indeed, she deserved punishment — but unless the secret was kept, more lives than hers would be brought to shame and ruin.
Resolutely, she turned to Rachael. The girl stood by the table, one hand resting on it. Silence saw the tears and scratches, the flush of sunburn and the raised, red weals from the nettles through which she had run, and felt a sudden rush of pity for this young, fierce, tormented child who was, assuredly, her own worst enemy. She said quietly, ‘What has happened has happened, and cannot be altered. And I know, better than anyone else, how it is my fault. I don’t want to excuse myself, or justify my crime — all I want is to try and make you understand why.’
Rachael glanced at her from under her lashes, and said nothing. Silence waited a moment, and then went on. ‘I know you love Nick.’
‘How?’ Rachael cried, and a great scarlet betraying wash of colour covered her face. ‘It was supposed to be a secret!’
‘Nat told me,’ said Silence. ‘He knows you better than anyone else, after all.’
Rachael stared down at the table. She said in a low voice, ‘I didn’t want anyone to know, anyone at all. Does Nick — I mean Captain Hellier — does he know?’
This was one time, Silence decided, when a lie would be kindest. She shook her head. ‘No, he doesn’t.’
There was a long, long pause. Then Rachael said, very quietly, ‘He loves you, doesn’t he.’
No point in denying it. Silence said, equally softly, ‘Yes.’
‘But my father doesn’t love you. I heard him talking to Grandfather once, before he married you. I thought he was talking about a cow he wanted to breed from. Then he said something about a good mother above all else, and I knew he was speaking of you. I remember it quite clearly,’ said Rachael. ‘And he couldn’t love you and say the things I’ve heard him say to you.’ She looked up, her eyes brilliant with yet more tears, unshed. ‘Do you love Nick? Nick, and not my father?’
‘I love Nick,’ said Silence steadily, meeting her gaze. ‘But I know, none better, that it does not give me licence to — to break my marriage vows. I promised to love, honour and obey your father, forsaking all others: and for nine years, nearly ten, I kept that promise. And now I have cast it all away for love. It sounds like a stage-play, doesn’t it? The world well lost for love. But love of that kind isn’t everything. I love you, and Nat, and Tabby and Deb and William, and I love this house too. I care for you all, so much. And I know that by loving Nick, I have put it all in jeopardy.’
Rachael chewed at her lip. She said at last, ‘But you couldn’t help loving him, could you? I couldn’t. After he saved me…’ She broke off, swallowing tears, and added painfully, ‘It was a dream I had, a silly childish dream, oh how Nat would laugh — and when I saw you kissing I felt — I felt as though I’d been the one betrayed. And I wanted to hurt you, so I told Grandmother. And if I hadn’t, she’d be alive now, so I killed her, not you.’
‘Stop it,’ Silence said quickly, hearing the rising note of hysteria in her voice. ‘That’s nonsense. Probably if we hadn’t burst in on her today, she’d have had a seizure berating Ruth, or William, or Deb. And that would have been as bad, if not worse.’
‘I suppose so,’ Rachael admitted, after a while. She thought for a moment, and then went on, her voice puzzled. ‘I don’t feel sorry — it was horrible to see her die like that, so suddenly — but I don’t feel sad at all. I feel…relieved. Is that very wicked?’
‘I feel it too,’ Silence told her, wondering if it was wise to admit so much.
‘And I suppose everyone will speak well of her now she’s dead, they always do — but sometimes I hated her,’ Rachael said. She looked at her stepmother, as if seeing her properly for the first time, and added on a note of sudden fear, ‘What are you going to do? You and Nick? Are you going to go away with him?’
For one wild moment her heart leapt. Away, free, to be with the man she loved so much, unshackled from her responsibilities and burdens: the world lay intoxicatingly bright before her. Then reality, grim and grey, intruded. She shook her head sadly. ‘No. No, Rachael, I can’t. I can’t leave you, or the others — I can’t leave Wintercombe. Your father will come home soon, and he will need my help and support. He has suffered much in the war — remember, Sam is dead.’
‘I’d forgotten,’ said Rachael. ‘How could I forget Sam?’ She stared down at her battered hands, and then up at her stepmother. ‘I — I’m sorry. I should not have said those things. And I don’t like it that you love Nick, I don’t like it at all — but I know really that he’d never think of me in — in that way, and if he truly does love you… I’ll try not to mind, I promise I will. And I promise, Mother, I promise I’ll never say anything about it to anyone, ever.’
Silence looked at her difficult, wayward stepdaughter, who so unexpectedly seemed to have listened to reason. She felt her eyes fill with tears, and said slowly, ‘I don’t deserve that, Rachael. But I thank you, with all my heart.’
‘Don’t cry!’ the girl said, jumping up from the chair. ‘You mustn’t — I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please forgive me!’ And she flung her arms around Silence as if she were the child in need of comfort.
For a long time they hugged each other, overcome by shared emotion. Rachael, for the first time, was thinking more of someone else’s problems than her own. She knew something of the sharpness and the anguish of love, though she was dimly aware that what she had felt for Nick was but a shadow of the glorious reality. And she also must acknowledge that in Silence’s situation, loving and being loved in return, surely only a saint would have resisted such temptation.
‘Let him who is without sin’…the words came back to her mind. No one was without sin — and therefore who could judge, save God? If God thought her stepmother worthy of punishment, then He would do it. And because her mind now shied away from the horror, the shame, the scandal and misery and complications that would ensue if she told her father about his wife’s adultery, she knew that she would keep her promise.
I do not deserve it, Silence thought, blinking away her tears. I do not deserve her allegiance — not after what I have done to her, and to all of them. I have laid this terrible secret on her, and probably on Nat as well — and Mally. And yet I can’t complain, for it was my own decision, and I knew what it might lead to. I went into it with my eyes open, knowing the consequences. And now my chickens are beginning to come back to roost.
But despite her sorrow and guilt, she knew that nothing, yet, had the power to diminish, or deny, or destroy her love for Nick.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
‘False face must hide what the false heart doth know’
(Macbeth)
Dame Ursula St. Barbe was laid to rest the day after her death, in the vault beneath the aisle of Philip’s Norton church. The entire household, and many of the village, attended her funeral, despite the claims of the harvest. There were few tears shed, though, for she had been feared and respected, but not loved. And Silence wondered how many felt, as she did, a guilty sense of relief and freedom, as though a tyrant monarch had died.
She had despatched Ned Merrifield back to the harvesters to tell them about Dame Ursula’s death, and to ask Ruth, and Margery Turber, to return. She did not dare send any message to Nick: she hoped desperately that he would take some small comfort from what had happened. Only in private would she be able to reassure him.
But there was no chance of that until very, very late, after the vicar and the carpenter and the sexton and various other interested parties had visited her; after the laying-out and the funeral arrangements had been completed; when the children, bewildered, tired and shocked, but not in any sense grieving, had been sent to bed.
Silence sat in her chamber, not knowing if he would come to her: in the bustle of the aftermath of death, she had had no chance, to speak to him, nor even to give him some sign that all was well — at least, well in comparison with what might have been. Pye’s solitary kitten, magnificently plump and healthy, suckled her mother industriously, her mouth clamped on the teat, her front paws kneading rhythmically as she drank. Silence felt suddenly weary, so weary of it all: the secrets, the complications, the lies and the evasions, and then, at the end, as inevitable as nightfall, the moment when he would leave.
Despite her words to Rachael, she was tempted: the Devil sat on her shoulder, and showed her the kingdoms of the world. For so long, she had wished to be rid of her responsibilities, to abandon them all and enjoy the freedom she had never in her life possessed. And now, the chance, unlooked-for, miraculous, might be offered to her. Nick would leave when the Roundheads came back, as they were bound to do after Bristol’s surrender, which must surely come soon. They would mop up all the remaining Royalist garrisons — Farleigh, Wintercombe, Devizes, Laycock, all were doomed to fall, even she with no military knowledge could see that. Nick would ride away, and she knew that if she wanted it, he would take her with him.
It had been better when she had thought she had no choice. But now that they were lovers, as passionate and true as any in ballad or play or romance, whatever decision she made would inevitably bring great anguish. To live without Nick, or without her children?
There was a protesting squeak. Pye, exhibiting once again that uncanny ability to sense her distress, got out of her basket, leaving the kitten bereft, and jumped onto her lap. And not just without the children, Silence thought as she stroked the cat while her hot tears fell onto the black and white fur. Without Wintercombe, and my garden: without Pye.
Make, do, mend, said her grandmother’s voice, scornful of self-pity: and inside her head Nat, bright-eyed and cynical, commented drily, ‘More fool you, to fall in love.’ Annoyed with her weakness, she pulled a kerchief from her sleeve and resolutely rubbed her eyes with it. Pye purred loudly, but before she could settle down where she liked best to be, Silence, who had discovered a sovereign remedy for the mopes, set the cat on the floor, rose, and went to the table.
A pile of books lay there, both Nick’s and Sir Samuel’s, in cheerful confusion. The volume she wanted lay on top: she returned to her chair and began to leaf through Nick’s battered old copy of one of Shakespeare’s plays called, for some reason, Much Ado About Nothing.
It worked. She was smiling at the barbed banter of Beatrice and Benedict, when his knock came at the door. Instantly, her heart pounding, she leapt up and flew to open it. Mally was already asleep in her closet, behind two inches of stout oak, and would not disturb them. The night lay in front of them, when they could be alone.
He came inside, wearing his tawny doublet, unbuttoned: the better of the blue ones had been ruined in the grenado’s explosion, not even fit for polishing pewter. As soon as the door was locked, he took her in his arms and kissed her with lingering delight, and all her fears and doubts and sorrows were swept away in his power. Unlike the first occasion, which had been a hasty slaking of hungers that had consumed them both too long, their lovemaking now was a slow, languorous exploration of each other’s pleasure, delaying the moments of consummation and climax for as long as possible, before the final glorious eruption of joy.
This time, Pye took it into her head to walk over their entwined bodies at precisely the wrong moment, causing considerable laughter and some writhing because, as Nick remarked, she was too damned inquisitive, and her whiskers tickled. But her intervention made no difference to the outcome, though Silence had to smother her giggles. Afterwards, they lay in a sweaty, entangled embrace, utterly and drowsily at peace until Nick saw, over his beloved’s shoulder, a pair of interested black and white ears. At his indignant hiss, Pye leapt off the bed and returned, offended, to her kitten.
‘We don’t step on her tail when she’s up to no good with a tom,’ Silence said, when they had finished laughing. ‘So why she feels she must poke her nose into our business, I don’t know.’
‘Curiosity will kill that cat,’ Nick commented. He leaned on his elbow to look down at her flushed, contented face. ‘Silence, my dear love — I know this is the wrong time and place to ask, but we won’t have another chance. What the Devil happened today?’ Slowly, with many pauses to marshal her thoughts, she told him everything. At the end, she was trying not to weep: not, she hastened to assure him, from overmuch grief at her mother-in-law’s death, but from the memory of her talk with Rachael.
‘And you say she has promised not to tell?’ Nick said, thoughtfully. ‘Can we rely on her?’
Silence considered it. She, too, had had her doubts on that score. At last she said, ‘I think so. I think that once she had got over her shock at seeing us, once her grandmother was dead, she realised that it was so much better, for all of us, to say nothing. She is very confused, Nick, confused and unhappy and still moonstruck with you, though I think she realises now just how foolish she has been.’
‘Thank you,’ said Nick drily. Silence gave him a wry smile. ‘I didn’t mean it in that way, and you know it, Captain Nicholas Hellier. But really, I think Rachael is safe. She knows how much there is to lose. And somehow, in the middle of all this, we are beginning to be friends. You and I will have to be very circumspect with her, and it wouldn’t be wise to parade our love before her, even though she knows of it. Rachael prefers to ignore inconvenient truths, and if we give her the chance to pretend that all this never happened, both she and I will be happier.’
Nick lay back on the pillows, his hands crossed behind his head. It was only in the last few days that he had been able to lie thus in comfort: his back was still a mass of new scars and half-healed scabs, criss-crossed in ugly purple and red, but there was no inflammation, no putrefaction where a piece of metal might have been overlooked. The great good fortune of his escape struck her all afresh, and she wriggled next to him, put her head on his shoulder and her arm across his chest to hug him even closer. ‘Wise Silence,’ he said. ‘Do you know me as well as you know your children, I wonder?’
‘I doubt it,’ she said drily. ‘Since I don’t know who your parents are, where you were born, how old you are, how you came to be in the Royalist army — I don’t know anything at all about your life before you came to Wintercombe.’
‘Perhaps you would not wish to know,’ said Nick. She could see his mouth stretch in that dearly familiar, lazy smile. ‘Anyway, you don’t need that information, do you? You didn’t fall in love with my upbringing or my history — you fell in love with me.’
‘The you I love is the result of your upbringing and history,’ Silence pointed out. ‘But I’m only expressing idle curiosity. As you say, I am in love with you — and I need nothing else to confirm or deny that feeling.’ She grinned, feeling ridiculously happy considering her earlier misery — but then, he had always had the power to lighten her moods. ‘Don’t worry — you don’t have to reveal your doubtless exceedingly chequered past to me. I’m probably better off not knowing about it, as you pointed out. But I do sometimes wonder how you have come by such incongruous talents. Not every Cavalier Captain can make a hat from a folded napkin, and quote the Scriptures.’
‘I like to be different,’ said Nick, quite unworried by her gentle probing. ‘But I will answer one of your questions. I am twenty-eight years old, and my birthday falls at the end of October. I am of the sign of Scorpio, dear lady, and you if I remember correctly are Aquarius, the bearer of water — a most apt sign for a gardener.’
‘I don’t know anything about astrology,’ said Silence. ‘To my father, it was but another branch of sorcery.’
‘Well, Scorpio people are reckoned to be dark, and secretive, and sullen.’
‘I’ll agree with the middle of those qualities — the rest, I would argue with.’ She snuggled closer. ‘The twins were born in the second week of November — does that make them Scorpios too?’
‘I would think so — and certainly Rachael fits the description to a nicety.’
‘Poor Rachael,’ said her stepmother. ‘She doesn’t help herself — but I can understand something of what she feels. I remember much the same when I was her age, save that I had to hide everything, or have my father beat me.’
His arm tightened about her. He said, ‘Is that why you are so good at concealing what you feel?’
‘When the strap is the penalty for not doing so, yes,’ said Silence drily. ‘Oh, don’t worry, I am not one to indulge in too much self-pity, especially for what has been long gone — but it is also one reason why I am perhaps more gentle with Rachael than most people would be.’
He was quiet for a while. Then he said, ‘What tale have you put about, concerning Dame Ursula’s death?’
‘I said that Rachael had felt unwell, so she and I had returned to Wintercombe. I looked in on Dame Ursula to see if she wanted anything, since her maid was harvesting, and found her dead. It is very close to the truth, and it has been accepted without question. Her mind was so vigorous that most did not notice it, but she had been ailing much, these last few months. And, Nick, I know I should not feel like this, I know it is wicked, but I am glad she is dead! It’s as if the greatest of my burdens has been lifted from me — I feel such a sense of freedom, you can’t imagine it. Since Sir Samuel died, she did her best to make my life miserable.’ She smiled. ‘And probably would have done so, had not a certain troop of soldiers come to my rescue, quite unwittingly, and given her something of greater importance to complain about.’
