“Aggie brought me a pasty.”
“Pasty!” She spat the word. Her father had been a wonderful trencherman. She had seen him eat four of Aggie’s pasties after a heavy dinner of beef, game and damson pie. He had always eaten pasties absently, as though they were wafers served with the junket.
She went out across the yard again. It was still drizzling and the house was a black mass except for the weak light of a pair of candles in her own room. She groped her way into the stone kitchen and lit the oil lamp with a glowing faggot taken from the hearth. There was just enough light for her to find half a cold chicken, a few slices of fat pork and two cold baked potatoes on one of the slate shelves of the pantry. She heaped the food onto a serving plate and carried it back across the yard, setting it down on the edge of Patch’s trough. She had forgotten to bring a fork. Louis took out his clasp-knife—the knife Aggie’s husband had given him to replace the one confiscated by the British provost in Lisbon—and sliced the meat. She thought that he handled the chicken bones more like a woman than a hungry man. He picked the meat from every bone, washing down the meal with another beaker of wine. She noticed this time that it caused a slight flush.
They talked about Patch, and Louis said that the pony had greatly improved. He had given her two pills the day before and had watched her sweat. The fat little mare seemed comfortable enough in her deep layer of straw. He stroked her nose and she nuzzled his fingers every time they approached her nostrils. Lucy reflected that all the horses in the stables showed pleasure when this lean young Frenchman came near them. She felt curious to know about his origins.
“Where did you learn all this?” she asked him.
Louis told her about his father and about the Bayonne coach-run. He spoke of a happy childhood in the cottage which the family had shared with a coach-guard, behind one of the larger posting-houses on the frontier highroad. There had been a constant flow of traffic to and from Spain, and even in the small hours coaches rattled into the yard and teams were changed during the brief halts. He drew a vivid picture for her of steaming greys, stripped of their harness, trotting contentedly into the warm stables and standing loosely at their troughs, munching hay while the boy Louis stood on a box and rubbed them down. He described his father stamping out of the cottage at 2 A.M. on a frosty morning, looking huge in his multi-frilled driving cloak and low-crowned beaver, his broad face almost masked by a long woollen scarf wrapped round and round his neck and stuffed between the wide lapels. He told her about cold, dark rides south-west and north-east, with the rain beating in their faces and their feet numb under the driver’s bearskin rug, of canters along the white road on long summer evenings, with the red sun on the vineyards and fine dust trailing like smoke from the hooves of the second pair of trotters. The wine made him unusually talkative. He described attempted highway robberies on lonely stretches of road, and an occasion when he had lain prone on the footboard and loaded pistols for his father throughout an hour-long attack by highwaymen firing from the woods. The guard had been killed and one of their leaders shot in its traces, but Louis’ father had kept up the fight until reinforcements arrived in the form of the southbound coach.
Lucy listened enthralled. He was showing her another world, in which men and even children fought and sometimes died for their daily bread. She led him on to describe the battles along the Danube and in Spain. He told her of Manny, crucified high up in the sierras, and of Claude, swept away in the Tagus flood. She asked him a hundred questions about Nicholette the cantinière, and he laughed at her expression of amazement when he told her that he had often seen Napoleon during the Austrian campaign.
The drizzle had ceased and a watery sun was rising when she saw him stifle a long yawn. At once she became insistent—he must go to bed and stay there until midday at least. Frampton, one of the stable hands, would be at work in less than an hour and he would watch over Patch. The pony was asleep anyhow and would not need watching much longer.
She returned to bed herself and slept quietly until the afternoon.
When she awoke she thought with pleasure of the previous night. It puzzled her to discover how soothed she had been by the encounter. She rode Roxy through the damp woods and across the seeping thickets of Shortwood Common, and found herself wishing that she had asked him to accompany her. It was a pleasure to see how well he sat a good horse.
The next day she did ask him to accompany her and when he hesitated she blushed and covered her embarrassment by shouting the order at him in her hoarse man’s voice. He only smiled and began to saddle the horses. Together they rode out towards the coast road, Lucy riding a little in front.
Her flash of temper disappeared the moment they were clear of the beech woods, and she challenged him to a race. The pair of them thundered across the common, thigh to thigh, until they were checked by the broken ground of the cliff warrens. After that they rode out every day, but, despite local gossip, which Lucy seemed to encourage by purposely taking the road through the village, their relationship remained that of mistress and servant. Louis still called her “madame” and never spoke unless he was first addressed.
March came and the woods round High Knowle were splashed with primroses. Thrushes sang in the thickets, rabbits started from the undergrowth when their horses stirred the shroud of dead leaves along the forest rides. There was a sweet smell in the glades, and from a knoll crowned by tall trees over at Hayes, near the cob-and-thatch farmhouse where Lucy told him the English colonist Raleigh had been born, Louis could glimpse the glitter of the Channel. They rode up there often. In the solitude their relationship seemed less strange, more like that of a man and a woman devoted to the same things, to open air and strenuous exercise.
He was standing there one afternoon, his back to a tree, holding the reins loosely so that his horse might crop the sweet grass, when she thought that she detected a trace of sadness in his expression. She gave him a swift smile.
“Homesick, Louis?”
He gave an answering smile and shook his head.
“I’ve been very happy here,” he told her. “I’ve no wish to go back!”
She was unreasonably delighted and for all her powers of self-control could not help showing it.
“I’ll keep you here, always!” she said, and came close to him possessively, as though at any moment the naval commissioners who distributed prisoners might leap out from behind the bushes and bundle him into a wagon for the port of repatriation. She knew that there was no real danger of his going back. The war with France had been in being for as long as either of them could remember and it seemed likely to go on forever.
He found himself moved also, more than he had been moved by anything since they had found Manny nailed to the tree in the mountains. He detected a mild scent, subtler and more elusive than the perfume of the flowers at their feet. He did not know that she had lately taken to dabbing her ears and throat with the stopper of a half-empty bottle of French perfume found in her old governess’s trunk years ago. She had never used perfume before, despising the women who did so at the Bicton hunt balls which she had unwillingly attended in the past.
He only said: “You’ve been very kind to me, madame!”
She detected a flutter of nervousness in his manner and for one moment thought that he was about to swing back into the saddle. The slight movement that he made swept away the final restraint of the barrier she had been trying to maintain between them during the last few weeks. She caught his arm and pulled him round to face her.
“Don’t ever go back, Louis, never, never!”
He stared down at her and for a moment she read panic in his eyes. Then his expression softened and he swallowed, deliberately, as though half-choked by tenderness. The movement of his throat was a sign to her. She flung her gauntleted arms around his neck and pulled him down to the clumps of primroses and violets, to the pine needles and the tatters of the old year’s beech leaves. As she covered his face with kisses he saw that her eyes were wet. He buried his
lips in her dark hair and whispered half-articulate endearments in her ear. He was nearly twenty-one, but war and poverty had denied him women, even the slatterns of the camp. He had often wondered what he would say when fond, caressing words were expected of him; now he discovered that these things said themselves. He held her close, thrilled by her trembling.
Left to themselves, their two horses ambled lower down the slope in search of richer grass.
CHAPTER TWO
They did not keep their secret for more than a week. Dodger, fat Aggie’s husband, saw them one morning whilst he was emptying rabbit gins up on the common. Dodger was a simple old man and after a moment’s open-mouthed scrutiny slunk off through the fir coppice to discuss the matter with his wife. Aggie was profoundly shocked. She had been reared in the feudal atmosphere of a remote country house, and it seemed to her incredible that her mistress, odd and wayward though she had always been, should lie in the grass with a French prisoner, presumably of the labouring class. She was wise enough, and kind enough, however, to say nothing about it to anyone, but her husband was not so discreet. He told Frampton, the groom, and soon the outrageous affair was common knowledge both in the household and in the village. Thirza, Aggie’s unmarried sister, was horrified and she sought various counsels on the matter, finally acting on those of Mr. Grimshaw, a crony of hers who was employed in Mr. Duke’s estate office and was thus able to write.
Lucy Manaton must have known that everyone in her world was aware of her infatuation, but she did not appear to care. She sensed that it could not last very long, that something would happen to separate them forever, but she accepted this as part of the price she paid for the hours spent in Louis’ arms and the warm spring days they spent together in the saddle, riding as far afield as Salcombe and Topsham. The pretence of decorum which they kept up in the immediate vicinity of High Knowle was dropped the moment they had ridden beyond the normal range of stray acquaintances.
Lucy felt that it was worth any risk to have someone like Louis to talk to after all her years of utter loneliness, and his shy, inexperienced lovemaking had stirred in her a physical appetite which she had thought Vince had killed during the first ugly week of their marriage. She wondered, calmly, whether she would have a child. The prospect did not alarm her. At the back of her mind she welcomed the possibility. It would be something to fling in the face of Vince if she ever saw him again, to make him look ridiculous and to pay off the score still owing on the murdered Hannibal; it would also be something by which to remember this gentle boy, who looked at her and stroked her cheek as though she were a goddess. Perhaps that was why he held such an attraction for her. She had never known a gentle man. All the men in her life had been either violent and uncouth, like Vince and her hunting companions, or servile and sexless, like old Harris the butler or Dodger at the lodge gates. On the few occasions that her father had kissed her his breath had reeked of liquor, and Vince, on those few nights when she had slept with him, had used her roughly enough to cause her acute physical pain.
A month went by and the idyll endured. Louis discovered with dismay that his conquest had altered his relationship with the other servants. Some of them became shy in his presence, treating him almost as though he was master of the house, but the majority made no attempt to hide their surliness and hardly spoke to him. He did not know whether he was in love with Lucy Manaton. He only knew that he liked being near her and riding behind her, watching the easy rhythm of her carriage and the sun patterns moving across her cheek as they walked their horses through the woods of an April afternoon. He enjoyed their embraces, but it was always she who began them. He would have been content to edge his horse alongside Lucy’s mare, Roxy, and let his fingers touch Lucy’s across the saddle-bow. He liked to hear her laugh. It was a strange contrast to her harsh voice and nowadays she laughed often at the broken English that she encouraged him to practice. He stopped riding over to Bicton to see Jean and the others. He felt that if he did he would have to tell them what happened, and the prospect of doing so filled him with embarrassment.
Now that the nights were growing milder Lucy always came down to the stables as soon as the servants had retired to bed. Twice she asked him to enter the house by the back door and come to her room, but he refused. Some instinct left over from his days in the skirmishers’ line checked him from entering unknown territory, and he said it was better that she should come out to him. She teased him, but complied, and they would sit, often simply holding hands, at the open window of his loft, looking out on the dark mass of the woods behind the paddock and speaking little.
It was an odd courtship and sometimes both of them had an uncomfortable feeling that they must appear a little ridiculous. It was only their physical need for one another which kept this from becoming embarrassingly obvious.
One night in early April she left him shortly before dawn and climbed the stone staircase to her room. She lit the candles of her heavy candelabra and began to undress, humming softly to herself as she unpinned her hair. She was standing there in her shift when she heard a floorboard creak. She spun round, thinking, for one happy moment, that he had broken his rule and followed her upstairs. A sallow, elegantly dressed young man stood on the threshold of the room, regarding her with an unpleasant, crooked smile. She started back against the fluted bedpost.
“Vince!”
He strolled into the room and she stared at him. All her contempt and loathing for the man, blunted by nearly two years’ separation and thrust into the back of her mind by the happiness of the past few weeks, flared up again, like a smouldering fire fed with pitch. He stood there a moment longer, enjoying her utter dismay. Then he flung a single word at her.
“Whore!”
She noticed now that he held a light riding-switch pressed closely against his leg, and the moment he saw that she had seen it he sprang forward, lashing out at her with the full power of his arm. She dodged the first blow, which whipped against the bedpost. The next second he was upon her and the switch slashed mercilessly at her bare legs.
The pain made her gasp, but it drove out her fear. Throwing herself across the wide bed, she groped for the empty ewer that stood on her marble-topped wash-stand between the bed and the narrow casement. She tried to scream, but the cry stuck in her throat. She felt choked with murderous rage so that she hardly felt the repeated blows on her neck and shoulders. Grasping the ewer by its long, curved handle, she swung it like a flail. It struck him with shattering force on the right temple; like a puppy crushed by a blundering foot he gave a kind of yelp and fell sideways across the bed, the switch dropping from his hand. She saw the fingers that had held it twitch convulsively and curl.
In the brief struggle the candelabra had overturned and the room was in darkness. She suddenly felt sick and steadied herself against the bedpost.
Somebody was stirring below, and old Harris, the butler, feebly called out something that she could not catch. She stood there beside the open window, trembling and sobbing, still holding the ewer in her right hand. The man on the bed lay very still.
Harris knocked.
“Who’s there, m’lady?”
His voice, unsteady with fear, forced on her mind an awareness that had left her the moment Vince entered the room. She seized a cloak from the back of the chair and flung it over her shoulders, wrapping the folds across her quivering body. Harris opened the door and peeped in. In the light of his single candle he looked like a tired old gnome. He opened his mouth and stared at the bed.
“It’s the master,” he said foolishly.
Her mind made an attempt to grapple with the situation. She thought: “Louis! I must get Louis away! Vince didn’t come on his own. He must have been sent for. I can manage Vince. I’ve silenced him already, but they’ll take Louis!”
She picked up the candelabra, lit a candle from Harris’s flame and held it directly over Vince’s head. There was no blood, but she saw a large blue bruise on the temple. She realized then that she was still holding
the ewer and that Harris had transferred his startled gaze from the bed to her.
She said: “Call Frampton and some of the others. Take him downstairs, he’s hurt!”
Then, without another glance at Vince, she went out, down the stairs and out across the yard to the stables. She went in and climbed the vertical ladder to Louis’ loft. The effort made her breathless. She began to sob again and cursed herself for the weakness. Stumbling across the bare floor to the corner where Louis’ pallet lay, she reached forward, grasping him by the shoulder and shaking him violently. He sat up instantly.
“What is it?”
As she gasped out her story he listened silently.
“You must get away now,” she insisted.
“Where can I go?”
She hadn’t thought as far as that. Where could he go? He was a prisoner of war and whether Vince was dead or merely stunned there was certain to be a hue and cry. Louis must leave the house. Chivalry on his part would avail them nothing. It could not help her and it might result in his own death. Vince might not be able to ride, but he was an excellent shot. She had seen him, so drunk that he could hardly stand, firing pistols at lighted candles and extinguishing them in three out of every four attempts. She knew Vince; he would never be satisfied until Louis was dead. He had a weak man’s vanity and, where pride was involved, the obstinacy of a trapped stoat. If he was dead, then the law would be called in and for Louis it would mean the hulks or worse.
Across the yard the house had sprung into life. Lights moved up and down, there were calls and the clatter of wooden clogs on the old stairs.
Louis did not have to be persuaded to leave her to face the outcome alone. He was fully conscious of his helplessness as a prisoner of war, and if he were found there and arrested, it would only make matters worse for her. As it was, nobody could prove that they had been lovers. It might even be dismissed as a piece of malicious gossip. It was kinder to Lucy to leave at once.
Seven Men of Gascony Page 17
