‘How I wish it was for the first time.’
‘You yourself decreed our parting. I hated what you did for a while, but then I saw why you did what you did. I shall love you till I die. So come, my love, and marry me.’
The ceremony took hardly a moment in time. Plighting their troth, they both felt the solemnity of the priest’s final blessings, which faded away in a final amen. Eleanor raised her eyes, eyes shimmering with tears in orbs of amber and laced with love and hope for the future she would have with this man who was now her husband.
William’s strong hands closed on her arms and with his throat tight with emotion almost too great to be borne, he murmured, ‘Kiss me, Eleanor.’
She raised her mouth blindly for him to place his lips on hers, then, after he pulled her hand through his arm, they turned from the altar and together walked out of the chapel, while Catherine and Godfrey, arms entwined, looked on, envisioning their own wedding day in the near future.
By tacit consent, the newly-weds stayed with Catherine and Godfrey for a few days before setting out on the long journey to Yorkshire. The parting for William and Godfrey was a difficult one, having been through much together, but Godfrey, intending to take Catherine to his native Glasgow, promised they would call at Staxton Hall when they travelled north.
If William’s family had expected him to bring Catherine home to Staxton Hall as his bride, they hid their surprise and rejoiced in his marriage to Eleanor.
Lady Alice kissed them both when William took his bride on his arm and presented her as his wife, daring his mother to dispute him or disparage Eleanor in any way for being so far on with child when they had only been wed three weeks.
‘I am delighted for you both,’ Alice said. ‘This is indeed a joyous time for all of us—and I see there are more surprises on the way.’ She raised her eyebrows slightly at Eleanor’s advanced pregnancy but asked no awkward questions, being content to await the birth in anticipation of an easy delivery and a healthy child.
They were an impressive couple—William as handsome and proud as a man should be, and Eleanor as beautiful and content as a woman could be.
Eleanor settled into life at Staxton Hall with ease. With the two men who had set fire to Hollymead and attacked her in York executed for their crime and Sir Richard Grey having met his end on the block, she felt that life as she had known it at Fryston Hall was over for good. William’s mother and his sisters fussed over her and watched her constantly; when she jokingly complained, they laughingly told her that she’d better make the most of it, since they were leaving Staxton Hall to take up residence in Alice’s brother’s house in Pickering when the baby was born.
For William, life with Eleanor was everything he ever hoped it could be, and more. A surge of tenderness and profound pride swept through him at her sweetness and her candour, and she filled him with joyous contentment. She was a rare woman and everything he had ever wanted. He loved her, all of her—her intelligence, her sensitivity, her gentle, passionate nature, but most of all he loved her courage, the kind of courage that had enabled her to confront adversity time after time.
Without it she would not have left Fryston Hall, and she would have been lost to him.
Eleanor’s labour began suddenly and fiercely in the first week of November. Contractions gripped her body and, after a moment’s panic, she was struck with the enormity of the situation.
‘It’s too soon,’ she cried, panicking as another pain gripped her. ‘The child is not yet due.’
Coming into the room, William’s mother calmly assessed the situation and ordered Eleanor to be taken to her room. ‘It’s not unusual. The child is obviously in a hurry to see the world.’
With dawning alarm William gathered Eleanor into his arms and mounted the stairs and carried his tender burden to their room. Everything was blotted from her mind, the centre of her being focussing only on getting the baby out as soon as possible.
As the pain assaulted her in a continuous wave, with the birth of the child the relief was enormous, but short lived, for quickly there was another agonising pain and Eleanor’s second child was born. Twins. A boy and a girl.
Later, holding her babies—small and as soft and light as thistledown—she looked sleepily at William, who had come in to the bedchamber and was leaning over her. ‘We have two babies,’ she whispered, ‘just like you said we might. Two beautiful, perfectly formed babies.’
Settling himself beside her on the bed and taking the boy in his arms, Eleanor smiled through her tears of happiness as he looked proudly down into the tiny, wrinkled face of his son.
‘Are you pleased with our children, William?’
His eyes glittering with unsuppressed pride and joy, William smoothed the curls off her cheek stained with a rosy blush. His sensual lips quirked in a half-smile. ‘Pleased is an understatement. A boy and a girl—how wonderful is that? They are beautiful. Just like their mother,’ he said, his voice raw from the emotion of the past twelve hours.
Knowing how hazardous childbirth could often be, William had lived the horrors of the things that could go wrong. Leaning forward he covered her mouth with his own, the gentle kiss eloquent of the profound love he felt for her, and relief that her ordeal was over and she was well.
‘Thank you, my darling,’ he breathed against her lips.
Settling her cheek against the tiny head in her arms, she closed her eyes and whispered, ‘You’re welcome.’
ISBN: 978-1-4268-6470-4
FORBIDDEN LORD
Copyright © 2008 by Helen Dickson
First North American publication 2010
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