After what seemed like hours of kissing, he raised his head again and said, ‘I’ve never been so obsessed by a woman before. I think about you all the time, ever since the fête… I’m going mad for you but I’m married, and so I thought I’d better stay away. But I couldn’t, Jane. I just couldn’t.’
She took his face between her hands and kissed him to still his words. ‘I’m glad you didn’t stay away,’ she told him.
He gripped her tighter now, speaking urgently into her ear. ‘I love you. I love you. I must have loved you for months but I didn’t know it. Tonight when I heard you singing I knew that I’d die for you, I’d kill for you. I never believed such a thing could happen to me – I’ve always been so rational.’
She was silent in his arms, listening to his voice, to its cadences and the strange accent that she had grown to love so much. She remembered the first time she saw him, when she thought him the Prince of Darkness, and then with a thrill of wickedness she threw her arms round his neck saying, ‘I love you too. I’ve loved you since the day I saw you in the snowdrop wood. I don’t give a fig if you’re married.’
They did not speak much after that but kissed and kissed, some of their kisses deep and clinging, others soft and light like butterflies landing on parted lips. He kissed her ears and down her neck; she felt his hands slipping down to her breasts where he caressed her rigid nipples so gently that he almost stopped her heart with longing and desire.
Suddenly he stepped away from her and gently pulled her dress back to cover her naked breasts.
‘I can’t do this. I can’t betray you and your family like this. For God’s sake go home, girl, and stop enchanting me.’
But she did not listen. With her eyes shining she took his arm as if he were a child and pulled him out into the middle of the smooth, grass-covered cloister yard. He walked with her like a man in a dream while, still gently pulling, she led him through the arched gateway into a long green meadow that marked where the monks’ road had run up to the ruined gatehouse.
It was as flat as a dancing floor and, as the similarity struck her, she laughed and swung him off in dance, all the time singing softly to him like an enchantress. Eyes fixed on each other’s faces, they danced under the moon, with her singing as they bowed and curtsied, advanced and retired. Each time he put his hand out to touch her the charge of energy between them grew stronger. It was as if they were joined together by invisible strings, as one stepped back, the other stepped forward and never did they stop staring into each other’s eyes. She was still singing as they danced into the wood and lay down together very slowly on the carpet of soft springy moss beneath the beech trees. There, in the silver light of the moon, with the smell of moss in their nostrils and the rustling sounds of midnight woodlands filling their ears, they made love without protesting and without promising anything. There was no need. They knew that they would love each other for ever.
* * *
Blaize watched his woman going out in the gang of bondagers to sow the earth with winter corn, scattering the seed far and wide as she walked, strewing it in generous handfuls like Persephone. As she walked the field he waited at the gate, and when the forewoman allowed the girls to stop for their morning break of cold beer and a crust of bread, she came across to him and he took her hand.
‘I made this for you,’ he said, and tried to tuck into the brim of her hat a little garland of rosehips and purple elderberries that he had picked on his three-mile walk from Melrose to Charterhall.
He was surprised when she drew back and would not let him fix the garland to the hat brim, saying, ‘Oh, Blaize, not those, don’t put those on me. They’re unlucky. They’re from the boon tree, that’s the tree of the witches.’ She was pointing at the deep purple elderberries and there was genuine fear in her face.
He laughed and said, ‘You do amuse me, Jane. You have all those ancient beliefs that must have come down from the pagans but you’re meant to be a good Christian. You go to church every Sunday, don’t you?’
She nodded and said, ‘Sometimes we go twice. But it doesn’t do to ignore the old ways. My mother’ll tell you that.’
In fact Jacques had already told him that many of Alice’s cures were part magic. She believed that if you rubbed affected parts of a patient’s body with a special kind of stone or hung an ancient blue bead round their neck, they would get better. ‘The funny thing is that sometimes they do,’ the French doctor had said.
Now Jane was telling him that anyone who picked even a leaf from the elder tree should first ask permission from the witch who lived in it.
‘You didn’t ask, did you?’ she said.
‘I didn’t know I had to ask,’ he replied with a laugh, but he threw the garland away.
He had been in the Borders for over a year and now he was in a different frame of mind, more prepared to appreciate the staggering beauty of the countryside around him, prepared to marvel at the myriad colours of the dying beech leaves as they drifted to the ground and covered the earth with a Persian carpet of red, gold and brown. He watched with delight as the huge horses dragged their ploughs up and down the sloping fields, turning the blood-red soil beneath their harrows, followed by skeins of black and grey pee-wits with their haunting cries of ‘Go back, go back!’
He no longer wanted to escape. The love he felt for Jane kept him captive more securely than all the chains and prohibitions governments could lay on him.
He went to see her every day, and waited for her coming home in the gathering dusk so that they could snatch a short time together before the curfew called him back to Melrose. He waded the ford in the river below her home and dreaded the winter floods which would cut him off from her. Then he would have to make a four-mile detour over the only bridge in the district across the Tweed at Leaderfoot in order to visit her.
One grey December day the women were working in the cattle sheds when he arrived and he was shocked when he saw the condition they were in as they stepped outside at the end of their day’s toil. Their legs and arms were wound round with thick ropes of straw to protect them from the wet and the cold but, worse than that, they were covered in dung. Their skirts up to the waist were sodden with it and their boots so heavily caked that no leather showed.
‘My God,’ he said, standing well away from her so as not to be overwhelmed with the smell, ‘that is a terrible job for a woman. Why do the men not clear out the cattle sheds?’
Big Agnes, who was walking behind Jane, said gruffly, ‘They won’t. Men refuse to do the job. They say it’s women’s work. They’re clever, it’s the worst job of the year but we have to do it.’
There were tears in Jane’s eyes when she saw how shocked he was. ‘I didn’t want you to see me like this,’ she said brokenly as he walked back to the abbey with her. ‘I hate being so filthy and smelling so bad. It’s loathsome.’
He stopped her with his hand and took her in his arms, careless of the smell. ‘I love you. I hate to see you doing this work but believe me, when this war’s over, I’ll take you away from this. You’ll never have to get dirty again.’
In the abbey, Alice, creeping like a sick snail now, had a huge tub of hot water waiting on the hearth for her daughter for she knew what the day’s work would have been. She started in surprise when she saw Blaize, with his scarlet jacket all streaked down the front with slime and muck.
‘Oh, your lovely jacket!’ she said. ‘What a mess you’ve made of it. Give it to me, I’ll clean it for you.’
He took it off and handed it to her but he still smelt bad. Seeing him looking ruefully at the stained sleeves of his shirt where he had held her, Jane laughed.
‘Look, this is a big tub, there’s room in it for two,’ she told him.
Alice had withdrawn to another room, so the girl and the soldier stripped off their clothes and climbed into the wooden tub in front of the fire.
There, with the flames dancing before them, they washed each other clean but they did not speak or kiss for fear of Alice
hearing them. It was the most erotic thing that he had ever done.
* * *
Alice’s life was slipping away fast. Blaize had come to respect her more than any older woman he had ever met and now he despaired when he realized that she had stopped fighting the malignancy that was eating her away. Soon she could only lie passively in a huge bed in her alcove room, watching the grey winter clouds through the little window opposite her eyes.
‘Have the swallows gone?’ she asked her daughter one day.
‘Oh yes, Mother, they went many weeks ago.’
‘I won’t see them back. You must look after your father. Your brother’ll soon be married and he can look after himself.’
There was no use protesting for they both knew that what she said was true. Jane held her mother’s hand as Alice went on, ‘Blaize is a good man. He loves you very much, I can see that and I’m happy about it though I’m sorry for Jock. What will happen when the war ends?’
‘He’ll have to go back to France but he says he’ll come back for me when he’s told his wife. He’ll come back and stay here, perhaps. I don’t want to leave this place, you know I love it here.’
Her mother turned her head on the pillow. ‘Oh, this enchanted country. It holds us, it never lets us go. We can’t breathe easy anywhere else. They say it’s fairyland and perhaps we’re all under a spell.’
‘It feels like fairyland. When I look out at the Eildon hills I feel they’re protecting us somehow. I’d never feel easy in my mind if I couldn’t see them.’
Alice’s eyes sought out the shapes of the hills through her window.
‘I know, I feel the same. An old woman once told me that King Arthur’s buried in the middle hill. I wonder if it’s true.’
She died a few days before Christmas when the earth was so frozen that it took a long time for her husband and son to dig her grave. The mourners included Blaize and Jacques, but Christian, whose hacking cough was worse these days, stayed in the abbey house with Jane while the ceremony was going on outside the window. After the ceremony, Jane’s brother announced that he was going to join the army and was setting off for Berwick to enlist.
‘I don’t want to be a landless labourer all my life, and I know that if I stay here much longer, this place will get me too, like it’s got everyone else in our family,’ he told his father and sister. They did not try to stop him going.
Jacques and Christian walked back to the big house, the blond Frenchman’s arm supporting the frail girl. Jane had not seen her friend for some weeks and was surprised at how ill she looked.
‘Is Christian sick again?’ she asked Blaize.
He nodded. ‘She’s spitting blood. Jacques is beside himself with worry. He’s trying to persuade her father to allow them to marry as soon as possible. He seems to think that by marrying her, he can protect her from the illness.’
But Charlie Glendinning never gave his consent. While the January winds were howling through the bare trees around the big house, Christian’s illness took a turn for the worse. She drifted out of life effortlessly, like a child. Sometimes it seemed she was rallying, but there would be a relapse, another haemorrhage, and she would be worse. Jacques was like a caged lion, raging against fate, powerless to stop the stealthy disease. All his medicine, all his knowledge could do nothing to turn aside the inevitable.
The pretty, fragile girl died on a sunny February morning when the first snowdrops were shining on the banks. She simply sighed and smiled, and died in her lover’s arms.
Her funeral, like Alice’s, was in the abbey but her resting place was in her family’s large, ornate crypt.
The skies were grey as they laid her to rest. Jane, at the back of the little crowd, shivered as she watched Blaize standing ramrod straight beside a wretched-looking Jacques. Then suddenly the sun shafted down through a break in the clouds, slanting over the brokenwall and lighting up her lover’s face. He looked as if he were standing in the beam of some heavenly light, and she gave a gasp of terror.
‘Oh no, no, no,’ she cried aloud in terrible grief, and ran from the aisle with her hands over her face.
When he came to comfort her later she let him believe that she had been weeping for Christian. She did not dare admit that she was mortally afraid for him because when the sun shone on his face she remembered the old superstition that whoever the sun shines on at a funeral will be the next to die.
* * *
The news from Europe was old by the time it reached the more remote corners of Britain. A few people in the Borders bought the Kelso Chronicle or one of the Edinburgh news sheets which were sent down a day late on the carrier’s cart, but as each copy cost sixpence only the rich could afford such luxuries. The poorer people read them later or simply had items of news passed on to them verbally.
Melrose heard about Napoleon’s defeat in Russia three months after it happened. But delight swiftly changed to despondency in the autumn of 1813 with the news of his victory at Dresden, a victory which made the prisoners of war strut through the town’s streets with their heads proudly high. But they were to be abashed again in the spring of 1814 when the news came through that the Allied armies had invaded France.
Then the unthinkable happened – the Allies were in Paris. Finally, on 14 April Napoleon signed a deed of abdication at Fontainebleau. That bit of news passed round like wildfire by word of mouth and long before the newspapers were circulating the official reports, victory celebrations had begun. The bitterness of defeat for the French prisoners was sweetened by the knowledge that the long war was at an end. They would be going home soon.
Blaize and Jane did not bother to hide the fact that they were lovers, but they were not the only couple in the same state, for many others had broken down the walls of hostility between antagonists and had fallen in love. There had already been a few marriages between local girls and Frenchmen and, of course, there were many illegitimate children born who would pass French blood down to their descendants. When Blaize heard the news of Bonaparte’s abdication and the end of the war, the deliverance he had longed for no longer seemed sweet, for he was in another kind of bondage.
Three of the prisoners had decided not to go home at all and they married their sweethearts, but Blaize did not have that option open to him. He had to be repatriated to France whether he wanted to go or not. If he tried to escape, it would be regarded as running away from captivity and he would be caught and punished in the same way as when he took off for the hills. Jane wanted to hide him but he refused to allow her to do so because a fine of twenty pounds was levied on anyone providing shelter for a runaway prisoner – and prisoner he still was until he was re-landed in France.
Arrangements were made by the Transport Office to ship the prisoners out, and the town was anxious to have some sort of party to mark the ending of their long relationship with the French.
Many friendships had been formed and the strangers had brought a new sophistication, a breath of the outside world, to Melrose. There were private parties every night and finally the prisoners gave their last concert in the theatre they had converted from a hay shed. Blaize and Jane did not join in the celebrations, for their coming separation weighed heavily on them.
At the beginning of May she suspected that she was carrying Blaize’s child. This was something she had longed for but now her delight was mixed with sadness. By the time her child was born, where would its father be?
They could make love in the woods again now that the winter had ended and she lay in his arms, worrying about what would happen when he went back to his own country where his wife was waiting.
‘How will you tell your wife about us?’ she asked him.
He was worried too. ‘I’ll tell her immediately. That’s why I’m going back. I promise you that I’ll not live with Marie again. I’ll tell her and then I’ll leave. When I’ve arranged everything, I’ll come back for you and the baby.’
‘But surely she’ll make trouble? You can’t just walk in and say you’r
e leaving her. You’re Papists, aren’t you? Your marriages last for ever. In my religion it’s fairly common for people to live apart if they don’t get on, but not in yours.’
‘That’s true. She’ll be angry but I’ll make a settlement for her. I don’t have a religion – I gave up the church long ago. But Marie does, and there’s no question of dissolving the marriage. You and I will have to live together without marrying. People do it all the time. It’s not so rare.’
It was arranged that the prisoners should leave Melrose in two batches. The first contingent marched out in May, so anxious were the authorities to be rid of them. They looked martial as they strode round the square in what was left of their uniforms, mixed now with articles of local apparel, and they sang the ‘Marseillaise’ as they swung off down the rutted road heading for Berwick-on-Tweed. Many of the people watching them wept, for they were losing friends and lovers. The French had transformed the life and outlook of the sleepy little town.
Blaize volunteered to wait with the second party. Colonel Berton, grey and old now, and Jacques who cared little whether he went or stayed now that Christian was dead, also stayed behind to organize the last affairs of the French. At the end of the month they were told that 10 June had been set as the date for their departure.
When this news arrived he left his lodgings and walked swiftly to the abbey.
He climbed the stair to the house, which felt deserted and empty without Alice. He came out again and sat in the sun on the steps where he had often sat with her, waiting for Jane to come back from her labours.
Soon he saw her walking slowly through the roofless aisle, her head hanging low in tiredness beneath the shady hat. She looked pale and he wanted to rescue her from the life of unremitting toil that she was forced to lead. When she saw him, she smiled and climbed the steps towards him, to sit on the top step at his side. She knew he had something to tell her.
Lark Returning Page 6
