by Laura London
“Lord, you’re taut,” he said. “Try to relax your legs, Liza. The stallion isn’t used to you. Being straddled by a woman so tense is—”
“I’m not straddling him, and I can’t help it if I’m tense.”
“Acute, aren’t you?” he replied. “It’s as difficult for me as it is for you. More difficult.”
As we rejoined the group, I waved to Ellen, who waved back, giving every appearance of having the time of her life. In fact, she was saying to Robert, “Do you th-think I could have a little of your wine?”
“Very well,” Robert said, giving her the nearly flaccid skin. “But only a little. I don’t want to take you home drunk.”
Ellen took the skin and tipped back her head as she had seen others do, letting the wine pour into her throat. Robert roared with laugher at her bawdy appearance.
“That girl,” said Brockhaven under his breath, “is bidding fair to becoming a rare handful.”
“Robert’s been doing it!” I said indignantly. “Why is it when Ellen does the same thing, she’s a rare handful?”
“Have you ever heard me say that Robert isn’t?”
I tried again. “She only wants to have an adventure. Is that so bad? Don’t you think if she has adventures, Robert is the safest person for her to have them with?”
“On the contrary. All he needs is another half pint and he’ll forget who she is, and what he shouldn’t be doing with her. And if she doesn’t keep her voice down, half the county will know who she is by the stutter. Damn—what was the matter with you? Don’t you know what could have happened to you out on a night like this?”
“Yes,” I responded promptly. “I could be ravished by an unconscionable libertine.”
We began to move with the group in a straggling procession toward the bottom of the hill. Brockhaven spurred his stallion to the outskirts of the crowd.
“Your point,” he said in my ear. I had the impression that he was smiling, though there was an edge in his voice. “Is that what it was, Liza? Ravishing? You can be blunt. My head’s cooler now.”
No, I thought in my heart. I love you. But how could I say that to the complex, self-possessed man behind me? I was miserably aware of my own cowardice that wished to share the depth of feelings with him, yet dared not. What was left? For him to believe me a foolish adolescent, curious about my budding sensuality, eager for limited experiments in passion. Lord knows the man was accustomed enough to being the brunt of infatuation. Instead of I love you, I said in a polite voice, despising myself, “I don’t know what it was. Perhaps you can explain it to me—you’re the one with the experience.”
“Oh, are we back on that theme again? I admire your resolution. When one considers that our last communication of that aspect of my life was marked by a certain want of cordiality, particularly on my part.”
“Of course, you’re right!” I said hastily. “I beg your pardon! I don’t mean to sit in judgment.”
“Don’t sound so scared. I’m less of a monster than you think. Didn’t your grandmother teach you anything about physical love?”
I thought it over and said, “She described for me the act.”
“God forbid. The act? You’re farther ahead than most girls your age. That is, if she told you all of it.”
“Of course she told me all of it. There wouldn’t be much point in leaving anything out, would there be, when one is forever seeing dogs mating, and other animals.”
“As you say,” he said. “They rather tend to give the whole thing away. Did your grandmother tell you anything else?”
“Only this—never make love with any man but your husband, and never refuse him.” I twisted around to look at him. He was trying unsuccessfully to suppress a smile. “Well?”
“Well. I think someday you’ll make a wonderful wife for some lucky fellow.” He gave my cheek a flick with a long, careless finger. “Turn around.” I obeyed him, facing front again, and he said, “It amounts to this, sweetheart. You are too tempting, and I am too temptable. The fox guarding the chicken. Which reminds me—d’you see Robert and Ellen?”
“There they are,” I said. “Up ahead of the couple on the donkeys.”
“Let’s catch up to them, shall we? We’ll get Robert to give us some of his wine.”
The wineskin was empty, but had been replaced by a bottle filled with clear red wine, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I drank some too, right from the bottle, wanting to keep Ellen company. I swallowed too much, and the wine ran down my chin in sticky trails, and Robert laughed at me as he had done at Ellen. Brockhaven mopped me up with his handkerchief and said I was a disgusting brat. Ellen retorted that he was a terrible guardian with such cheerful stammering loudness that Brockhaven cringed and said, “Robert, make her keep her voice down. Not that way, idiot,” as Robert tried to stop her mouth with a kiss. “What a foursome we are. Come on, let’s not hold up the parade.”
“Yes, let’s go,” chirped Ellen. “I want t-to watch them raise the maypole.”
“Oh, no,” said Brockhaven quickly. “No maypole. We’re turning off at the first dark corner to get you both back to Edgehill.”
Ellen looked at him with eyes already suspiciously bright. “I’m going to see the maypole, Alex. I’m going to see it, and if you t-try to stop me, I’m going to pull off my hood and my m-mask and start screaming that I’m Ellen Cleaver and that Lord Brockhaven is a fuddy-duddy, and that I’ve pleasured with Robert in the Edgehill wine cellar.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” said Alex, his eyes narrowed.
“Yes, I think she would,” said Robert. “She’s drunk as a friar—I’ve never seen anyone pour wine down so fast in my life.”
“I hold you personally responsible for that, Robert,” retorted Alex in an exasperated voice. “What the hell’s the matter with you, letting her drink that much? You can’t expect an innocent chit to hold her liquor.”
“I had about as much luck,” Robert answered sweetly, “at preventing her from drinking too much as you’re having persuading her to forego the maypole. Better to do as she says.”
That is how we got to go to the maypole. We reached the village as the last vestige of black night had turned from the sky, to be replaced by strips of rose pink. Folk came spilling from their cottage doors and from the woods where so many hardy young had spent the night, and young and old began to greet the new day and the new spring with a raucous clamor of shouts, whistles, cheers, banging drums, and clanging hand-carried bells. Ellen blew earsplitting blasts on a cow horn provided for her by Robert. Young girls brought large baskets of flower garlands, passing them around, and soon I was draped with so many floral chains that I could barely move my chin without having my nose tickled in the petals. Aside from me, someone had given Ellen a small tiara decorated with stars, crescents, and wheels, the amulets to ward off witchcraft and evil.
Young girls ran to the field to bathe their faces in May’s first dew, which it is said, is an infallible beauty charm. I had lost sight of Ellen, but Brockhaven groaned as he saw her led by Robert through the crowd, her cheeks smeared with wet grass.
The procession wound to the village green through cottages decked with green branches and birch boughs gathered last night in the forest. The ceaseless toll of May carols surrounded us as we rode behind the ten yoke of oxen, each with sweet nosegays of flowers tied to the tips of their horns, that drew the heavy maypole.
Children cavorted and scattered petals, and couples danced in wild leaps as the maypole was raised.
Nan, the girl who had been on the back of Robert’s horse when we first came upon them, was crowned May Queen, wrapped in a blanket woven of bluebells and new green leaves, and the dancing began in earnest, with the streaming, herb-laden ribbons on the maypole flying in endlessly changing patterns. Ellen took me by the hand in the singing, laughing crowd, and cried, “Dance, Liza, dance,” and whether it was the wine or the gaiety around me, or the sweet freedom of anonymity, Ellen and I ran around the maypole, and danced like
a pair of spirits. Someone, I believe it was Robert, stuck white willow wands wreathed in cowslips into my hands, and I waved them over my head and struck them together as the other girls were doing, and danced until I was dizzy.
I don’t remember when Brockhaven plucked me from the crowd, but I vaguely recall being once again on his horse, his arm around my waist, and Ellen and Robert riding next to us, Ellen blaring on her horn for all she was worth. My eyes drooped, and I slept the rest of the way back to Edgehill.
Chapter Eleven
The next thing I knew I was waking in bed at half past two that afternoon with a splitting headache. I don’t know how Brockhaven managed to get me unseen into my bedroom, or to get the horn away from Ellen. I don’t know how he and Robert thought to ride out and find our horses, or how he guessed which farmer they should be returned to, nor do I know which maid he bribed to take our crescent crowns, and our soiled and wine-splashed dresses, and have the mess cleaned up with no one the wiser.
What I do know is that the second I woke up, I was summoned with Ellen to appear in Brockhaven’s library. We sat with searing, biting hangovers while he delivered to us a lecture that could have cleaned the tarnish from the family silver, and warned us that if he ever saw either of us make the slightest attempt to rake it up again, he would take us by the scruff of our necks, and lay us, and the whole tale, before Lady Gwen. Opium-soaked meat—were we out of our minds? We must have been a fairly woebegone pair, because finally he laughed and gave us a dose of the powder that Robert used for his postindulgent affliction, sent us back to bed, and told Lady Gwen that we had indigestion.
The most amazing outcome of our escapade turned out to be the change in Robert’s attitude toward Ellen. In every tale one could read written for young ladies of virtue, any hapless young girl so lacking in self-control as to allow herself to behave in such a carefree manner would earn the lasting and incontrovertible disgust of any young man. Robert’s reaction would have astounded the moralists. Instead of holding Ellen in disgust, he looked on her with new respect. He had never imagined there to be such a lust for adventure in this quiet, earnest little damsel.
He began to talk to Ellen about herself, and the more they talked, the more they discovered about each other; he began to call her Ellen the Lionhearted. Finally, to Ellen’s delight, and far beyond her wildest dreams, he began to flirt with her, soaring her spirits to Olympian heights. I was glad for her sake, and it made things happy and exciting, an atmosphere that I sorely needed. My own spirits were plunged to the lowest desolation.
I dreamed at night of Brockhaven kissing me, touching me, and would wake up icy and sweating and twisted tightly in my bedclothes. When my guardian and I were together, mostly with Ellen, Lady Gwen, and Robert, I found that my gaze would catch and hold some random movement of Brockhaven’s—the shaping of his long white fingers around the curve of a wineglass, or the way he would absently run the tip of a finger down the smooth, flat side of a knifeblade; and I would think of the deep, heady magic his fingers had made of my flesh. I found myself staring at the hollow at the base of his throat, and remembering how I had been close enough to feel the pulse beating there. I longed for him to talk with me and tease me as he had the day I walked on the stone wall. Deep within me there was a wish that he would tell me his secrets and emotions, and listen as I shared mine with him.
It had become so overpowering for me to be in his presence that speech was for me out of the question; I began to avoid him and was effortlessly successful. Perversely to my hurt, he avoided me. When we were thrown together unavoidably, in a room in which a third party was present and it would have been conspicuous if either one of us had left immediately, he was the same as he had always been—kind, yet distant and reserved, occasionally irritable. The shifting phases of his mood seemed derived from such things as the progress of planting and whether or not the new plow would arrive, rather than anything to do with me.
I couldn’t imagine Lord Brockhaven asking any women for marriage and tenancy for life, because he seemed too whole and separate to have another person that close in his life. I couldn’t imagine him feeling so strongly for a woman to want to marry her. What was left for me—to be his mistress? It was unthinkable that I should contemplate such a thing.
I was tempting enough to be kissed, provided I fell against him accidentally in a meadow or if he were to meet me incognito in a dark wood, but I had discovered that men can have that kind of physical contact with a woman and invest it with no affection; hence, Robert and Nan as we had seen them at the bonfire. It made me feel serious, sad, and hopeless. I could see a lifetime stretching ahead of me filled with unrequited yearning for Lord Brockhaven.
I realized how destructive it was to nourish my hopeless hopes, and spent hours undertaking what I fondly wished to be the expungement of Lord Brockhaven from my thoughts and my heart. I looked back in horror once the hours were passed, realizing that I had merely spent the time mooning over him.
Half of May was gone. The snowy apple blossoms had fallen from their trees, carpeting the earth underneath in plush ermine, leaving new green growth behind. Red campion had come to bloom, growing in the shady spots under the hedges. A pair of little wrens was nesting outside my window, and I watched them for long, reflective moments, two tiny feathery balls hopping and trilling not three feet from the sash. Ellen and I collected fragrant herbs and laid them in sand to dry to make sachets for her elderly nurse, who would be eighty years old on the seventh day of June. However much I did to keep busy, it remained nearly impossible for me to eat at the table when Lord Brockhaven was present. My energy began to wane, and I lost weight.
About this time, Ellen became afflicted with a spring cold, and was put to her bed with mustard packs and orders to sleep, and I realized how much I had depended on her company to keep me going. For the first time in my life I felt lethargic.
It worried Lady Gwen. On the third morning Ellen spent in bed, I was having breakfast with Lady Gwen and Robert. I had consumed what had become my normal pittance and then asked to be excused.
“My dear child,” exclaimed Gwen. “Again you haven’t eaten enough to keep a minnow aswim. If this continues, I fear we shall have to force feed you like a Christmas goose. I know I’ve asked you this before, and I don’t wish to press you, Liza—but is there something troubling you?”
“No, dear ma am.” I tried to smile. “Spring fever perhaps.”
Gwen shook her head and took on a worried look. “I fear it’s the change from the wandering gypsy life to this one, come so soon after the loss of your grandmother. So much to distress you! One would almost think, my dear, that you were pining.”
When I said no more, she left with a troubled frown to visit Ellen’s sickbed, after leaning over to tenderly kiss the top of my head. After she left, I glanced at Robert, who I thought had been reading the paper, only to find him staring intently at me. Meeting my gaze, he said quietly that he thought we ought to talk: not wanting to hear his questions, I pleaded a headache and left the room. I pressed my temples on the way out feeling that the lie had actually brought me a real headache. I smiled ruefully, deciding that Grandmother would be forcing a tonic on me if she could have seen me like this.
Thinking of my grandmother filled me with a terrible longing, and I had to choke down a thick, unhappy feeling in my throat, and blink back tears. I went to the kitchen and asked the steward for a glass of wine. He obliged, and I took the glass to the garden and poured it on the earth as an offering to my grandmother, saying, “May this be before you.” The familiar act of mourning and love lifted my spirits, and in this mood of optimism, I decided I would make myself a tonic.
I ran upstairs and changed into a high-waisted walking gown of peach cotton trimmed with white velvet ribbons, smoothed the high muslin neckruff, and went out in search of bog bean.
A wonderful purifier for the blood is bog bean, a stimulus to the appetite and a remedy for migraine. You’ll find it everywhere you look in Scotla
nd, but in this area of England it only grows here and there. When it is discovered, there is usually lots of it, so you’re in luck. There was just such a lucky spot bordering the garden at the dower house. The dower house, a lovely small structure of cream-colored brick, had been vacant for seventy-five years. Ellen had told me that it was empty of furniture but that the servants went through it twice a year and kept it cleaned and in repair. Other than that, it was left alone, except for irregular checks by the steward or Brockhaven. The garden was in a picturesque state of neglect, the only attention paid to it being a scything of the walkways at midsummer. Tiny, fragile teardrops of lilies of the valley grew along the garden path.
The day was quiet except for the song of the thrush. Two squirrels chased each other across the overgrown trail as I picked my way toward the bog bean, which grew, as it does, in the small lake at the back of the garden. Thick reeds, making a good recovery from winter frostbite, had framed the lake with green whiskers. The surface of the water reflected the blue sky, a surface shimmered and broken only by the pair of springs bubbling up from the bottom. A sheltering of yellow and orange azaleas shared the bank with an occasional mound of dark rhododendrons, while bluebells and Lent lilies were graceful partners with lacy ferns. They danced to the slow, soft music of a long spring zephyr which, as is the way with a truly beautiful tune, was felt more than heard. A backdrop of dark yews bordered the setting from the rest of the world.
The bog bean was growing where I had marked it previously—in a patchy hummock about twelve yards from shore, nearly to the middle of the lake. One hand occupied by my straw basket, I gathered my skirts in the other, lifting them as high as I could, for this was one of the expensive dresses Lady Gwen had bought for me, and I didn’t want to soil it. Silvery minnows darted around my feet as I touched the sandy bottom; it was a pleasant, rough feeling. The going was easy for about six of the twelve yards, and then there was a rapid descent where I could see it would be too deep to wade. I turned, and, accompanied by the minnows, went back to shore to remove the dress.
