by Bianca Bloom
After he left, I watched him go through the window. He moved rather efficiently for a traveler who was clearly exhausted. Even through my distress, I could see that it would not be received well that he had been forced to stay at the inn. The village, which still called me a Shylock, would think worse of me for forcing out my “relative”.
14
When Esther came in, I realized that I was shaking. As Mrs. Climpson had done the day I first learned of Gilbert’s death, Esther wordlessly set whiskey before me and watched me drink it down.
With a hollow laugh, I walked over to the couch, sinking down in it with the realization that I would be quite a drunk if I did not learn to manage my nerves better.
“Would you like to run any notes over, ma’am? I know you have had little time to attend to farm business today.”
It was shorthand, as if there were spies behind the curtains. When I wanted to meet Adam, I had a message sent over to his estate asking to have something from the kitchen gardens. Esther was the only one who knew my full secret, though our cook must have suspected. She was an old friend of my auntie’s, though, and rumored to be a bit of a merry widow herself, so I knew she would always keep quiet.
“Perhaps that we could use a bit of sage,” I said. It meant that I would meet Adam in a place between our two estates, not at his home or mine.
She looked at me quietly, knowing that the hills could be full of poachers, although at nine it would still be light. “You’re certain, then?”
“Yes,” I said, with a deep sigh.
After Esther had gone, I reflected on one thing that Mrs. Climpson had told me. “A good servant anticipates the needs of the family she serves,” she had told me. “And that’s just as true of a barmaid. You must know who needs to be pushed outside into the bushes, who needs another ale, and who is about to need a good smack.”
Most of the servants did seem to know this of me. It was not unusual for me to walk into my study at an odd hour of the afternoon only to find a fire already burning, or to ask cook for a light dinner suitable for an upset stomach only to find that she’d already made me a healing broth.
But Esther was the only one who knew about Adam. Esther could see that loneliness and desire well up in me before I was even aware of it myself, and before I reached for the man whom I believed to be the perfect cure. It was easy for her to see when I was desperate, not only for the wild comfort of Adam’s body, but for one person who could provide counsel to me in my troubles.
15
At nine that evening, I met Adam near the top of one of the hills. There was a little hollow which was cut off from all sides, and the only sort of person one might meet was a person from my very own estate. And if one did meet such a person, then one would easily hear the footsteps from far off, unless it was very windy.
We had about an hour until sunset, and it was not windy. The sea air, from a distance, was beautiful. After a decade of living in the grand manor, I was finally able to appreciate what mainlanders and the dreaded English loved about the Isle of Skye. When I lived with Sean, I had hated how his body and mine reeked of sweat and salt. When I was living in my mother’s cabin, I was working hard to make sure that neither of my daughters went near the sea, scared that they would drown. But now, with a bit of distance, I was able to appreciate the beautiful sea air, the warm summer sun sinking down to kiss the wild waves.
By the time Adam reached me, I was calmer, though a bit surprised that it had taken him so long to find our spot. Perhaps he had been away so often lately that he had lost his sense of where the place was.
I scrambled up to greet him, drawing him to me for a kiss. “Oh Adam,” I sighed, “How I have missed you.”
His smile, I was surprised to note, was tenser than mine. “I thought we would not meet here, darling,” he said. “I already told you that I would come to your house next Thursday.”
“Yes, but I don’t know if you can come then,” I said, drawing in my breath and reaching for my lover’s hand. “A Mr. Bell has come to claim the estate.”
He stood up straight, as if he had been jabbed with a poker. “What? Someone taking the estate?”
I sighed, putting my hands about his stiff waist and resting my head on his shoulder. “Yes. And it seems legitimate. But that changes little.”
“It could change everything,” Adam objected, but he did not move as I held him close to me.
“I always knew that some relative or other of Gilbert’s would inherit,” I said absently, breathing in Adam’s smoky scent, which never failed to enthrall me.
And then I, the woman who could never forget a fact or figure, attempted to throw them all aside. “Let’s forget all about that for a moment,” I said. “It’s a tedious business, the estate, but it may give us a chance to start anew.”
My vague little allusion to marriage, even as my hands caressed his neck, did not seem to move the man.
“With you in mourning?” he said. “The timing would be abominable.”
Pressing closer to his chest, I tried to disagree. “I am not in mourning,” I murmured. “It has been two years, and I am quite free.”
“You are wearing this lavender dress,” he said, “Widow’s weeds.”
I pushed the skirts aside. “My position of wife could not keep me from you before,” I breathed, already unbuttoning his fall. “As a widow, I certainly cannot stay away from you now.”
He looked about him. “I must leave for home soon, Marion.”
This stopped me. “You do not wish it,” I said, with some shock. Adam had never in his life refused me, but I reflected that the horrors of the day might not have been kind to my beauty.
He sighed. “Of course I do, darling. But I just wanted you to know that I cannot stay until the stars are up. I shall have to go.”
I lowered myself onto his chest, touching his coarse hair with my fingers. “But not yet.”
“No,” he grunted, “Not just yet.”
The urgency added to the allure for me. Adam preferred the comfort of a bed, but I preferred the hills. With the little salty breeze whipping at my hair, which I had torn free when I threw off my bonnet, I felt wild. Adam’s clothes were still on him, and mine still on me, but long years of experience let me find him underneath my great skirts after I had undone his fall with cold fingers.
As I sat astride him, rising and falling on his great prick like a woman possessed, he clutched at my fingers, closing his eyes and grunting.
After a minute, I leaned close to his face, kissing him and telling him to open his eyes.
This was the moment I enjoyed almost more than the climax. Having him down, between my legs, completely in my power. The great wildness that coursed over me, forcing me to forget my time of grief, or the deep scars that years of childbearing had left on my body. He was hard within me, pulsating, and his hands were firm on back as he clutched me to him.
“Adam,” I whispered, ready to declare my love anew, to promise him the moon, to remind him that he was the most handsome man on God’s green earth.
Then he forced me onto my back. With short, heaving strokes that I knew well, he bumped his way around inside me, until he pulled away and finished himself in the grass, panting like a mad dog as he did so.
With a great sigh, I watched the back of him, closing my legs. For once, I wished that he would simply forget to be careful, and that he would clutch me to him as death overtook his features, instead of pushing me away as if I were nothing but a whore.
16
It had been years since I had enjoyed the pleasure of a man spending inside of me. With Gilbert, our less-than-nightly ritual had always been a chore of varying degrees of awkwardness, his seed inside of me always followed by an unspoken prayer that this time, perhaps, the result might be a son.
No, I had not known any pleasure of that sort for eighteen years. With Sean, it had been intense, all-encompassing. Even after the twins were born, and I was nearly mad with exhaustion and worry, I had not taken m
y mother’s advice. She had told me that I was not ready for more children, and that I should make sure that my husband knew it.
But my husband, when he was not drinking, or when he had imbibed less than he did on his worst nights, loved me with an eagerness that encompassed my whole being. I had no desire for more children, but my desire for my husband was so strong that I never even dreamed of refusing him.
It was best when he was fresh off the boat, before he’d had a chance to head over to the pub. Because in spite of his love for the wicked liquid that killed him, sometimes his desire for me was even greater.
One night he came home so covered in sweat that I wondered how he had possibly managed to get warm on a cold winter’s day. The babies were finally sleeping, but only because I had used up all of the blankets on the two of them, swaddled tightly together in their little crib.
I was shivering myself, but when I touched him I felt warmer. “How did you come to be so hot, then?” I asked him.
“Thinking of you,” he whispered.
I let him take my dress off, though I was shivering. “If thinking could get a body this warm, darling, I wouldn’t have any trouble here alone.”
He laughed, though I hushed him quickly because of our daughters. “I also ran from the docks. I couldn’t get back to you fast enough.”
He undressed himself, and threw me onto our sorry little mattress.
That night, it was a miracle the warm little babies didn’t wake. At first, I bit my fingers, trying to keep them warm, as my husband kissed me and spread my legs.
But soon, he was beginning to moan, saying such unspeakable things to me that I could not listen to them without both blushing and growing warmer.
By the time he had turned me onto my stomach, lifting my legs into the air as if I were a wheelbarrow and he the strong man tasked with holding me, I was not remotely quiet myself. In fact, I was nearly screaming with pleasure.
When Sean had first known me, he had once snuck into my family’s cottage when everyone else was at church – I had insisted that I was far too ill to go.
Well, that afternoon, when Sean held my body against the wall and fairly filled me up with both desire and children, he certainly made me ill. I was ill for a full nine months, in fact, though I was only married for about six of those.
In the shack, the walls were not strong enough to support my weight, so Sean, driven mad by my own desire, which was at its peak since my recovery from the girls’ birth, held me up in the air. I clutched at his shoulders, tightened my legs around his back, and grabbed at his hair for balance.
And when he spent inside me, it was as if in defiance of all the laws of nature. Most of it spilled out as I slipped off his sweaty body, and we both fairly crawled back to the little mattress, where I slept in his arms underneath both our cloaks.
Or rather, only my own cloak. I realized, at dawn, that my husband had taken his cloak with him when he went off to the pub. I had been so exhausted by our congress that I didn’t wake until the girls did. They were still warm, but they were hungry, and I hoped that my exhausted body had enough milk for both of them.
It was the first time my mother’s words had made any sense to me. “That’s a man who loves a bottle,” she had told me. “Marry him, you’ll be a widow to the drink, mark my words.”
Yes, my husband enjoyed a drink. Or many drinks. Still, he was young – we were both young, and I thought that he loved me much more. After all, when he got off the boat, he hadn’t gone straight for a drink. He had gone straight to me, hadn’t he?
With a start, I realized that there had been a great deal of truth in my mother’s words. Even when we had come together like two star-crossed lovers determined to pound themselves into oblivion, and so skilled at the act we probably looked like a pair of circus performers, it was not enough to keep the man home for more than a few hours.
Whereas the little bundles in the old crib were enough to keep me home constantly. It was as if I were tethered to the walls.
With a sigh, I removed one of my breasts, the nipple now hard from cold, not pleasure, and offered it to Frances. Flora, who was larger even as a baby, was temporarily soothed by my finger in her mouth, but she would soon need her turn.
17
With Adam, I had enjoyed nights of wild abandon. But they did not, in fact, contain a complete lack of caution. I always knew well that I had a reputation and three daughters to protect. Adam was no doubt aware that if we were found out, his own reputation would suffer, and that my having a child out of wedlock was quite unthinkable.
But that would all be different. After all, I was finally out of mourning, so marrying now would cause no great scandal. And it was the only way for me to secure a position for myself, and for my daughters. Perhaps, with the money that Adam had made from his investments, I could offer enough to get the farm out of Lord Bell’s clutches. After all, as every woman of business knows, anyone will sell anything if the price is set high enough. And if I could buy the estate from the new Lord Bell, Adam and I would certainly no longer have any need to stay in hiding, making do with short little trysts like this one.
After all, I knew that the gorgeous man would have stayed behind, if only he did not have family obligations taking him back to his own estate.
“Adam,” I said to my lover, as he cleaned himself with his handkerchief, getting his clothes straightened out and smoothing his coarse hair down before putting his hat back on.
“I need to be off in just a minute, my love,” he said absently, rubbing at something on his shoe.
I sighed with impatience. “Don’t you wish to hear about the new Lord Bell? It’s only the gossip of the whole village.”
“I can’t hear about the man who is keeping you from me,” he said, though whether he saw this as a serious transgression I could not quite be sure. He did not seem overly disturbed by the thought, only intent on lacing up his boots.
“If we married now, we might be able to hold the whole estate together. If we just bought it from him, Adam, we could live there ourselves.”
He frowned, looking down at his boots again, then fiddling with one of his pockets. “Yes, but we would not be able to purchase the whole thing.”
I sat a little straighter, suddenly wondering if I ought to have any worries for the money that I had been distributing freely for the better part of a year. “Adam, are your investments not profitable?”
He smiled, but his face was rather tense. “Profitable, yes. But if we do not invest in the profits, we will miss a great opportunity! Come, Marion, you know all about those costs.”
My sigh was so great that I imagined it sweeping down the hill, pressing down all of the grass on the way to the sea, then meeting the breaking waves on the beach. “I know, darling. But I’m disappointed, is all. If I do nothing, then I will lose my home.”
I wondered what all the years of striving had got me. A certain amount of money saved in the bank, that much was true, but now no amount of money would help me hold onto my title or my land. My daughters and I would be shot straight back out onto the dung heap, just a different part of it this time. I wondered why I had spent all those years with Gilbert, working harder than I had as a barmaid and begging my barren body for a son. And all that on top of many awkward nights with the man, in which he fumbled so much that I wondered whether I was uniquely cursed at making him a bumbling husband. In fact, the only thing that he truly seemed able to enjoy, the only way that he would give up his seed easily, was if my warm mouth and tongue surrounded him, flicking over his skin and making him thrash and grunt.
And that method, of course, brought us no closer to acquiring an heir.
No, I reflected that perhaps those years were wasted. Marriage was a curse when it was possible to lose nearly everything with a husband’s death. I had to find a better way to settle myself, and my family, so that we would not be prey to the vagaries of illness.
If only I could be with someone like Adam, someone who loved my body
and listened to all my troubles with a beautiful ear.
I turned, wishing that I could take that particular man in my arms and forget my worries.
But Adam had already kissed me on the head and walked away down the hill at a very good clip. As I had for many years, I would have to solve the problem myself.
18
The next day at breakfast, all of my daughters inquired eagerly about the new man.
“When will we get to meet him, mum?” asked Frances. “Has he traveled everywhere? Where did he come from?”
It was a wise enough question. Perhaps knowing a little bit more about the man would help me understand just how he had gotten himself into such perilous debt. Perhaps he was in a foreign country with lax standards, though I didn’t really think that it would be any sort of excuse.
“Do you think that he will wish to have tea with us?” asked Flora, fluttering her eyelashes. “Mama, you did say that you were going to take us shopping after we came out of half mourning. I’ve outgrown all my old things. I tell you, I have only three dresses.”
I was about to tell her that for most of her childhood, she’d had only one dress, or two if one took into account that she could swap dresses with Fran for a little bit of variety.
“Does he like riding, mum?” asked Grace, her voice the quietest of the bunch. “Because if he does, then maybe he won’t sell all the ponies.”
As usual, she had seen the point of everything, more so than her two elder sisters.
“Well,” I said, finishing my eggs, “It will be up to Lord Bell. I heard long ago from our attorneys that he was to inherit everything if he were ever found, and now he has been found.”
Frances nearly fell into her food. “So we will have to move away? Oh, mama,” she sighed, “We are to become exiles from our own home.”
