“You’d think Lenore wove them herself,” Lally laughed, but her slate-blue eyes were sad.
Then Mistress Watts came hurrying up the stairs with a white linsey-woolsey petticoat for Lenore, so that she might face the rigors of Oxford weather rather better. Lenore was glad she had bought a bright shawl for the kind landlady. “And a tidbit for Puss,” she added, handing Mistress Watts a small wrapped package containing salmon.
They all laughed at that, and Mistress Watts hastened to tell them that Puss expected Christmas presents “same as anyone,” and confided that she always spiked his Christmas milk with a bit of spirits.
“Should Puss get too drunk, Mistress Watts, let him stagger on his paws over to my lodgings,” Gilbert said. “I’ve a fondness for strays.” He was looking at Lenore as he said that, and she flashed him an angry look. He was standing beside the window looking very rakish in bronze silks, his weight supported on one foot as he lounged against the wall. As she met his sardonic gaze, he shifted his weight so that his other hip was thrust forward and a lean bronze silk thigh was thrown into high relief in the bright winter light reflected off the snow. His easy smile was knowing, and raked over her as if he had stripped her down to her chemise and already was tossing back her skirts. Before that cool, insolent look, remembrance flooded bitterly over Lenore, and she turned quickly away, to find Lally watching her with a penetrating gaze.
“Has Gilbert been bothering you lately?” Lally whispered.
“No, of course not,” Lenore lied with an innocent look. “Why should he?” Her shrug said: one rebuff should be enough.
“Oh, I don’t know—he’s very persistent and I just thought he might. Well, I must be going.”
“Don’t go, Lally,” urged Lenore. “Stay with us till time to dine—’twill not be long.”
“ Twill be very long,” corrected Lally. “I remember last year ’twas late at night before all was ready! We were near to starving before the goose was carved. The Great Tom bell had already tolled curfew, so we’d no choice but to stay the night sleeping on the floor in Mistress Watts’s common room!”
Last year ... so Lally had been with Ned a year, at ' least. Lenore had not known it had been so long.
“I'll be back.” Lally rose and pulled on her gloves. “Tonight is a festive occasion, and I mean to dress for it!”
What Lally meant became clear that evening when she made a sensational entrance on Gilbert’s arm. He was resplendent in honey-colored velvets frosted with Mechlin, and she was every bit as spectacular in a deep red velvet gown cut shockingly low. Her ash-blond hair was magnificently done, every hair swept up in place. From her soft kid gloves to the tips of her velvet pattens she was a fashion plate, and she bore in her arms great sprays of holly for Mistress Watts’s table decoration.
Lenore felt plain by comparison. She was wearing her usual russet wool, full-skirted, with a starched white linen collar and cuffs edged in point. For a moment she gazed wistfully at her flamboyant friend. And yet—she looked down at her dress; she remembered that Geoffrey had arranged with Mistress Watts to have this warm woolen dress made shortly after their arrival in Oxford and had surprised her by its early completion on the first bitter cold day. “Of russet wool to complement your hair,” he had said gravely as he presented it to her, but she had suspected him of choosing that color out of sentiment, because russet was the traditional color of country brides’ dresses.
She looked up again, from fingering the russet material. Lally might be garbed in rich velvets, but her slate-blue eyes were unhappy, and the fashionably dressed man on her arm was not her lover. While she. . . ! Lenore gave Geoffrey a soft look. He was everything to her—and she to him.
Christmas dinner was a happy occasion, marred for Lenore only by Gilbert’s presence. Although several times before dinner he had tried to corner her, she had managed to avoid him. True to Lally’s prediction, the sun had waned before the meal was served, but Mistress Watts had been reckless in her use of tapers, and the beamed low-ceilinged common room downstairs blazed with light. Wide-lopped polished boots scuffed over the clean-scoured stone floor and masculine voices made a low hum, for with the exception of Lenore and Lally, Mistress Watts’s guests were exclusively male.
At one side of the room a Yule log burned brightly on a great hearth with an iron crane above it from which hung a great iron pot. The aproned cook was tasting the oyster stew from this pot with a long-handled iron spoon, and the goose was being turned on a spit by Jack, the stableboy. The warm hearth emitted a mouth-watering aroma. Potatoes were baking in their jackets in the ashes at the edge of the roaring fire and pitchers of cider sat in the deep windowsills waiting to be poured into pewter tankards.
Gwynneth, aided by her younger sister Dora, who had been hired for the occasion, were arranging pewter knives and trenchers and tankards and linen napkins atop the improvised “dining table.” This was a number of long boards supported by carpenters’ “horses” and covered with an assortment of odd-sized linen tablecloths—for Mistress Watts’s linen chest was inadequate for the entertainment of so many guests. The holly Lally had brought had been arranged into three handsome centerpieces spiked with candles and spaced down the long board. And although some of the students’ cuffs were frayed and their boot soles worn almost through, Lenore thought she had never seen so glittering a company.
She was seated between Geoffrey and red-coated Michael (who had vied with Lewis in a friendly scuffle to sit beside her) and directly across the table from Lally— and unfortunately across from Gilbert also, for he was squiring Lally this evening.
The steaming oyster stew—served in wooden bowls and eaten with pewter spoons—was rapidly consumed, for by now the guests were ravenous. Then the Christmas goose was brought to table on a huge pewter charger and received a cheer from the company. Lenore smiled as she watched an elderly admirer of Mistress Watts carve the goose with obvious trepidation. He lived across the street, and had gallantly contributed the chestnut and oyster stuffing.
Seeing her suitor was nervous at carving before so many guests, Mistress Watts attracted their attention by saying loudly, “I’ve a rare sight for you, a trick I’ve taught Puss here.” She ordered Gwynneth to bring up a low stool and place it beside her, and the big white cat obediently jumped atop it, his head and half his body now showing above the table. “I’ve trained Puss to eat at table,” Mistress Watts announced in an important voice. “See? He’ll eat every course, won’t you, Puss?”
A round of exuberant applause greeted Puss’s quick demolishing of a small bowl of oyster stew, but the noise frightened the cat, who jumped down from the stool and sought an empty windowsill where he licked his paws and gazed balefully at the company.
But Mistress Watts’s elderly suitor gave her a grateful look for diverting attention from his clumsy efforts at carving and her kindly eyes twinkled back at him.
As the goose was served, Lenore leaned forward to speak to Lally, and saw that Lally was staring somberly down at her hands, her fair head bent a little and reflecting the candlelight, while Gilbert argued with the student on his left.
Sensing Lenore’s compassionate gaze upon her, Lally looked up and her slate-blue eyes hardened. “You have a muff for each hand,” she said bitterly. “While I—!” She broke off, but Lenore knew it was not muffs Lally was talking about.
Except for one or two bad moments when Gilbert looked across the table at her with unadulterated lust in his gaze, Lenore found herself enjoying the occasion. Geoffrey was at her side and witty remarks flew back and forth as the guests stuffed themselves. The servants ran about, flush-faced and bright—they’d been nipping at Mistress Watts’s French brandy in the pantry. That brandy had been smuggled into Oxford up the Thames and so had arrived duty free. Lenore was glad the servants were having a good time of it, even if the service was careless— glad, too, that she’d remembered to buy them baskets of red apples for Christmas.
The meal progressed. The goose and pease and ho
t baked potatoes, bursting in their brown jackets, were consumed along with a large amount of cider. Then the stable-boy proudly brought forward the great plum pudding, flaming on Mistress Watts’s treasured silver tray. They ate it with a thick wine sauce, drank wine and brandy, and uproariously toasted each other’s health—and as they grew drunker and more reckless, the King’s. Lally matched the gentlemen, glass for glass. Lenore watched her anxiously, for Lally in her daring red gown was too merry tonight, her forced laughter too shrill. Gilbert, too, was watching Lally with heavy-lidded eyes, watching her flushed face and the strand of ash-blond hair that had come loose from her intricate hairdo and which she irritably pushed back to lift her glass again and stridently toast “All of Royal England!”
Gilbert drank with the rest and looked across the table. “Took ye the white horse on your journey this time, Geoffrey?” he asked carelessly. But before Geoffrey could answer, he added “Nay, I suppose not—a white horse shines like a beacon in the darkness, but a bay horse slides into the shadows well.”
“What are ye saying, Gil?” Geoffrey’s voice was lazy, but a pair of cold gray eyes challenged his cousin.
Gilbert shrugged. “Only that mayhap the bay does keep ye safer from . . . highwaymen.” He emphasized the word and laughed discordantly; Lenore could see that he was getting very drunk.
Geoffrey studied his cousin, obviously making allowance for Gilbert’s drunken state. “I’ve managed to hold my own with the gentlemen of the road thus far,” he said in a level tone. “Perhaps my luck will hold a bit longer.”
“Aye, ’tis luck we all need.” Gilbert’s gaze played mockingly over Lenore, and she flushed and turned pointedly away. He shrugged and turned back to Lally. When Michael said something that turned her attention that way again she saw that Gilbert’s drunken gaze was bent fixedly on Lally’s heaving red velvet bodice. Lenore—though relieved at this respite from Gilbert’s unwelcome attentions —could not help feeling angry with Ned. His Marston lady had expected him to spend Christmas Day with her, of course, but—his lonely daughter of the regiment needed him as well, and her heart might well break because of him.
When, after dinner, Gilbert and Lally slipped away early, Lally weaving on her feet and being supported by Gilbert, whose condition was almost as bad, Lenore’s shoulders jerked spasmodically, and she made a convulsive gesture as if to stop them.
“ Tis not our affair,” Geoffrey murmured in her ear, seeing the direction of her lowering glance. “Each must make his own bed, Lenore, though sometimes ’tis thorny sleeping in it.”
“But—can’t she see him for what he is? Corrupt?”
“Women have always forgiven Gil his corruption,” Geoffrey sighed. “He has a pretty face.”
“I do not find him pretty,” snapped Lenore.
Geoffrey laughed. “Then you’re in the minority.”
“I just don’t want to see Lally hurt,” she sulked.
“Nor do I. But Lally’s a grown woman—yes, and a worldly one. She’d not appreciate your clucking over her like a mother hen.”
Around them now the wine was being poured by unsteady hands, spilling over pewter tankards, drenching lace cuffs and splashing onto the clean-scoured floor as the young bloods clashed their tankards together and roared out forbidden Christmas carols. The very walls rocked with “God Rest Ye Merrie Gentlemen” until Mistress Watts’s eyes rolled in her head in fright as she sought vainly to quiet the singers. Lenore was hard put to avoid several roguish youths who sought to kiss her beneath the mistletoe Mistress Watts had hung from the beams to snare the attentions of her elderly admirer.
When the guests had all departed—three of them were so drunk they had to be carted awkwardly through the snow to their lodgings in wheelbarrows, to Mistress Watts’s distress (she muttered that the neighbors “would think she was running a bawdy house”), and Lenore was once more alone in her upstairs lodgings with Geoffrey, he went over to stir up the fire and Lenore came up behind him and wrapped her arms about him.
“Our first Christmas together, Geoffrey,” she said in a soft voice.
He put down the poker and turned about, taking her shoulders in gentle hands. “Pray God the rest will be better ones,” he said huskily. “And celebrated in a home of our own.”
“Oh, do not say that!” She hugged him. “For a finer Christmas I have never known!”
“God’s grace sent you to me, Lenore,” he said simply, his lips brushing her bright hair which she had loosed to cascade down about her shoulders. “For surely I do not deserve you.”
For the moment Lenore had forgotten Gilbert, and her laughter brimmed with confidence. Roguishly she cuffed his face. “Deserve me? Certainly you don’t deserve me, but I’m a foolish woman and I love you as you are!”
“Come to bed and prove it!” His white teeth glinted in a wide smile and he pushed down the neck of her chemise and pressed a warm kiss into the gleaming whiteness of her bared shoulder.
“Look, Geoffrey, it’s snowing again,” she murmured as he carried her to the big square bed. “The town will soon look like a wedding cake!”
For a moment she felt his muscles stiffen, and she rushed on to say something else. Marriage was a subject they avoided now, as if it were treacherous ground where they must never tread. Once they were abed and fondling, her foolish remark was forgotten as their love flamed on this cold, unforgettable Christmas night
CHAPTER 14
During the Twelve Days of Christmas, winter tightened its icy grip on Oxford. All Christmas week Geoffrey did not leave her side and with Geoffrey home, Gilbert prudently avoided Lenore—for he had a healthy respect for Geoffrey’s sword arm. She saw him once, when Geoffrey took her skating on the frozen Thames. He was skating arm in arm with Lally, and they made a handsome couple, scarves flying, their breath frosting the. air and their noses red with cold. Seeing them together sobered Lenore because she knew that room had been made for Ned at Marston and he would be staying there till Twelfth Night, which left Lally to spend the holidays alone. Lenore knew she should have been grateful Ned was at Marston, for Gilbert’s new fascination with Lally gave her a respite, but she could not help feeling sorry for her friend, whose sad face haunted her.
Lenore loved the icy crystal weather and Geoffrey affixed her pattens and together they explored the old walled city afoot. She found it to be a long narrow town built upon a gravel bank, with a crossroads at the center. The Roman roads had passed Oxford by, a wind-whipped pink-cheeked scholar told them pleasantly when they stopped to rest in the shelter of an ivied wall—the Romans, from bitter past experience, mistrusted roads built on swamps.
Happy to be with Geoffrey on these walks, Lenore hurried along beside him, laughing at the cold, for she was muffled to the ears. Scrambled about her among the twisting streets were the big buildings of the university. But commerce as well as learning were important here, Geoffrey told her, for as soon as the ice broke, barges would ply up and down the Thames, carrying wool downriver from the Cotswolds for the looms of Oxford, and wines upriver to the old walled city from France—and sometimes, for the militant, arms. At taverns where they stopped to warm themselves on bitter days, they shared tankards of hot buttered rum and sometimes beef or mutton pies.
During the whole of that enchanted Christmas week they were gloriously happy.
Early in January, Geoffrey rode out. He would be gone a fortnight, he told her. He was not. He returned three nights later and limped up the stairs leaving a bloody trail. Lenore, who’d been prudently staying downstairs with Mistress Watts on the grounds of an indisposition—actually to avoid Gilbert in case he tried to pay her a call, heard the outer door open, heard limping footsteps ascending the stairs, seized a lighted candle and ran up after him in time to open the door to their rooms as he sagged against it.
“What happened?” she cried, frightened at the sight of his white face.
“I’ve been shot,” he said grimly. “ ’Tis only a leg wound, but it opened as I dismounted, a
nd I fear that my blood stains the snow outside. ’Twill cause questions. Would you go down and scrape up the bloodstains from the snow and wipe them from the stairs, Lenore? And stable my horse?”
“But your wound—!” gasped Lenore. She set the candle on the table and ran to help him to a chair.
“Go now.” Geoffrey waved her away. "‘Now, Lenore!” He staggered to the table and leaned heavily upon it for support.
Lenore hurried away to do his bidding, but from the landing she heard a heavy thud and rushed back to find he had slid to the floor unconscious.
Lenore had had practice binding up Meg’s wounds when Tom Prattle had come home drunk and beaten her. Now she moved quickly and with dispatch. She brought Geoffrey to, weak from loss of blood. She removed and tossed aside the bloody scarf that bound his wound. Somehow she got his boot off and with water from the pitcher she washed the wound, bound and stanched it efficiently with clean linen napkins. Once that task was done she slipped down the stairs and out into the frozen moonlight and quickly removed all evidence of blood from the snow—and from the stairs. After that, she stabled and fed the bay horse.
When she came back in and closed the outside door, Mistress Watts had wakened and stuck her head out. “Is anything the matter, Mistress Daunt?” she inquired sleepily.
“Nothing at all,” lied Lenore in an easy voice. “Geoffrey is back, so I’ll spend the rest of the night upstairs.”
“Back so soon? That’s good.” Mistress Watts yawned. “No, don’t come out, Puss—I can’t be chasing you!” Hastily she pushed back a furry white paw and closed the door, and Lenore fled up the stairs to Geoffrey.
He had got himself over to the bed when she got back. He was lying fully clothed and exhausted across it, his wounded leg stretched out and his other booted one dangling over the edge of the bed. Lenore pulled that boot off, too, slid a pillow under his head, threw the coverlets over him, and wrapped a warm brick for his feet.
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