“Ye’re a good nurse,” he gasped, beads of sweat frosting his forehead as he moved his injured leg to a more comfortable position. “One would think ye’d been battle-trained, Lenore.”
She glowed with pride, held up his dark head and poured some brandy down his throat, took the glass and then sat down on the bed beside him, smoothed back his dark wavy hair and asked him how he’d come to be shot.
’Twas cursed bad luck, he told her. A friend of his father’s had recognized him at an inn and—glad to see him—had blurted out his name in greeting. Twas too well-known a Royalist name not to cause remark. And his way out of the town had been barred by soldiers, hastily summoned by the Puritan innkeeper. He’d fought his way through—Lenore shuddered to hear—and lost them on well-trampled roads. None had followed him here, he was sure of it.
Lenore held that well-loved head to her breast and thanked God he had made it home to her.
All January Geoffrey convalesced, passing off his condition as a distemper of the lungs. Since Oxford was filled with distempers of the lungs at this season, his story was readily accepted. Lenore was glad to have him with her, but their funds were running perilously low. Mistress Watts did not press them for the rent, and once without Geoffrey’s knowledge, Lenore even borrowed a small sum from Michael, who came over shivering, with his red cloak clutched around him and two woolen scarfs wrapped around his neck. Oxford had the worst weather in the world, he assured Lenore gloomily—July and August were the only frost-free months this miserable town had. There’d once even been a snowstorm right in the middle of summer term, and he for one found it unbearable! He had no plans to spend another winter here, but would return to his home near Coventry in June.
Lenore had to laugh at so much gloom, but even she found the weather irksome. Winter had indeed closed down on Oxford town. January was a gray month with fall after fall of snow. Snow perpetually covered the city wall with its high walk for sentries and its bastion. Snow drifted down on ivied towers and warrens of medieval cottages, on shops and stables and taverns, iced the streets and made work shoveling for day laborers with red noses and patched clothes. Snow almost closed the cobbled alley called Magpie Lane, where in better weather footfalls echoed after dark, and hampered the efforts of young Mistress Daunt to get some exercise by walking about the city with Lally. Fast sleighs glided past them over the hard-packed snowy streets and sleigh bells tinkled in the frosty air. The Thames stayed hard-frozen—the Oxford students called these lovely upper reaches of the river, romantically, the “Isis”—a river goddess. Lenore would have gone skating there with Lally, but Geoffrey objected, lest she fall on the ice. Lenore gave him an impatient look—she was a good skater. The sound of sleigh bells, reaching them from Magpie Lane, made her yearn to ride out on Snowfire over the hard-packed snow, but Geoffrey sharply forbade that, lest it bring on a miscarriage. Lenore fretted at that, but she arranged with Lally to exercise Snowfire, and spent long hours petting and currying Snow-fire in Mistress Watts’s warm stable—and giving attention to the bay, too, who had brought Geoffrey home to her through the blizzard. The stable boy was fond of the bay, and exercised him for her, but he was afraid of prancing Snowfire, who had once inadvertently kicked him.
For Lenore this time of Geoffrey’s recuperation was like a truce in a battle. Time seemed to hang suspended for her. Geoffrey’s constant presence was a bastion against Gilbert—although as the month wore on and her pregnancy became more apparent, Gilbert gave her an angry, sulky look when he passed her trudging down the High Street with Lally. He seemed to take her pregnancy as a personal affront, for he pointedly eyed her stomach and after that brief encounter almost ceased to notice her altogether. Lenore had the uneasy feeling his attentiveness would return once the baby was born, and she was slender again, but that was a long time away, and she refused to think about it—their circumstances might be much changed by then.
Lally was amused by Gilbert’s sullen manner. “Don’t mind him,” she blithely counseled Lenore. “Gilbert hates women who are increasing—can’t stand the bulge. Last year he sent poor Millie Tippert away to the country to have hers, said he couldn’t bear to look at her ungainly form—and he was the father!”
Lenore shuddered. “Where is she now?”
“She died in childbirth. There was a terrible storm, the farmhouse where she was staying was on the river-bank, and with the flooding it became an island—the midwife couldn’t get through and the farmer’s wife got hysterical, didn’t know what to do. It must have been awful.”
“I don’t see how anybody could even speak to Gilbert after that!” cried Lenore. “It was all his fault!”
“Of course.” A cynical smile curved Lally’s mouth. “But Millie had her revenge posthumously. She was lonely in the farmhouse and she felt cut off, so the night before she died she sat down and wrote a long letter to Gilbert’s mother complaining about the way Gilbert had treated her. The farmer saw that it was delivered, too—he’d felt sorry for Millie. Gilbert’s mother read it and flew into a passion—Gilbert said she was positively livid with rage— he was supposed to come home, but she refused to let him—said he could jolly well stay in Oxford for another two years until he’d learned how to behave! That’s why he spent Christmas here—he can’t go home until she decides to forgive him.”
“I hope that’s never!” said Lenore with vicious emphasis, although in truth she’d have been glad to see Gilbert through the city gates at any time.
“It wasn’t because of what he did to Millie.” Lally gave her an amused look. “It was because of what she was. Millie was a laundress, and Gilbert’s mother couldn’t abide his taking up with a low-class doxie!” Her laughter pealed.
Lenore was appalled. She gave Lally an uncertain look, but Lally shook her head ruefully. “You’re very innocent of the ways of the world, Lenore. Perhaps that’s what Geoffrey saw in you—oh, I didn’t mean that,” she added hastily, for Lenore had broken stride and stiffened. Lenore relaxed. Lally was, after all, her friend. But she knew it would be even harder for her to be civil to Gilbert after this.
They stopped at a coffee house for warmth and refreshment. It was forward of them to come in unattended, but Lally knew the proprietor’s wife, who promptly whisked them back to a small private room where they enjoyed steaming coffee and little wheaten cakes. The proprietor’s wife bustled away, leaving them sitting companionably at a small wooden table, beside them a window with small leaded panes that gave onto a stable with icicles dripping from the thatched roof.
Lally was watching her brightly, and Lenore cast about for a way to break the awkwardness that had arisen between them over the story of Millie. She could scarce say she had another reason, as well, for hating Gilbert! Her hand passed nervously over her white collar, smoothing it, and brushed a lump half-concealed by her bodice —she had her subject: eagle-stones!
This morning Mistress Watts seemingly had at last discerned that Lenore was pregnant. She had been remarkably slow to discover it—Lenore suspected her landlady guessed they were not married and thought Lenore might not wish to admit she was bearing Geoffrey’s child. But this morning Mistress Watts had hurried upstairs with a silk bag of eagle-stones, which her wealthy cousin in Bath had brought home from abroad. This, she told Lenore importantly, her scanty curls bobbing for emphasis, was a very efficacious charm which had helped her cousin in Bath through two difficult pregnancies. The silk bag must be worn on a ribbon around Lenore’s neck until two or three weeks before the baby was born—just to make sure all went well at the birth.
Lenore had accepted this well-meant gift with grave thanks, threaded a ribbon through the eyelets of the silk bag and put it around her neck immediately. She was uncertain as to the efficacy of charms, but one could not afford to take chances. Charms were popular with pregnant women. Women in the Cotswolds wore them, too— Meg had worn several supposed to give her an easy delivery, but whether they had helped her was debatable, for she had miscarried all the same.
Lally, stirring her coffee, stared at them with a kind of fascination; then she shuddered and turned away. “Eagle-stones did not help me,” She said shortly. “My baby died. In Stratford, the day he was born.”
Lenore’s violet eyes widened. She had not known Lally had gone so far with her Kevin. ... It helped explain why Lally’s strait-laced relatives had been unwilling to take her in after her father died.
“That surprises you, doesn’t it?” challenged Lally grimly, swinging about to face Lenore. “You’ve wondered about Ned and me. The baby was Kevin’s, but ’twas Ned saw me through it—though it ended badly all the same.”
“No—I never wondered,” said Lenore, hastily taking a swallow of near-scalding coffee.
“Of course you did. Everybody does. They can’t understand why I stay with him, filling in the time until he marries. But—” she bit her lip and frowned. “I wanted you to understand, Lenore.”
“You’re very good to Ned,” Lenore said soberly. “I’ve often felt he should wed you instead of some ninny in Marston.”
“Ned likes small pretty brunette women,” Lally informed her in a brittle, hopeless voice. “Not long, stringy ones like me. And her name is Lavinia.”
Lenore felt called upon to protest. “I don’t even like the name Lavinia,” she said hotly. “And you have the carriage of a queen, Lally. Geoffrey often comments on your spirited walk.”
Lally laughed bitterly. “But not on my pretty face, I’ll wager.” She looked out the window at the hanging icicles. “ ’Tis unsettling, but I’ve grown fond of Ned these past months we’ve been together. When he marries—God’s teeth. I’ll miss him!” Her voice roughened.
Lenore gave her a sympathetic look. She had a very good idea of what blond, fashionable Lally was going through.
“Perhaps Ned will change his mind,” she suggested hopefully.
Lally’s harsh laugh stung her. “Not till after he’s wed Lavinia and bedded her,” she said bitterly. “Then when the thrill of the chase is gone, he may miss me—he may want someone to talk to. But I’ll be gone, for I won’t be able to sit by and wait in hopes he’ll come back to me for an hour, a night....”
“Where . . . will you go?” Lenore wondered.
“I’ll find a new protector, as I once told you I would,” Lally replied in a determined, hard voice.
Gilbert, thought Lenore with a pang. That caramel head was often bent over Lally’s fair one these days. “I wish spring would come,” she sighed.
“Ned will marry Lavinia in the spring,” Lally reminded her, studying her hands.
“I’m sorry,” said Lenore in a contrite voice. “It’s just that I hate being cooped up indoors so much, and I suppose I’m impatient to hold my baby in my arms—” she stopped lamely, for Lally’s face had twisted for a moment
“It’s all right,” Lally told her softly, pressing a hand down over Lenore’s on the table. “It hurt terribly at the time but—I’m over it now.”
Lenore suspected no one ever got over it.
This conversation with Lally made Lenore all the more conscious of what she had—a strong man’s arms to comfort her, a strong man to love her—and his baby on the way. Geoffrey mended fast, and at night their bodies responded vibrantly to each other in a perfect union. By day they found it easy to laugh off the gloom of others who found the continued cold depressing.
It was only lack of money that plagued them.
The next time she trudged with Lally through the snow, they met Gilbert coming out of an alehouse. He made them both a sweeping bow, but his smile was for Lally. “If you make a leg so handsomely in this weather,” Lally cautioned him lightheartedly, “you are apt to land on your backside in the snow!”
“You and Mistress Lenore seem to keep your footing,” was Gilbert’s cynical rejoinder. He was looking at Lally’s muff—which was the one he had given Lenore for Christmas and which she had promptly presented to Lally on the pretext that “after all, you’re exercising Snowfire for me.” His lazy gaze passed over Lenore’s plum velvet hat and muff—Geoffrey’s Christmas gift—and his voice held an edge of spite. “I see from Mistress Lenore’s fine clothes that Geoffrey must have found a way to live without working—certainly his father is not supporting him, has refused to see him, in fact. I heard through an aunt that Geoffrey traveled a great distance to see his father but was turned away at the door.”
Lenore flushed and bit her lip. “Your aunt must have been misinformed,” she said icily.
Gilbert’s laugh was a trifle unpleasant. “You’ve no need to worry, Mistress Lenore,” he told her smoothly. “Geoffrey’s tough—he’ll be back on the road soon enough. He’s never let a wound hold him back for long,” he added on a taunting note.
Lenore cared little that Gilbert was implying Geoffrey was a highwayman, for she doubted he could prove it— but it frightened her that Gilbert had guessed Geoffrey was wounded. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said carelessly, her hands gripping inside her velvet muff. “Geoffrey has an indisposition of the lungs—not a wound!”
Lally gave Gilbert an angry look. “ ’Tis too cold to stand here talking nonsense,” she said crisply. “We bid you good day, Gilbert.”
When she returned home, Lenore taxed Geoffrey with it. She did not look at him as she pulled off her gloves and spread out her cloak before the fire. “Gilbert believes you’ve turned highwayman.” When he said nothing she turned and faced him. “Tell me how you were wounded, Geoffrey—the truth.”
“It was as I told you,” said Geoffrey. “Be damned to Gilbert!”
She studied his face, that dark, loved face with the steady gray eyes. They were looking at her now, with tenderness. She sank down on a chair. “Oh, Geoffrey,” she said in a hopeless voice. “What are we to do? We have no money, no—”
“Come here, Lenore.” Very tenderly he enfolded her in his arms. “My leg is almost mended. Trust me. I will find a way for us.”
He would need to, she thought sadly. Their situation was fast growing desperate.
In February rain fell soddenly and melted the snow and everyone—Town and Gown alike—caught cold. Candlemas was marked more by deep slush than revelry, and the city of towers became a dismal place of stuffy noses and hacking coughs and gloomy, wet, cobbled streets. On winter mornings vapor rose all around the city from the numerous rivulets about the river.
Geoffrey, up and mended, was now gone most of the time. He told her once gravely that he was trying to arrange a “living” for them. She wondered what he meant, and surmised he might be trying to arrange through relatives for a pardon and perhaps to borrow enough money to buy a commission in the army, for soldiering was the only trade he knew.
That he was unsuccessful in these attempts was apparent, for he came home through the gray winter mists looking grim and had little to say about where he had been or what he’d been doing. But he brought with him little trickles of money, enough to keep them alive, and now as she grew big with child, she was grateful. For with the baby coming, she no longer felt capable of riding the boggy winter roads and shivering through the nights in caverns and barns and chance hovels.
Now that her advancing pregnancy had—happily— made her repugnant to Gilbert, Lenore had lost her fear that he might try to repeat his performance of just before Christmas. She hated the sight of him and gave thanks that he no longer frequented her lodgings.
In the meager rooms, off Magpie Lane, young Mistress Daunt held uneasy court, for she was always edgy these days, feeling that Geoffrey was off somewhere taking some great chance and instead of riding home might be brought back to her in a cart—for burial.
Michael was her most frequent visitor, for with her advancing pregnancy, the rash young men who had written her love sonnets drifted away to woo likely tavern maids, and Lenore, save
for her visits from Lally and occasional dinners with Lally and Ned, on those infrequent occasions when he was not at Marston, was much alone. She spent long hours practicing her penmanship under Michael’s guidance until even Geoffrey admitted her much improved, and she read borrowed books until her candle guttered out.
'It was a pleasant respite from the miserable weather when Michael would come swinging over in the afternoon in his red cloak, bringing with him a bottle of wine and sweetmeats sent from his ancestral manor south of Coventry. He seemed bent on entertaining her, and would regale her by the hour with stories of bloody riots between Town and Gown which had been erupting since medieval times. Lenore didn’t know whether to believe him or not when he told her that on one occasion hooded country folk had swarmed into Oxford bearing a black flag, killed sixty students, and scalped some of the chaplains. It was not, he conceded, chewing thoughtfully on a sweetmeat, the university’s finest hour.
Sometimes Mistress Watts joined them, trudging upstairs with the big white cat purring in her arms, to tell them with sparkling eyes and a tremor in her voice of the wild days during the reign of Charles I when university courts had banished lewd women and arrested night-walking citizens. She recalled how Charles had made Oxford his headquarters during England’s Civil War. Why, the town had been like a garrison, with New College turned into a magazine, and All Souls into an arsenal, New Inn Hall a mint, and the King himself at Christ Church, where the main quadrangle was turned into a cattle pen! How the town had rallied to his cause, then, with undergraduates throwing up great earthworks! Things were different now, she sighed. Lenore understood her longing to speak of these things, for they were memories of the days of her youth.
But being indoor so much chafed Lenore.
This Towering Passion Page 21
