“And you left her for that? Because she was not rich?” mumbled Lenore.
“Nay, I’d not have left her for that. Twas not Letiche’s fault that her mother told lies, or that I hoodwinked them. Letiche berated me, ’tis true, but ... I deserved it. I know not what would have happened had not her mother snatched her from the house and left me with the debts we’d incurred in our brief marriage. I left within the week, and I’ve neither seen Letiche nor heard from her since. I’m sure the d’Avignys pray daily for word of my death to reach them so Letiche can marry again and bring them the fortune they seek.”
“She’s—pretty?” This had been plaguing her, but the words came out with an effort.
“Letiche is small and dark and has a round face and a bubbly laugh. Some would not call her pretty, but she has a certain comeliness.”
Like Ned’s Lavinia, thought Lenore. Small, dark, bubbly. Not pretty like Lavinia, perhaps . . . but his wife. Lenore kept her head bowed as she thought about that. “Have you ever written to her, Geoffrey?”
“No.” His answer was emphatic. “Nor do I think she’d relish hearing from me. Lenore, you must know I consider you my wife—and you would be my legal wife, could I but arrange it. And I will guard you and the child you bear me as tenderly as if the words had been spoken over us in some vast cathedral.”
“Oh, Geoffrey, I’m so ashamed that I doubted you!” Blinded by tears, she flung herself into his arms. “What more could I ask than that?”
“A great deal more,” he said, holding her close, gently caressing her golden hair. “And I would that I could give it to you, Lenore.”
“ Tis only that I’m so tired of waiting to have the baby,” she sighed. “It makes me irritable, it makes me say things I do not mean.”
Geoffrey’s arms tightened warmly about her. “Someday,” he promised, “things will straighten out for us, Lenore. I’ve not led much of a life, but once our child is born”—his voice grew rich, telling her how much this baby meant to him— “I promise we’ll mend our affairs. There are places where such as we can make a new start . . . The Daunts of Williamsburg, how does that sound to you?”
“The Colonies? Then you meant what you said about going there? Twas not just idle talk to cheer me?”
“ Twas not idle talk. I’ve been scheming to arrange it. So far all has fallen through, but next week there’s a man —a planter, Lenore, who’s visiting relatives just three days’ ride from here. Tis said he’s in England looking for an overseer for his Virginia plantations and will pay a good price for the right man. He cares not for politics, but if I impress him well, he could arrange our passage.”
Williamsburg ... far from Letiche, far from France, far from the iron grip of the Lord Protector. “Williamsburg,” she murmured, nestling into his arms.
“What troubles me,” he admitted, “is that this is the last week of May. Next week will be June. The baby could come while I’m away, but—’tis my only chance to see this man, Lenore. He stays with his relatives but a week.”
“I'll be all right,” said Lenore staunchly. “Lally will come and stay with me. I’ll send her word after you’ve gone.”
He nodded, and held her in his arms for a long time. “You’re so brave,” he murmured half to himself. “If aught should happen to you ...”
“Nothing will happen to me, Geoffrey,” she insisted. When Geoffrey rode off, Lenore sent a note to Lally at Gilbert’s lodgings.
And received word that Lally had left Gilbert, left Oxford. She had taken only her clothes and her meager jewels. No one knew where she had gone.
To Lenore it was a crushing blow. Lally gone . . . she had counted on having Lally around when her baby was born . . . she had gone without even saying goodbye. Gilbert must have done something awful to her to make her leave abruptly like that.
Now, for the first time, Lenore felt not merely gloomy, but frightened.
I will not have the baby until Geoffrey gets back, she promised herself nervously. I will barely move around. I will sit very still and eat little and drink little, and Geoffrey will come back and I will have someone to cling to when the pains come.
At other times she cursed herself roundly for a coward and deliberately got up and walked about, ate heartily, and told herself that she could do it all alone if necessary.
As it happened, she very nearly did.
She was sitting on a chair by the window, looking out at the rain pattering down from a gray sky, when she saw Michael in his red cloak swinging up the wet street. She sighed. She did not feel at all well, she did not feel like hearing horror stories of terrible times between Town and Gown, nor did she wish to practice her penmanship, which she was sure he would suggest, even though she had grown very passable at it by dogged effort and Michael had even bragged of her progress to Geoffrey. Moving cumbersomely, she went out onto the landing to call down to Mistress Watts that she was unwell today and was not receiving visitors.
Always alert for a meal, the white cat, who had been attentively crouching at a mousehole in the upstairs hall, turned to look at Lenore. The mouse saw its chance and ran out almost under Lenore’s feet. She jumped aside with a little cry and collided with Puss, streaking forward intent on the chase.
Trying to dodge the running cat cost Lenore her balance. Her foot caught in the hem of her skirt as she teetered on the top step. She tried vainly to grasp the newel post as her weight, heavy to the front due to her pregnancy, toppled her. With a wild scream she tumbled down the stairs, arriving at the foot just as Michael opened the door.
His face turned white at the sight of her lying there in a crumpled heap, and Mistress Watts, who had heard Lenore scream, came running out. “What have you done to Mistress Daunt?” she cried fiercely.
Michael was taken aback. He gave Mistress Watts a wounded look. “I’ve done nothing to her. I was coming to call, and when I opened the door she was falling down the stairs.” Anxiously he bent over Lenore. “Is she dead, do you think?” he asked fearfully, studying her unconscious form, afraid to touch her.
“Nay, ’tis her time has come, that’s all. Let us hope she has broken no bones in her fall. There, you see, she’s coming around now”—this as Lenore moved and groaned and opened her eyes—“can you get her upstairs by yourself, or shall I call the stable boy?”
“I can—do it—myself.” Panting with effort, for he was not very strong, chunky Michael managed to pick up Lenore and stagger up the stairs with her in his arms. There, under Mistress Watts’s clucking supervision, he laid her very carefully on the bed.
“Thank you, Michael,” said Lenore weakly. She gasped as a sharp pain went through her.
“Don’t talk,” said Mistress Watts crisply. She adjusted the coverlet. “I’ll send for Mistress Rue, the midwife.”
“I’ll go for her—’twill be quicker.” Michael was obsessed with a need for action. He darted away.
“On Mount Street,” Mistress Watts called after him.
Michael, just rushing out the front door, called back something unintelligible and kept going. But he had misheard. He hurried to Blount Street through a heavy shower that soaked him through and searched for Mistress Rue in vain. In rising panic, he blundered about the wet streets and finally ran back over the slippery cobbles to announce in an almost tearful voice that he could not find her. But Mistress Rue was already there, for Lenore’s shrewd landlady had seen the state of upheaval Michael was in and had prudently sent her stable boy running to Mistress Rue’s.
“ Tis all right, all right,” she assured Michael, for she was quite pleased with herself that Mistress Rue had arrived so speedily.
“You mean she’s here?” he asked incredulously, wondering how this miracle had come to pass.
“Indeed she is,” Mistress Watts smiled as Michael slumped down exhausted. “Mister Daunt favored a doctor, you know. ’Twas I persuaded Mistress Daunt to insist on a midwife.” In this she had been assisted by Lenore’s experiences in Twainmere. “Midwives assisted at
the birthings in Twainmere,” Lenore had told Geoffrey stubbornly, “and ’tis after all up to me to have this child—neither doctor nor midwife can do it for me.”
“And a woman will be more comforting than a man,” Mistress Watts had chimed in to add, as she walked by the door and overheard their conversation.
She chose to forget that Geoffrey’s dark brows had formed a straight line and he had gone over and closed the door rather hard, although at the time she’d sniffed and thought he should be grateful that she could provide such a good midwife.
And see how well Mistress Rue was doing! She had arrived, fat and bustling and energetic and wearing a large gray linen apron. “What, is Mistress Daunt already in labor?” she’d demanded, tossing her wet cloak to Gwyneth. “Then all the knots about the place must be loosened at once—in the kitchen, indeed in all the rooms!” The woman had foresight. Rushed as she was, she’d bethought her to snatch up an old garment—one that might have been new during the Old Queen’s reign—“for luck” to wrap the newborn child in. Ah, this midwife was worth her salt indeed, and would never neglect any of the necessary childbirth charms!
Mistress Watts hurried upstairs. “Ye be lucky!” she beamed. “Mistress Rue is here.”
“Where—is she?” gasped Lenore, pale and perspiring from her last bout with the fierce labor pains that had seized her.
“Down in the kitchen seeing that all the knots in the place are loosed.”
Knots? What was this about knots? Another great pain struck Lenore, and she cried out. “I care not a whit for charms!” she gasped when she could speak again. “Only that my baby be born alive and healthy! Tell Mistress Rue to forget about knots and come upstairs at once!”
Mistress Watts sputtered. So shocked was she by this lack of proper feeling for time-tested charms that she withdrew from the room altogether in a huff and went back downstairs and slammed the door to her quarters.
“Your husband’s very young,” Mistress Rue observed to Lenore when she finally finished with the knots and went upstairs. For she’d glimpsed Michael sitting on the top step, looking tired and forlorn, and naturally assumed him to be the father.
Lenore gave the midwife a dazed look. She was just coming up out of a well of suffering.
“Never mind,” said Mistress Rue, from out of her years of experience. “We’ll get you through this, mistress.” But as the hours dragged by and Lenore’s condition worsened, Mistress Rue began to look worried. She muttered that she had never placed great reliance in eagle-stones herself. “But your husband might ran to the church and demand the bells be rung,” she suggested, brightening. “Indeed that often eases a difficult labor!”
Lenore, lying weak and pale between pains, said a little testily that the Daunts were of no consequence in Oxford and the bells would doubtless remain silent, no matter what they demanded.
At that declaration. Mistress Rue tore from the room and whispered something in Michael’s ear. Michael, who had winced every time he’d heard Lenore groan, got up and went out looking dazed. He came back with a piece of frayed rope, which he silently handed to the midwife. She snatched it from him and went back into the bedchamber.
“We’ve had this from the bellringers.” She waved the piece of rope at Lenore importantly. “It should do almost as well as having the bells rung.” She tied the rope around Lenore’s waist—rather tightly, for it was a bit too short—and there it remained as a good luck charm until Lenore, screaming in agony, ripped her fingernails in tearing it off.
Mistress Rue clucked in dismay. “Now I must tie this back on,” she insisted, moving to do so.
The pain had subsided for the moment, and Lenore gave Mistress Rue a baleful look. “If you even try it, I promise you I will claw your eyes out!”
Mistress Rue straightened up with a wounded look. “Very well, Mistress Daunt, but if things go badly for you, I am not to be blamed!” She turned to Mistress Watts, whom curiosity had brought up the stairs again to see how matters were going. “She do be a bad patient,” the midwife sighed. “I hope that she may not die, but I have attended at two birthings this past month where the ladies did die after they broke the rope—and they do say things happen in threes.”
Mistress Watts clucked her tongue and gave Lenore a worried look. Michael, who had overheard this as the door opened to admit Mistress Watts, was slumped down on the stairs looking as if he too might expire. “Do you need more rope?” he croaked.
Mistress Watts turned to say impatiently, “Mistress Daunt refuses to use it.”
“I do think he could do with a hot posset,” Mistress Rue told the landlady, with an uneasy look at Michael. “Husbands do take on so at birthings!”
Mistress Watts forbore to tell the midwife that Michael was not the father, that the father was off on one of his many trips of which she so heartily disapproved—a man should be at his wife’s side at a time like this! She brought Michael a hot posset herself; it was made of hot spiced milk curdled by ale, and he rallied as he drank it.
“Do you think she will live?” he asked in a tragic voice. “I heard what the midwife said.”
“Keep your voice down,” said Mistress Watts sharply. “And why would she not live, a fine strong girl like her? Mistress Rue is always looking on the dark side—but then, she sees so many as won’t follow her instructions.”
“But you heard her say Lenore broke the rope and tore it off!”
“Ah, but we’ve countered that with the knots we’ve loosened.” She looked sharply at Michael. “Have ye any knots about ye?”
‘1 don’t think so—yes, yes, I have!” Excitedly Michael scrabbled at his pursestring, a narrow leather thong, which he kept knotted for safety’s sake.
“There, that may be what’s been causing the trouble!” Mistress Watts told him triumphantly, when at last his awkward fingers had it untied, and Michael sank back, much relieved and feeling terribly guilty that the knot of his pursestring should have been holding back the birth.
It was a difficult birth. The hours dragged by, day slipped into night, and Lenore thought that terrible night would never end. She gripped the soaked bedding and fought down screams as her back arched in agony and her hand gripped Mistress Rue’s with a pressure that numbed the midwife’s fingers. She screamed for Geoffrey, and once for Meg, and could not understand the midwife’s crooning answers. For a time the whole world seemed to turn to a hot blackness and there was only the pain, a livid leaping thing, knifing through her body as if to rend her apart. She came to, out of a long-drawn-out agony, in a red haze, dimly aware that the midwife was speaking to her.
“A fine lovely daughter ye have, mistress!” The fat puffing midwife was chortling. She held up the child as proudly as if she’d borne it herself. “I’ll be calling the father to come in now—I do think he’s gone to sleep out there on the steps. He’ll be so pleased!”
“No—wait,” murmured Lenore, reaching out for the baby, and the midwife handed the small precious bundle that was her daughter to her and went out to call Mistress Watts and Michael.
Weak and exhausted, with her face wet with perspiration and her hair plastered to her forehead, Lenore looked with wonderment at the small sweet creature she was holding so carefully.
She had done it! She had done it! She felt a thrill go through her that was like none she had ever known. Her daughter! Out of that scalding night of pain, she held her daughter in her arms at last. Tears of joy trembled on her lashes as with a fierce sweet tenderness she cradled her baby.
She looked up in triumph, violet eyes aglow, as Mistress Watts entered the room. To the confusion of the midwife. Mistress Watts had just banished Michael sternly from the stairs and told him he could sleep in the common room downstairs, since curfew had long since sounded and the watch would get him if he left now. The midwife looked appalled at this, and turned to Michael as if expecting him to assert his rights.
“I’m not the father,” Michael admitted sheepishly.
“Not the fath
er?” Mistress Rue looked at Michael in bewilderment. “Then who’s to pay me?” she demanded in a strident voice. “I’d not have come if—”
“Here, I’ll pay you!” Hastily Michael pulled money out of his untied purse, and counted out coins into the midwife’s hand. “Is that enough?” he asked her doubtfully.
It was more than she’d expected. Mistress Rue closed her fingers on the coins and sniffed. An odd household, this! With a man who was not the father pacing the floor outside, and a woman giving birth who was so reckless of charms she’d near killed herself birthing! Determined to say as much, now that she’d been paid—and also that she doubted Lenore could have any more children—she followed Mistress Watts into the room.
There she found Mistress Watts almost in tears herself just to see the glorious expression in Lenore’s violet eyes. With a rare instinct for a precious moment, kindly Mistress Watts hurried the protesting midwife away to let Lenore enjoy these first moments with her baby in private.
Raptly, by the light of a single taper, Lenore studied that small sweet face. What a great beauty she would grow up to be! she thought fondly. Already she was beautiful. Her daughter! It was hard to realize that she, Lenore Frankford had a daughter! Although she had wanted a boy, had fully intended to name him Geoffrey, all thought of that was gone now, and the small pink child in her arms seemed the most desirable thing on earth. Her daughter...
This Towering Passion Page 24
