Silent for a while, he watched me brush the horse; then he said, "I regret…" His fingers slid through the horse’s mane and I caught a glimpse of his clean, straight fingernails that never did a hard day’s labor in their tender life. "I regret that I spoke as I once did to you."
"That was a very long time ago and best forgot." Looking over his shoulder, I saw Suzannah enter the stables.
Before I could warn him to be silent, he sighed, "Of course, you are right, madam. What happened betwixt us then is best forgot."
Her countenance was unchanged, but I knew she heard every word. "There you both are," she exclaimed, her hands clasped in her apron, "hiding away together again."
Again? "Were you looking for us then?" I asked. "Must be something urgent, that you could not wait until we came in."
"’Tis cold out here, Master Culpepper. You shall catch a chill."
"It was your idea that he should ride," I reminded her.
"You keep him out here too long – trying to keep him all to yourself, I suppose." She turned to him. "Come inside, Master Culpepper, and get something warm in your stomach. If you let her distract you, she will keep you out here for hours."
He laughed uneasily and let her take him away. She could make a mountain from a molehill. That single, overheard sentence would feed the little furnace, in which she forged the nails for a coffin. There was no room for both of us in that house – she made that clear to me from the beginning – and there was only one way out.
After that, she took prodigious care of Robert Culpepper, always ensuring he ate a good breakfast and keeping his boots warm by the fire. She encouraged his poetry reading in the evenings, ignoring her husband’s groans, and was always ready to push us together, forcing us out of the house on spurious errands. One wash day, as she sprinkled his shirts with lavender water before hanging them up to dry, she commented on his elegance of dress and manners.
Rufus was scornful. "He certainly preens in those platters over the mantle, more even than Hugh ever did."
"There is nothing to be scoffed at in a young man who takes care of his appearance and minds his manners," she replied snippily. "It makes a pleasant change to be sure."
He snorted with laughter. "I seem to remember you sought me out for my rough edges once, my dear. You could not get enough of them, then."
* * * *
A parcel arrived from Will, sent via Master Scroggs and carried on the fish cart from Yarmouth. It was cloth; several brightly colored bolts of material. Suzannah ran her covetous hands over the cloth and whispered disdainfully in my ear, "You shall be the best dressed little whore at Chapel."
To be polite, I asked her if she would like some of the cloth for herself, but she laughed rudely at this suggestion, asking what I thought she would do in such fancy cloth. "Shall I wear it to mop floors, or muck out the stables?" I never saw her muck out the stables, in all the time I lived there, and the floors were swept no more than once a week – even less frequently in summer – but if she chose to cut off her nose to spite her face, so be it.
Now that I had cloth for new gowns and a tutor for Nathaniel, the idea of going to London for Bagobones’ wedding slowly turned from idle daydream to reality. I took the cloth up the lane, where Tilda could do her cutting and sewing in peace, spreading the pieces out on the trestle table in the deserted hall. She followed the pattern of the old dress that once belonged to Bagobones, adding a few touches of her own liking. I helped with the sewing, although most of my stitches had to be picked out and re-sewn by her neat, quick hands.
I had planned to find a Norwich merchant with whom I might travel to London, but instead I was invited to accompany Mary Sourpout and Sir Brian. My cousin professed concern that I would let the Sydney name down otherwise. She took it upon herself to hoist the banner of Sydney Pride now that her father was gone and so I accepted her begrudging offer.
We left for London on a cool, crisp morning with the weak sun struggling to show itself through thick clots of determined rain cloud. Tilda said a very sorrowful goodbye, reminding me to avoid sins and temptation, urging me to behave myself in my new frocks; not to get them stained and torn. Very proud of her work, she claimed not to know why she bothered, as I would likely ruin them at the first opportunity of adventure.
While my coffer was roped to one of Sir Brian’s mules, Nathaniel and Master Culpepper also came out to say their goodbyes.
"I do hope your journey is a pleasant one," said the tutor.
"I ‘ope you don’t ruddy come back," Nathaniel exclaimed crossly.
Ignoring his curses, I stroked the thick, black fringe of hair from his forehead, and planted a kiss there. Just as I turned away, Master Culpepper slipped a tiny, palm-sized book of poetry into my gloved hand. "A little reading for your journey," he said, smiling timidly. Inside the book, I discovered a letter, the contents of which I think it best if I do not tell. It would cause me enough trouble later. I looked up, just in time to see Suzannah turn away, a thin smile on her lips and I knew she encouraged him in this.
For all his book learning, Master Culpepper knew nothing of real women. He admired from afar, like a Knight from Arthurian legend, practicing the art of courtly love. I doubted, however, that he would know what to do with the object of his affections, once he had her. Poetry might be very nice in certain circumstances, yet, shockingly, it was one gruff, decidedly unpoetic fellow I missed, his touch for which I yearned.
How odd that once I did not want him here at all, and now I wished he never left.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Grace
The storm erupted, rain shooting down. I shoved my notebook under my shirt to keep it dry, but with the rain blowing hard in my face, I was breathless and blinded. Lightening cracked overhead. The sky was swollen now with charcoal clouds and thunder rolled, like gladiator’s chariots, across the roof.
Under my shoulder the door opened and I fell forward, tripping down the step, as if the stone moved, just a few inches, to trick my feet. The house was cold, but there was a fire in the big hearth. The stone-flagged floor was quilted with shadowy diamonds – the reflection of the storm through the lattice windows.
Something was wrong. The room seemed larger and emptier. Beside the fire there was a copper hipbath filled with water. A book lay open on the table, the pages ruffled by a draft. My pictures were gone, as was the clock on the wall. Herbs hung drying over the hearth and a row of dented pewter platters stood along the high mantle. A wooden chair, its arms pocked with nail marks, waited by the fire; beside it a tankard, its handle marked with greasy fingerprints apparent in the glow of the flames. And there, dusty and worn, were someone’s boots, kicked off in a hurry.
My fingertips brushed against the wall, touching the stone. I felt Genny leading me, letting me look through her eyes. I turned my head slowly, taking it all in. It was like an exhibit in a museum, but I was not merely an observer; I was a part of it.
I moved around the room, my nerves stretched taut. Desperately I searched for the past – those little pieces of memory that would bring him back to me. Stepping down into the pantry, I found the over-laden baskets of rotting fruit, just as I remembered, and a brace of hares, hanging upside down from a hook, their eyes staring blankly back at me. Someone had crushed herbs with a pestle and mortar, leaving dried stems scattered across the shelf.
I held the leather-wrapped handle of a long knife. As I lifted it, my breath formed a mist on the blade, so I rubbed it clear with one finger and saw my face reflected there. Yes, it was me.
Footsteps.
Dropping the knife, I backed away. The pantry door opened, and Suzannah came in, her eyes, like those of the dead hares, staring emptily. In haste, her hands reached along the shelf, searching in the dim light. Through the half open door, I could see Rufus, his two good hands hanging over the arms of the chair, his chin on his chest. It was a heavy state of unconsciousness brought about by something beyond sleep. Finding the knife, Suzannah snatched it up and hurrie
d out.
As Rufus said, there were no ghosts. Just memories.
Clutching the notebook under my shirt like a shield, I opened my eyes again.
"You’re soaked!" Suddenly my pirate was there, looking worried.
Thunder shook the house, rain slapping hard against the windows. There was no copper bath and no fire in the hearth. Under my feet there was a rubber doormat. All the lights were on. Now the predominant odor was the charred bitterness of burnt toast – from that morning’s run-in with my temperamental toaster – and strong coffee.
"You’ll catch cold again if you don’t get out of those wet things."
Another flash of lightening shot through the windows, and thunder threw itself across the sky in a temper tantrum.
"Any minute now the lights will go—"
They went out and night came prematurely in the middle of the day. We were silhouettes moving about inside the house, sometimes visible and sometimes lost again in shadow, while we looked for candles in the pantry.
"Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m doing here?" he said.
"I suppose you changed your mind and came back. Couldn’t stay away. I have that effect on men." Fumbling along the shelf, I found candles, but when I turned, he was holding a towel.
"Come here," he said softly, ready to dry me off.
"Give it to me."
He stepped closer. "No. I’ll do it."
I was on edge, jumpy and nervous. His presence was, like the storm, potentially damaging and powerfully electric. Of course, he wanted control. He put the towel over my hair and rubbed with both hands, quite hard.
"Ouch."
He slowed the rhythm and began humming that tune again. He’d got it from me, of course, but I wasn’t sure if he knew that yet.
I twisted around to take the towel away, but he kept hold, tightening his grip. Even in the dim light, his eyes were so blue that it hurt to look, as if I stared too long into the sun. There was no other sound but my heartbeat and then his. Nothing else mattered. "Tell me what to do," he groaned, his breath blowing gently against my forehead. "Tell me how to win you over. I can’t wait any longer. I have a weakness, it seems, for dangerous women with orange flames in their eyes."
"Don’t talk rot." But I kissed him and he put his arms around me, his hands running slowly down my back, fitting me against his body as if I belonged there.
Rain drummed hard against the window, trying to get in. Thunder rolled across the sky, shaking the walls. Rufus called out for his cider, rapping his wooden hand impatiently on the scarred arm of his chair.
I whispered, "I need you." It was a visceral reaction, swiftly breaking through all those cautiously constructed barriers and doubts. Even though I knew he was the wrong sort of man for me – too stuffy and old-fashioned, I recognized my lost mate the moment I saw him. It was madness.
"Stay," I sighed; my voice barely heard above the war drums of thunder.
His heart, under my hands, was slow and steady, while mine dodged about like a mad cat in pursuit of a mouse. In a sudden panic – the sort that usually came if I overslept and my alarm failed to go off – I pulled on his shirt, urging haste.
He chuckled softly. "Have you no patience, woman?"
I clung to him with ink-stained fingers. "Never leave me again."
"I never did, did I?" he managed, all the words expelled in one breath, as he carried me across the room and up the stairs. "I'm here now, aren't I?"
* * * *
After the storm, the air was rich and full, a cornucopia of flavors. Butterflies rustled against the ivy outside the open bedroom window, and gentle sunlight sought forgiveness for deserting us that afternoon. The candles were out, but their blackened wicks still trailed thin wisps of smoke, adding another spice to the thick soup.
We lay quietly together, my head on his chest, the two of us tangled in the bed sheet, too lazy to move. My scarlet bustier hung from the bedpost, its ribbons curling down, spinning in the breeze.
"I never met anyone quite like you," he marveled, his low voice echoing deep inside his chest.
"Like me how?" I slung one leg over his strong thigh.
He considered carefully, reaching up to twist one of those scarlet ribbons around his finger. "Desperately, incredibly irresistible. Slightly mad and strangely sane."
"It runs in the family," I sighed.
I heard his head moving against the pillow, his lips touching my hair in a gentle kiss.
"Tell me more about your family," I said sleepily.
"Don’t you know it all?"
"No. Not all."
He tucked his arms behind his head. "Well, let’s see. My father lives by his own rules and does as he pleases. Nothing gets in the way of his pleasures. My mother is a shell of the woman she once was. She’s been ill some time. We handle the matter as we do anything unpleasant, by ignoring it. My brother cannot settle into his responsibilities, but, like our father, leaves me to clean up the mess he leaves behind."
I ran my finger along the scar that crossed the bridge of his nose. "Go on," I urged.
"My brother’s child has been left largely to my care since neither parent seems interested. He knows, of course, that I will never let the child suffer abandonment."
"It must have been hard for you – always being the dependable one," I whispered, drawing patterns with my fingertip across his chest, where there were more scars. I fleetingly wondered why he had so many scars, but I was in that foggy, blissful state where one chooses to ignore many things that might require too much thought and possibly result in a remarkable conclusion too strange to be believed.
After a while he answered, "Someone had to step up to the task, as my father wouldn’t. And my brother can’t seem to find his way in life."
I chided gently, "Not everything is your problem to solve."
"I do what needs to be done." Suddenly he rolled over, pulling me beneath him. "Someone must, Scrapper."
I smiled drowsily. "And you are the best man for the job."
"Precisely! Are you done prying for juicy details about my life now?" he demanded. "Has your devious imagination stocked up on ideas for that book and all at my cost? Good. Now kiss me, before I..." And he whispered in my ear, all the things he was about to do to me.
He was a pirate, after all, and should never to be mistaken for harmless, no matter what color his eyes. I should have known. Now, in a weak moment, I’d let him in. I was putty in his hands – just exactly what I never wanted to be. I was his prisoner now, a fallen woman, completely at his mercy. So skillfully he made me forget myself with this heedless abandon.
My poor mother, if she walked in on us then, might even lose her grip on her handbag. I found suddenly that I could forgive her for everything, because I was happy now, finally, truly, for the first time in several hundred years.
* * * *
He slept face down, head under the pillow, blocking out noise and light. Sprawled diagonally across the bed, he snored loudly, frightening the birds from the ivy. I dressed quickly, sloppily; strong coffee was the most urgent matter of business, while I tried to retain some sense of normalcy and ignore the throbbing desire to climb back in that bed with him.
It had never been like this – at least not in this lifetime. I felt lighter suddenly and caught myself smiling when I looked in the bathroom mirror. My hair, tied up in a lazy knot, even looked good for once, extra curly perhaps.
I felt particularly wicked, as if I’d corrupted an innocent, when I’d done nothing of the sort. Still, surely it was almost incestuous to have a love affair with a fictional character of your own creation? I’d fallen prey to temptation and lust. At last – that sort of trouble.
Wandering out into the back garden, I sat a while in the sun with my writing. The story had to be finished one way or another. Genny still waited to have him back, but who needed him the most?
He belonged in her story and I knew it would be selfish to keep him here with me, but I couldn’t give him back. Not yet.
So, rather than write, my pen doodled lazily in the margins, procrastinating. I sketched a series of faces – people I knew well, in this life and another.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Genny
1537
It might seem the artist had an easy task – to paint my cousin’s face in a flattering light, but she was no easy customer to please and neither could she sit for long without insisting on viewing his progress, and then advising him on what he did wrong.
Admired as a local beauty at home, here Millicent must compete with the sophisticated ladies of court. She threw herself into the challenge, following every fashion devotedly, listening eagerly to recipes for brightening her lips with crushed beetles, as if this idea might give her eternal life. Unconcerned about the poor, shoeless beggar children who jostled for table scraps outside her grandmother’s gate each evening, she fretted instead over every minutia of her wedding gown, fearing it would meet with criticism from the ladies who would stand in judgment.
Lady Talbot, Millicent’s grandmother, lived in a house gifted to her by the current King’s mother, as a pension for services as friend and confidant. It was a grand building, but in recent years standards had declined; chipped paneling was not replaced, broken windows were patched with wood, and holes, worn in the tiled floor, covered with moth-eaten rugs. Her manservant Ambleforthe, lived, it seemed, in the wainscoting, where he awaited her summons at all hours of the day or night. Today he was summoned to give his opinion on the artist’s progress.
"The lady," he managed finally in his low voice, "looks very… white."
The artist did not think much of having his work assessed by a servant and, fussing with his tools, mumbled about the necessary understanding of light.
"Millicent is very white," I pointed out. "Except when annoyed and then she is very red."
Across the room, posed in her chair, my cousin fumed, "I cannot concentrate with your twittering."
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