by Annie Groves
‘You need what my English grandmother used to call a mustard bath,’ Ricardo told her, ‘but I don’t think I have any mustard.’
Rosie managed a weak laugh. ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ she told him.
‘Your breeches are wet and I don’t think it is a good thing for you to be sitting in damp clothes, especially when you are not well already.’ Ricardo was still holding her feet in his hands. To Rosie’s shock he bent his head and kissed them lightly, causing a delicious feather-light tingle of pleasure to warm her body, followed by a sharp surge of anxiety. They were all alone here in the cottage. Ricardo was a very passionate man. He loved her and he knew that she loved him. He had her father’s permission to court her. In Ricardo’s eyes might all of this mean that he felt he had every right to the kind of intimacy they had not previously shared?
He had released her feet and was standing up. Did she feel anxious or was that tightening sensation inside her more excitement and anticipation than apprehension?
‘I am very conscious of the fact that your father has put his trust in me, Rosie.’ Ricardo’s voice had deepened and thickened. ‘We are alone here together, and there is nothing I want more than to claim you as my own, but I am honour bound to think of your father and to act as though his gaze is upon me and his judgement hanging over me, for I am not just the man who loves you but the man who will one day be his son-in-law, and the father of our children and his grandchildren. I want you to know this before I say to you what I am going to say and to understand that my words and my actions are motivated by my concern for your health, and that they do not contain anything I would not want your father to witness. Do you understand?’
Rosie nodded.
‘Good. I am now going to go upstairs and bring down for you a warm dressing gown. Whilst I am in the kitchen, making you a hot drink and filling a hot-water bottle for you, you are to take off your wet clothes and put it on. I give you my word that I shall not come in until you say that I may do so.’
‘I can’t do that,’ Rosie protested, although in truth she was so cold and wet that there was nothing she wanted more. ‘I have to get back to the hostel.’
Ricardo shook his head firmly. ‘No, you cannot go back there tonight. You are not well enough. In the morning I shall go and see the warden and explain to her the situation, and I shall ask as well that she arranges for the doctor to come out and see you. There is no point in arguing with me, Rosie. I am acting now not just as your husband-to-be but also in the place of your father,’ Ricardo told her sternly. ‘This, I know, is what he would want and expect me to do. When your father and I finally meet face to face, I want to be able to meet him as a man of honour.’
‘You are a man of honour, Ricardo,’ Rosie told him in between her increasing bouts of shivers. ‘You are the most honourable man I know.’
‘You will trust me then? Tonight?’ he emphasised. ‘In all things?’
Rosie looked up into his face and was overwhelmed by the force of her love for him. ‘Yes,’ she told him truthfully.
She had removed her damp clothes, kneeling on the rug in front of the fire, stripping right down to her underwear, and now she was wrapped snugly in the large warm dressing gown that smelled so wonderfully of Ricardo.
‘Here is some special coffee for you,’ he told her, coming in with a mug of rich dark coffee that smelled so strong she wrinkled her nose.
‘What’s in this?’ she demanded after she had taken a sip.
‘Brandy,’ Ricardo told her. ‘It will help to warm you and help your cough, so drink some more.’
Obediently Rosie did so, pulling a face and telling him, ‘Ughh, it tastes awful.’
‘But it warms the stomach, sì?’
‘Sì,’ Rosie agreed and then giggled. She felt oddly light-headed, and somehow almost carefree, as though a huge weight had suddenly been lifted from her shoulders.
‘I will take your wet clothes and put them to dry over the range,’ she heard Ricardo telling her. ‘They are a wonderful piece of equipment for a cottage such as this, provided you know how to deal with them. I confess it took me nearly two weeks to learn how to keep it in without using too much fuel.’
Rosie laughed. ‘You’ve done very well. I’ve heard that they are well known for being difficult to deal with.’
‘You are warmer now?’ Ricardo asked her.
‘Much. But I don’t need a doctor, Ricardo,’ Rosie told him gratefully and then gasped as she suddenly started to cough so violently that Ricardo had to hold her mug of coffee. ‘The cough gets worse in the evening,’ she defended herself. ‘But I’m all right really.’
‘You are too thin, and whilst, cara, I would dearly like to think that you are wasting away on my account, it seems to me that you are not as well as you want us all to think.’
‘People have enough to worry about, without worrying about me as well.’
‘That is typical of you, Rosie, that you don’t want to cause others concern.’
She stood up, careful to keep the dressing gown wrapped tightly around herself, surprised to discover how pleasantly light-headed she felt. ‘I think you put too much brandy in my coffee,’ she told him solemnly.
‘It will help you sleep.’
‘Will it? Do you know, Ricardo, I don’t think I want to sleep. Dear Ricardo,’ she smiled beatifically at him, ‘I do love you so very, very much. Do you truly believe that my father doesn’t mind about us?’
‘Yes. I truly believe it,’ Ricardo assured her.
Rosie exhaled on a small happy sigh and then stood on her tiptoes and leaned forward to wrap her arms around Ricardo’s neck so that she could kiss him.
‘Rosie…’
‘Don’t you want me to kiss you, Ricardo?’ she reproached him. ‘I thought that you would.’
‘Rosie, I do,’ he assured her, his voice muffled, ‘but…Rosie…’
But it was too late. Rosie was pressing irresistible and eager little kisses all over his face.
‘Rosie…’ he protested thickly.
‘Ricardo?’ Rosie whispered back against his mouth. ‘Did I tell you how good it feels when you kiss me?’
The logs hissed and crackled in the fireplace as the wind buffeted the cottage. Rosie made a small ecstatic sound as she pressed herself closer to Ricardo, lost in the wonder of what they were sharing. This was the first time they had truly been alone together, the first time they were free to whisper and kiss and touch, safe in the knowledge that there was nothing between them and no one to see them.
Rosie had stopped hugging Ricardo’s dressing gown round herself when she had reached up to wrap her arms around his neck and now she was the one to whisper softly to him, ‘Touch me, Ricardo…properly…here,’ she emphasised, taking his hand and placing it on the warm swell of her breast.
How was it possible for something as simple as a man’s touch to give her so much pleasure? She felt dizzy with delight on the intoxication of it, yearning eagerly for more, but Ricardo was already pushing her gently away.
‘This is not what your father would expect of me, Rosie. Not now, before we are married. And besides, you do realise, don’t you, my darling girl, that it would be totally wrong of me to take you to bed in your present condition?’
‘It’s just a bit of a cold, that’s all,’ Rosie protested.
Ricardo laughed and held her close. ‘I was talking about the brandy in the coffee I gave you. Now why don’t you go upstairs to bed? I’ve lit the fire up there for you and put a hot-water bottle in the bed, and then in the morning—’
‘Where are you going to sleep?’ Rosie knew that the cottage had two bedrooms but only one bed, from what Mary had told her.
‘I shall be sleeping down here,’ Ricardo told her firmly.
It was hard to leave the warmth of his arms, and even harder not to coax him into going upstairs with her, but Rosie wasn’t so strongly affected by the brandy that she didn’t realise the wisdom of what Ricardo had said. If her father meant what he had written in his lette
rs, then she and Ricardo had the rest of their lives in which to share the intimacies of being together. Besides, Rosie knew that she didn’t want to share the fate that had befallen Sheila, whose condition had caused so much gossip, with some of the other girls saying that her young man would never have married her if it wasn’t for her pregnancy. That wasn’t the kind of start to married life that Rosie wanted for her and Ricardo.
The bedroom was small and cosy, with its sloping walls and dormer window, but the coldness of the icy bathroom had left Rosie shivering as she got into the old-fashioned high bed with its iron bedstead.
The tot of brandy Ricardo had urged her to drink before coming upstairs had soothed her cough and made her so drowsy that her eyes were closing almost as soon as her head touched the pillow.
It was the pain in her chest that woke her up – that and the sound of her own coughing. At first she thought that she was at home in Liverpool, and she called out for her mother. Then she remembered that her mother was dead, but by that time she felt so poorly, and her thoughts were sliding in and out of her head in such a confused muddle, that she couldn’t catch hold of them to think about them properly – and besides, her head hurt too much. She knew, though, that the bedclothes were cold and damp and she thought somehow in her confused state that she must have fallen asleep outside in the rain but then she remembered that she was in Ricardo’s cottage, so she felt for the hot-water bottle, thinking it must have burst, whilst she shivered convulsively and her body burned up with fever.
‘Rosie…’
Someone was calling her name urgently, dragging her back from a place she didn’t want to be dragged from. She tried to blot out the voice, but it wouldn’t go away. Reluctantly she opened her eyes.
‘Ricardo, I’m too hot,’ she told him, and then shuddered violently and started to cough.
THIRTY
‘Doctor says that you can go home for Christmas, Rosie. Isn’t that good news?’
The news she had just been given was even more welcome to Rosie than the cheerful smile Nurse Bradley gave her as she checked Rosie’s temperature chart and then poured out a spoonful of linctus for her.
Rosie had no memory of the night Ricardo had bundled her up in his dressing gown and the eiderdown off his bed, and then carried her all the way to the village and the doctor, and no memory either of how Dr Flint had taken one look at her and said immediately that she needed to go into an isolation ward so that her chest could be checked out for TB.
The first memory she had of the events of that night and its consequences was that of waking up in hospital, her bed surrounded by screens, and a doctor and two nurses, all wearing masks, peering down at her.
She had thought at first that she must be dreaming and then when she realised that she wasn’t she had been filled with disbelief that a mere cough should have resulted in her being in hospital.
There had then been a week when she had drifted in and out of sleep, feeling too ill to care about anything, crying helplessly because Ricardo hadn’t been to see her, not knowing then that he had spent every spare minute he had at the hospital, badgering the staff for news of her, desperate to be with her but not allowed to be because she was in an isolation ward.
Then eventually, when it was realised that she didn’t have TB, she was moved to another ward, and she could still remember the joy that filled her when she had woken up one night to find Ricardo sitting beside her bed.
‘Sssh,’ he had warned her, putting his finger to his lips. ‘I’m not supposed to be here and if the nurse catches me, she’ll throw me out.’
Rosie was a very lucky young woman, Dr Hood was fond of telling her. Another few hours without treatment and he doubted that anything could have saved her from succumbing totally to pneumonia. It was thanks to Ricardo’s prompt actions that she had not done so, he had added. Rosie smiled softly now, thinking how much she had to thank Ricardo for. He had saved her life, she knew that, even though Ricardo himself tried to make light of what he had done.
‘I certainly couldn’t carry you across three fields now,’ he had joked with her, only yesterday. ‘Not now you’ve filled out a bit again, thank goodness.’
Rosie had smiled ruefully at him, remembering the number of times he had sat patiently at her bedside, spoon-feeding her the nourishing foods she needed for her recovery, but had felt too weak to bother eating.
And now she had made such good progress that she was being allowed to ‘go home’.
But where to? She didn’t have a proper home any more. There was the house in Liverpool, of course, which now belonged to her father, but she could hardly turn out the tenants, especially not at Christmas.
Then there was the hostel. Mrs Johnson had been to see her, as had the girls, and the warden had assured her that there would be a bed for her there, but Rosie was a sensible girl and she knew that, whilst the danger was over, it would be some months before she was strong enough again for land girl work.
Ricardo came to visit her every day after work although, strictly speaking, visitors were not allowed, but somehow he had managed to persuade the nurses to let him see her. Rosie and Ricardo had grown so close these last weeks. She loved him so very much and she didn’t know how she could ever have imagined she could live without him.
Ricardo had been making enquiries and it seemed that they could be married, especially with the duke already standing surety for Ricardo’s ‘good behaviour’. The duke had also said that he wanted to keep Ricardo on, and that they were welcome to live in the cottage. Mary had come in to see her and had offered her the loan of her wedding dress, assuring Rosie that she wouldn’t have to worry about a thing so far as a wedding was concerned, because she and the other girls would see to it all for her.
The future couldn’t have looked brighter except for one thing, one shadow, one fear and sadness that Rosie couldn’t quite banish. Her father. Oh, he had written – and more than once; telling her how relieved he was that Ricardo had been there to look after her when she had been so poorly, and telling her too that she wasn’t to give another thought to his own foolish comments about Italians, made in the heat of the moment when his blood had been up over her mother. But Rosie still worried that she might be taking her own happiness at the cost of her father’s pain.
Although it was a Saturday afternoon, Rosie knew that Ricardo would be working. The duke had been very good about him having time off to visit her, but Rosie knew that Ricardo didn’t want to take advantage of the duke’s generosity.
She was sitting in the convalescent room of the hospital, wrapped in blankets to protect her body from the cold air from the open windows and the sharp fresh air she had been instructed to breathe in to help her lungs. Matron was a firm believer in the efficacy of good fresh air, and Rosie couldn’t help laughing when she heard the comments the other patients made about this practice when Matron and the nurses were out of earshot.
Rosie wondered what time it was and how long it would be before Ricardo came to see her. It wouldn’t be until it had gone dark and his work was over for the day, she knew. What would he say when she told him what the doctor had said? Although they’d talked about getting married, Ricardo had been disappointingly vague when Rosie had tried to discuss setting a date, and that had upset her although she hadn’t let him see it. Had the fact that she had been so poorly made him have second thoughts? If so, he certainly hadn’t given any indication of that when he came to see her. He was always so loving and kind to her that she could only agree when the nurses told her how lucky she was.
The door to the convalescent room opened and one of the nurses announced cheerily, ‘Rosie, you’ve got a visitor.’
It must be one of the girls from the hostel, Rosie decided as she turned round to welcome her, but the smile she had been about to give trembled into a shocked exclamation of disbelief when she saw who was standing in the doorway looking at her.
She was still supposed to be taking things carefully and not doing too much, but she was p
ushing away the blankets wrapped round her legs and standing up unsteadily, blinking hard just in case she was imagining what she was seeing. But no, the two men she loved best in all the world were there, standing together in the doorway, Ricardo supporting her father, just as a son should.
‘Dad!’ Rosie didn’t know if she was laughing or crying or perhaps doing a bit of both.
Her father hadn’t changed at all. His eyes still had the same loving twinkle and he still smelled of salt and tar, even if his familiar rolling walk had ceased with the loss of his leg.
‘I can’t believe that you’re here. I just can’t believe it,’ Rosie was still repeating half an hour later, unable to find the words to say what she really felt.
‘Well, it’s your Ricardo who organised it all, writing to me to say as how you were fretting and asking if I was up to coming home. If my girl needs me, I told him, then wild horses won’t stop me being there for her. So Ricardo speaks out to this duke chap and asks him if there is anything he can do and, blow me, before I’d got me kitbag packed up, someone was knocking on the door saying as how a berth had been arranged for me. By, lass, but it’s good to see you,’ her father said in a less jocular voice. ‘I’ve bin that worried about you, knowing that you weren’t well. Of course, I knew you’d got Ricardo here to look out for you, and that helped.’
Rosie had to blink away tears as she saw the look her father was giving Ricardo.
‘He’s a fine lad, Rosie love. I knew that the minute I read his letter, but now that I’ve met him…I couldn’t ask for anyone better to take care of you, and I know that your mum would say the same.’
It was too much for Rosie’s composure. ‘Oh, Dad…’
‘There…what on earth are you crying for? We should be celebrating, shouldn’t we, seeing as there’s going to be a wedding in the family?’
They were married quietly two days before Christmas in the village church. Rosie’s father gave her away, and Ian stood as best man for Ricardo. Earlier in the week Rosie and Ricardo had gone to her mother’s grave to place some flowers there. To Rosie’s own surprise, her father had struck up a friendship with the landlord of the village pub, who had offered him the job of barman, explaining that, with the extra business brought in by aircrews coming in and the land girls, he and his wife were struggling to manage. It was a live-in job and, as her father had told Rosie happily, it was a snug berth that would suit him down to the ground.
