They both laughed.
“And she turned me out for it.” His voice was rueful.
“And your uncle stood for it?” Constance looked indignant.
“That he did,” sighed Deverell. In point of fact, there was more to the story. His uncle, the new Earl of Roxford, had been away at the time, and his mistress-turned-bride had made the most of it—with one of the grooms. It had been the boy’s misfortune to witness one of their passionate partings with herself near naked bidding the groom good-by at the door of her bedchamber around dawn. Her face had gone ugly at sight of Deverell hurrying down the corridor for an early morning ride and she had slammed the door. Later she had tried to ride him down on the driveway and narrowly missed the puppy. When Deverell’s uncle came back, she had been first to corner him lest Deverell tell of her doings. She had laid it on rather thick, insisting that she had indeed been thrown as a result of the boy’s darting in front of her, and had suffered a miscarriage. The new Earl of Roxford had frowned mightily at that, for the main reason he had let himself be bullied into marriage with his erstwhile mistress had been the necessity of a legitimate heir. He had called Deverell in and thrust into his hand a couple of guineas and suggested vaguely that he run away to sea, that the life of a cabin boy might just suit him. Deverell had learned the truth later, but by then it was too late. The mistress-turned-wife had already borne a son and he knew he would not be welcome at Wingfield. But he felt no need to go into all that now beneath that glorious violet gaze.
“So I’ve been on my own since,” he added crisply. He did not tell her of the awful hardships he had endured as a young lad in London, having his pocket picked the first day, the street life in the alleys—no, he would not tell her of that. He would tell her of the better times. “I worked for a peddler for a time, and that was how I came here. The peddler was seized in York. Had he not given a shout. I’d have been seized too.”
“Why?” breathed Constance.
Deverell shrugged. “It was claimed he’d stolen something in the last town we’d been. I never believed it, but his horse and wagon and all his merchandise were confiscated—even my wages which were owing.” And they had whipped the peddler until he bled, before a sullen milling crowd at the Whip-ma-Whop-ma-Gate, as York’s “street of punishment” was called. And before half the lashes were applied the peddler’s eyes had rolled back and he had had a seizure and died. He would not tell her that; it would horrify her. Instead he said, “It had begun to snow that day, I had nowhere to sleep that night and no money, so I took the first thing offered.”
“Chimney sweep?” she guessed.
He nodded gravely and told her how Old Hays, taller than a scarecrow and as thin, with his height emphasized by the sooty tall-crowned beaver hat he always wore, had just lost his helper. Deverell had seen it happen. He had been walking through the snow down Spurriergate, the “street of spurmakers,” for “gate” was the old Danish name for “street,” and he had seen a lanky man dressed all in black, a man so tall he seemed to be walking on stilts. The man was accompanied by a reed-thin, soot-smudged boy slightly older than himself, and Deverell had realized they must be chimney sweeps. As he watched, the tall man’s high-crowned beaver hat was taken by the wind and, as it went sailing off, the boy flashed into the narrow street to retrieve it. A heavy cart was just then lumbering by and a smaller one attempting to pass. It was all over before the horses could be brought to a halt. The boy was caught between them, crushed by the cartwheels in the fast-falling snow. Deverell had stood stunned—and then realized that he was in luck. A job opening had just come his way.
“And you ended up here, at Claxton House?”
“Where Old Hays died midway through the job, yes.”
“Well, I can’t call you ‘Sweep,’ ” decided Constance. “It doesn’t suit you at all. I think I’ll call you ‘Dev.’ ”
The boy would have been enchanted to be called anything by this fairylike creature. All he wanted was for her to stay within sight.
“Why are you practicing dancing?” he asked curiously, for he knew as well as she that she would not be allowed to dance in the Banqueting Hall and these steps she had been executing with such grace and precision were hardly the stuff for farmers gone a-Maying.
“Because”—Constance drew herself up—“someday I’m going to be a lady of fashion and have a big house of my own to manage. And I must be ready.” Overcome by the folly of what she was saying, tears suddenly sparkled on her sooty lashes and her breath caught. “Of course—it won’t happen, I suppose,” she whispered.
“It will!” declared the boy’s strong voice. “I'll get your house for you!” He spoke almost fiercely.
“You?” She gave him a wondering look.
He had spoken on impulse, but now he affirmed it recklessly. “You’ve my word on it! The word of a Westmorland!”
She smiled at him then, a slow sweet smile. Reaching out, she trustingly gave him her hand and they walked, boy and girl fashion, over to a low mound of hay and sat down upon it companionably. She was not to know how the touch of her soft hand affected the fifteen-year-old boy. It set him afire and lit in him strong new passions. He hardly dared look at her lest she see how he felt, and his guilty flush lit up his strong young face.
But they were now farther from the lanthorn and the girl could not see him as clearly. She noticed nothing amiss.
“Why do you make me this great offer, Dev?” she asked softly. For offers such as his—empty though it might be—were beyond her experience.
“Because you deserve it,” he said ringingly. And looking at her, he knew with a pang that he was not the only man who would think she deserved a great house—she read that in his eyes and bridled.
“I am considered of no great worth here.” Calmly.
“Then they are all either blind or mad!” he declared with such heat that again she considered him in wonder. For the world had yet to tell her that she had the kind of beauty to stop a man’s heart.
“Perhaps you would like to dance with me?” she said tentatively.
Dev felt suffocated with joy. “If you will teach me?”
“We will learn together,” she told him with her grave sweet smile.
In the days that followed she saw much of Dev. She basked in his kindness, she shared her innermost thoughts with him. And because he was thin and she was afraid he did not get enough to eat, she took food surreptitiously from the big kitchen and brought it to him in the stables wrapped in linen squares. She managed to bring him bullets too from the great store of bullets her grandfather kept in his study, for Dev had a grand ambition—he wanted to be “the best shot in England.” He practiced his marksmanship out on the moors with the one legacy Old Hays had pressed into his hand before he died—a pistol. She, who was so hard-pressed and unhappy herself, tried her best to make Dev’s life a little less hard.
Dev worshipped the ground she walked on.
There came an awful day when Hugh, home from school for a fortnight, seized her—for laughing when he slipped and fell inelegantly into a mud puddle—snatched out his hunting knife and hacked off part of her hair.
“I’ll kill him!” muttered Deverell when he found her sobbing in the stables over a handful of long dark hair.
“No—Dev, you mustn’t!” She clutched him, full of fear for there was murder in his eyes and he had already picked up a pitchfork. She thanked God he had used up all the bullets in his pistol.
He would have wrenched away. “I know how he treats you! I’ve seen him at it!”
“No, Dev, no!” She clung to him, white-faced. “Sir John dotes on him and—”
“I care naught for that.” With the pitchfork firmly in hand, Dev started toward the big stable doors.
She managed to run around in front of him and block his exit. “If you fight him, they will send you away,” she gasped. “And what would I do without you?”
Her lovely imploring face was very close and Dev was brought up short by her words
: What would I do without you? How that tore at his heart!
“I can’t let him hurt you, Constance,” he said huskily.
“He hasn’t hurt me, my hair will grow back.”
Dev looked back at the dark lock she had dropped as she sought to hold him back. “Could I have that?” he wondered. “I’d like to weave it into a bracelet to wear round my wrist.”
She flushed with pleasure. “I’ll weave it for you,” she promised eagerly.
Dev gave her a wistful look—and promised himself that he would deal with Hugh. Someday.
She looked up, her eyes luminous—and it was then that Dev gave her his first hurried kiss. A boyish kiss, swift and sweet, that caused them a moment later to spring apart in embarrassment—Dev busying himself with putting away the pitchfork and Constance quickly addressing herself to weaving a bracelet for Dev out of her own dark hair.
And so it was that Dev wore around his wrist a narrow braid of silken hair, as dark and shining as the cloud that framed Constance’s sweet face—that cloud that was fast growing back again. Just as Constance was growing into young womanhood.
“I have always been an outsider here,” she pondered one day to Dev. “Yet I’m of their own blood. Why do the Daceys treat me so?”
Dev could have told her, but he forbore. She would learn the hard truth soon enough.
Part One
First Love
They've plighted troth so true today
And sealed it with a kiss.
Their love is fresh and new today,
A glorious season this!
Claxton House,
The West Riding, Yorkshire,
Spring 1681
Chapter 8
At Claxton House, the lord and lady of the manor were Church of England, but the servants were stubborn Dissenters all. They grumbled about the harsh repressive Acts that made life so hard for Dissenters, and as she ate the coarse food in the servants’ hall or helped make butter in a big wooden churn or dipped tallow candles, Constance listened. In the drafty kitchens and buttery of Claxton House, she was learning Dissent—and politics. Discovering the real world.
But her most wondrous discovery was the magnificent ruins of Fountains Abbey, stretching along—and over—the river Skell.
At Claxton House she had often heard cook inveigh against the white-robed monks who had established their great Cistercian abbey near Ripon early in the twelfth century. “Fat abbots dressed to kill, riding on prancing palfreys with great silver crosses—and them supposed to have taken vows of poverty!” she was wont to remark in derision, drawing the back of her fat hand across her broad sweaty face. Then she would return to basting with a long pewter spoon a shoulder of sizzling venison that turned on a long iron spit—or bend over a steaming pigeon pie.
“Where is Fountains?” Constance asked Dev one spring day.
“Haven’t you seen it?” His brows shot up.
“No, never.”
“I’ll take you there, first chance I get,” he promised. He was seventeen now, tall and rather startlingly handsome. All the younger chambermaids bridled when he passed by. Long-limbed, hard-muscled, his strong young face—for all he was but a stableboy and at Claxton House not likely to rise above it—mirrored authority. His voice too—and it was an attractive voice with rich timbred undertones—had a ring of authority to it. Already the other stableboys deferred to him, and not just because of his increasing prowess with his fists or his skill with a pistol, but because of something inborn, some innate sense of leadership that called out to them. He had come from a long line of commanders that reached back to that first Sir Deverell, chain-mailed knight, who had fought at the Battle of Hastings to gain for William the Norman an island empire.
“Is Fountains very far?”
“Not so far we cannot walk it,” he assured her. “But we must skirt the thorn hedge that was planted by Sir John’s grandfather to keep ‘those pestilential monks’ at a distance.”
“Who told you about that?” she asked in surprise.
“Garn, the stable master,” he grinned. “His people have tilled this land for generations.”
“He must be as big a gossip as cook,” Constance smiled. “To hear cook talk, you’d think those poor monks raped the country!”
“The abbey was rich, the people were poor,” he said shortly. “And some of cook’s people were burned to death in the time of Bloody Mary—just for the crime of being Protestant under a Catholic queen. You can’t, blame cook for being vengeful.”
Constance wondered suddenly if cook’s bright-eyed young daughter might have told him that. “But of course we live in more enlightened times,” she said quickly. “Such a thing could never happen again. Could it, Dev?” Her young face was troubled.
He gave her an uneasy look. “Who knows?” he muttered. “When a religion comes to you from overseas, what feeling has it for the local people? How does Rome know what it’s like here? I was brought up Church of England,” he added. And then grimly, “But I’m a Dissenter now!”
Constance too was a Dissenter. At Claxton House she had aligned herself with the servants instead of the master.
“And Fountains—”
“For miles around this land was ruled from Fountains Abbey. But it’s long deserted. You’ll see.”
It was on a spring afternoon with the ground soft and yielding underfoot that they set out across the fields, Dev’s long legs walking strongly with their springy stride, Constance moving along beside him in her faded lavender kirtle with a light blue shawl thrown about her shoulders against the cool wind, that swept down from the heather heights of the far-flung Yorkshire moors. They walked fast, talking and laughing. Caught up in conversation, Constance saw the great abbey all at once just at dusk and she missed a step and paused breathlessly to drink in the sight of it.
The timeless ruins, slumbering in the wooded valley drained by the River Skell, caught at her heart. Unroofed, deserted, its doorless openings and windows devoid of panes revealed the magnificence of the evening sky. Great and gray, it loomed before her, so lovely it seemed unreal. Begun early in the twelfth century, a scant seventy years after William of Normandy conquered this land, it had been unroofed, its treasure scattered, by order of a later lord, Henry of England. But in the centuries intervening, grown rich on vast church lands, immense flocks and commerce in wool, this remote and ancient seat of the austere white-robed Cistercian monks had flourished in grandeur. Even in its ruined state, it took her breath away.
They had reached Fountains just as the setting sun turned the western sky to brilliant rose madder, shading upward to pink and lavender and purple. And now with the changing of the light the clean massive lines of the somber gray walls and upflung stone lace of its gothic tracery became a rhapsody in stone. As they watched, those massive walls changed from dove gray to pinkish French gray and then to a heart-stopping rosy lavender.
As she stood there enraptured, Dev’s arm stole around her. She shivered beneath his touch and turned toward him with her eyes wide and dark and wondering. Something quite magical had happened when he touched her, something she did not quite understand, but her body for a moment had seemed to want to reach out to Dev with a will of its own.
Blushing and suddenly shy, Constance turned away, to look back at the abbey, changing now at last to a cool whited purple as the sun went down and clear white moonlight from a pale greenish moon flooded the scene.
“It’s beautiful,” she breathed, watching the moonlight turn the wide expanse of intervening grass a mysterious deep viridian green even while it silvered the winding expanse of the River Skell. And then, almost accusingly, “No one said it was so beautiful!”
Dev, who had let her go reluctantly and was thinking how radiant she looked standing there, laughed. “That’s because all at Claxton House shun the place!”
“Well, I’ll not shun it!” declared Constance fervently. “I’ll come here every chance I get!” Beckoning Dev forward, she picked up her skirts a
nd ran over the parklike green turf, ran toward the magic that waited for them along the silver river. And Dev, smiling because he loved her, followed—and caught her, and kissed her in the moonlight. A long lingering kiss that made them both draw back in wonder, shaken by the glory that seemed to beckon just ahead.
“It must be—this place,” said Constance unsteadily.
“It isn’t,” he said in a low rich voice. “It’s you.” He was toying with her hair as he spoke and now he ran his fingers playfully down the back of her neck, now he was caressing her soft pulsing throat.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
And Dev, sternly reminding himself how young she was, let his hand drop away and stepped back. He told himself sternly that he would do no more than hold her, kiss her now and then, he would give her no cause for alarm. But... her fresh young body, her elusive flower scent, her trusting face—she was like a lodestone drawing him. He wondered dizzily how long he could hold himself in check.
It was late when Constance—her body alight with strange new yearnings but her virtue still intact—crept up the stair and let herself into the bedchamber where Felicity lay sleeping. Tiptoeing not to awaken the sleeping girl, she slipped into her own cubbyhole—but not to sleep. To dream.
And so the vast complex of Fountains Abbey .became their special retreat, to which they fled to heal the wounds of the spirit that life at Claxton House was inflicting on them every day. Together they explored the lofty unroofed church which stood just north of the Skell, together roamed the nave with its eleven great bays, hand in hand stood in wonder in the lovely Chapel of the Nine Altars. They frolicked through the cellarium's magnificent double avenue of arches and lunched on whatever scraps Constance had been able to glean that day from the kitchen. There in that noble unroofed shell they sat on stones that, they agreed, had known feudal lords and mounted knights and medieval splendor—yes, and fat abbots too, they told each other, laughing. Together they wandered through the abbey’s cellars, its brewhouse, its prisons, its buttery. Constance gazed in wonder at the magnificence of the Abbot’s House and said it was amazing that with empty land all about, so much of the house should have been built on arches over the Skell.
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