“Amazing,” agreed Dev, and bent to kiss her.
Constance, who was learning caution in such things, pulled away. “How large do you think this room is?” she exclaimed to divert him, for her cheeks were still flushed and her lips still burning from that kiss.
And Dev, transported by the gossamer touch of her silken mouth, dutifully paced off the great hall and found it to measure some 170 by 70 feet. Like the great hall at Winchester Castle, it was punctuated by eighteen stone pillars and arches. It had many rooms and even its vast kitchen dwarfed to insignificance the sizeable kitchen of Claxton House, for the abbot’s kitchen measured 50 feet by 38 feet.
“And they called these monks ‘austere’!” laughed Dev, moving toward her for he was eager to kiss her again. “Why, except for castles, this must have been the largest private home in England when it was built!”
Still breathless, Constance avoided him nimbly. Only this morning Henriette, spying grass stains on her dress, had cautioned her to “Stay clear of that handsome stableboy, ma chère. He is too much like a hawk—one day he will fly away and break your heart.”
But of course, she told herself, he would not.
She knew more about Fountains now, for she had inquired about. The Abbot of Fountains, who had lived so richly, had been hanged at Tyburn like a common criminal at the time of the revolt. But bad or good, she could not bring herself, like cook, to hate his memory.
Staid Claxton House was where young Constance laid her head at night, Dissent was her religion and rebellion ran in her blood, but Fountains Abbey, so beautiful in its ruined state and indestructible forever in her memory, had become in a strange way her home of the heart.
“Oh, Dev!” She whirled about, and over him washed the purple glory of her sparkling eyes. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a home half as grand as this?”
“Wingfield is more than half as grand,” said Dev sturdily. “And more than half as large as this Abbot’s House.”
“Is it really, Dev?” Constance was taken aback. “Perhaps one day you’ll take me to see it,” she said wistfully.
He shook his head and stubborn pride rang in his voice.
“The day my uncle cast me out, I swore I’d not return save as a belted earl!”
And that would never be, she knew, for his uncle had a son of his own to inherit. Dev, the outcast, would never inherit Wingfield.
“But we have this,” she said quickly. “Our make-believe manor—Fountains!”
He caught her mood. “And to my chatelaine, I give the key to my new-won castle,” he said, bowing in exaggerated fashion and presenting her with a horseshoe which he picked up from the ground.
She laughed and with a deep curtsy accepted the horseshoe. “Just the right size for doors such as mine—if my castle had doors!” For Fountains’ doors and windowpanes, like the roof, like the gold and silver it had housed, had been carted away long before they were born.
It was at Fountains that Dev told her of his boyhood in Kent. Lying on his back on the grass with his head on her lap, his voice had richened, deepened, as he described to her the garden land of Kent with its blooming orchards, its fields of hops dried in conical oasthouses, its thatch-roofed villages, its foggy winters and its glorious summers. He told her how the rakish half-timbered wattle-and-daub cottages were built, their timbers prefabricated in the forests where the great trees were felled, shaped and fitted by adz and numbered for reassembly on the site.
And he told her, with an ache in his voice, of Wingfield, built of the gray-brown Kentish stone, approached over green velvet lawns between tall hedges of clipped yew. Listening raptly, she could almost see its dramatic gabled roofline, its banks of mullioned and transomed windows, the vast sweep of its eastern front with a tall steeple in the center and at each end square towers surmounted by pointed roofs which formed the farther end of a great U-shaped design down which one passed between five steep gables on either side. It seemed far away and unreal. Like Fountains, it was part of her dream.
But she loved to hear Dev talk about it, loved to hear the sound of his voice as he lay beside her, or sat with an arm flung lightly around her shoulders while she leaned back in the crook of that arm, looking outward at the silvery glitter of the river as it wound by.
She needed these fancies as a respite from the harsh unending grind of her life at Claxton House, just as Dev needed his fancies about someday achieving his own impossible dream—to become as his grandfather before him had been, Earl of Roxford. Children of adversity both, they would sometimes sit in silent communion while the breezes drifted down the Skell, ruffling their hair and bringing with it from the moors the scent of rain.
Sometimes on hot summer evenings they undressed with their backs to each other and swam naked in the River Skell, frolicking about the arches and foundations of the mighty stone structure looming above them. Constance, frailly built and never a very strong swimmer, would seek the shallower places and suddenly with a sweep of her arm direct a splash of water at Dev, showering his laughing face with glistening droplets. And he would retaliate by diving under and pulling her down into the depths until both their heads emerged, laughing and sputtering, from the water.
Once when she slid into the water too soon after devouring the lunch she had brought, Constance doubled up with a cramp and would have drowned but that Dev realized her difficulty, swam toward her and bore her competently to shore.
She lay there trembling and sick, her slender body pale and gleaming. And Dev, hovering over her, dripping wet, saw her as he had never seen her before—not as a shining silver mermaid half seen in the water but as a naked girl, totally desirable.
The sight made him sway on his feet.
Constance, doubled up with the cramp, was hardly aware of his rapt surveillance.
He did not touch her—not then, although he ached to. When she felt better, she dressed modestly, beyond his sight, and was sober as they walked home across the meadows, for she knew that on this day he had saved her life.
“Dev.” Her voice was a gossamer whisper as she looked up at the tall youth striding along beside her. “I’d have died back there but for you.”
His face was shadowed as he looked down at her. The moon had risen and its glow silvered the fields but cast his face in darkness. “I shouldn’t have let you go in so soon after eating,” he said roughly. “I knew better.”
She sighed, a long-drawn-out sigh that seemed to sway her whole being, like a long-stemmed meadow flower swaying before a sudden breath of wind—and then her white arms twined round his neck and she drew his face down to hers for a swift sweet kiss.
This small tribute to his prowess, so freely and so gently given, rocked Dev to his foundations. He clutched her to him with such fervor that she gasped, and he bore her to the meadow grass in his enthusiasm.
“ ’Tis only because you’re so young I’ve held back,” he said huskily. “We could stay till morning—we’d not be missed.” His hand was caressing the silky skin of her bosom as he spoke, straying down beneath her bodice to explore the delicate texture of her round breasts.
A flood of feeling went through her.
“No, I—we must get back!” She pushed him away in panic and scrambled up, afraid suddenly of she knew not what. Of becoming a woman too soon, perhaps. Of Henriette’s warning that Dev was a wild hawk who would wing away and leave her. She wanted this lightness of youth to last....
“Catch me if you can!” she cried and streaked off like a will-o’-the-wisp across the flowering meadows.
Dev, realizing that the time was not yet, ran lightly after her, fighting back the overwhelming desire that roared through his veins like a torrent. He caught her playful mood and frolicked with her—indeed they might have been two young Dolts running through the moonlight—all the way home to Claxton House.
But Midsummer’s Eve was another story.
Bonfires had been built. All the servants were dancing round them. The merriment might well go on till da
wn and no one would notice where a pair of waifs were tonight.
She and Dev, caught by the magic of summer, carried a kerchief of cakes along with them to Fountains Abbey and ate them there, talking of the future and what would one day be. They drank deep of the clean cold water of the river that once had watered the abbey gardens, lying full length in the grass to drink, scooping up clear handfuls of water in their cupped hands and laughing as they drank.
The moon had come up. Its pale radiance shimmered the stone lace into a place of wonder against the deep blue blush of the night sky. Constance lifted her head and rolled over on her back away from the water so that she might study the delicate stone tracery that always fascinated her.
She found instead a dark head obstructing her view and Dev’s warm lips pressed down upon her own.
This time she did not stir or fight him, but lay quietly with her arms outflung as his long body came down to rest lightly against hers, his weight supported on his elbows. He seemed part of the magic of the night and she knew she loved him.
Perhaps she had always loved him, from that first day when he had found her dancing on the stable floor. It was as if she had overnight become a woman and Dev had discovered it before she had.
“Oh, Constance, I want you so.” Dev’s words came to her borne on a gusty sigh and she knew he was asking—not forcing.
When she made no response, lost in the loveliness of her surroundings, in the warmth that seemed to cascade from his strong body to hers, he toyed playfully with her ear, nibbling it, and let his lips wander over her face and throat. Then he shifted his weight to the side and with questing fingers gently eased down the neck of her bodice where her young breasts strained against them, released them from the taut material and kissed them too, worrying the pink crested nipples with his tongue until a soft little moan escaped her.
And suddenly, borne on a gust of desire, she wrapped her arms around him and pulled him down to her, returning fevered kiss for fevered kiss, letting the world slip away into oblivion.
Dev was her future and she would hold him to her heart.
Through the golden shimmer of her dazzled senses, she felt the sudden thrill that went through Dev at this open-hearted acceptance of his love, she felt the pride in him as he brought his youthful manliness up hard against her feminine softness, and she forced herself not to cry out when he entered her with a sudden thrust that brought tears of pain to her eyes and wet her lashes.
She was his and she wanted him to know it.
For his part, Dev felt that he was born to love her. His lean body fitted itself to her fragile slenderness as perfectly as a hand fits a glove. Her silken skin was a madness driving him on—and on. Clothes were something to be brushed away. Time had no meaning. Her body was alight with new discoveries, swift sensations of rushing feeling at his touch, mounting, ever mounting. Like enchanted lovers, there beside the silver river, they strove and murmured and loved and kissed and let themselves be swept onward by a river all their own, a river of endless desire on which they tossed like drifting leaves, uncaring of their destination. But their river built to a raging torrent, a wild uncharted stream that of a sudden burst its banks and swept them with it madly to thrills undreamt of.
And when it was over, when they lay there side by side, bodies touching in the pulsing tremor of the afterglow, their spirits seemed to mingle even as their bodies had done.
Not till the moon was on the wane could they bring themselves to leave—for they knew they must return before the sun was up.
Constance rose first. She smiled at Dev as she tucked her round young breasts back into her straining bodice and smoothed down her skirts around her slender hips. She looked lovely standing there against the background of the silver river, Dev thought dreamily. He still could not believe that she was his.
“We should exchange our vows,” she told him softly.
“I would we could have the banns cried,” he told her in a husky voice. But they both knew that would mean dismissal for him and God knew what for her.
“No matter,” she said raptly. “This is a holy place. Time has hallowed it.” Holy—and beloved by me. “And besides,” she added haltingly, “it is where we first...”
“I know,” he said, catching her mood as always. He rose and took her hand, there beside the ruined abbey beneath the open summer sky. “On this day, Constance, I do plight you my troth and swear to be ever true.”
Her own voice caught as she softly echoed his words, and her eyes, looking up trustingly into his face, were velvet pools in which he sank and was lost. “On this day, Deverell, I do plight you my troth, and swear to be ever true.”
And there they kissed, beneath the stars of Yorkshire.
And for them, the ancient stones they stood before were an altar fashioned for them alone, the upflung walls, rising magnificently in stone lacework against the sky, a cathedral of their love, and the faint murmur of distant thunder rolling down from the Cleveland Hills to the northwest, a soft benediction, pronouncing them man and wife.
Constance would always consider it a marriage, that simple clasping of hands and exchanging of vows that only God had witnessed. For on that night of stars, deep in her heart, she gave herself to Dev, and she knew her feelings for him would never alter.
Afterward they drank deep of the cold waters of the Skell and walked back hand in hand, awed into silence, to Claxton House, both of them with the feeling that life had changed for them, momentously.
Claxton House,
The West Riding, Yorkshire,
Midsummer's Day 1681
Chapter 9
The cock was crowing as the lovers reached the dark pile of Claxton House, and Dev, after a last swift kiss, went his way while Constance slipped into the house through a kitchen door that was left unlocked by kindly cook so that the scullery maids might slip back unobserved after trysting with their lovers;
At the top of the stairs she was suddenly confronted by Hugh. He was wearing dusty riding boots and his face was almost comically thunderstruck at sight of her, disheveled and with meadow grasses tangled in her rich dark hair.
“I—didn’t know you were back,” she gasped.
“Just got in,” he said, and then with a nasty laugh, “and find you just getting in too. Well, if you get yourself pregnant, you won’t be so lucky as your mother!” he added brutally.
“What do you mean?” she cried indignantly. “My mother—”
“Was well along with child before my uncle married her.”
She stood quivering. “So what if she was?” she demanded angrily. “She’d not be the first to visit the marriage bed before the preacher!”
“But the child was not his,” he mocked. “He admitted that to my grandfather. Haven’t you wondered about the way you’re treated here? You’re an embarrassment, we don’t know quite what to do with you! You bear our name, yet you’re not of our blood.”
“I don’t believe you!” she cried sharply. But even as she spoke, she knew it must be true. Like the missing piece of a puzzle, it explained everything. And now she knew why her mother had clutched her to her, whispering, Don’t ask, don’t ever ask.... With a sob, she ran past him.
“I wouldn’t let on that you know,” he called softly after her. “For then Grandfather might decide to put you in the kitchen permanently—and forget you.” His mocking laugh rang out again and she felt it go through her like separate points of a pitchfork.
She was not one of them. But then, who was she? Who had her father been? She could not ask grinning Hugh, and she feared to ask that fierce old man, whom she had thought to be her grandfather.
When she darted past a sleeping Felicity and reached her own small sleeping alcove at last, her body—which should have been tingling with newfound wonder—felt cold and watchful and frightened.
She leant against the wall and her thoughts pounded at her. Who am I? Who was my father? My real father?
Constance kept out of Hugh’s way throughout the
day. But it was late afternoon before she managed to catch Dev alone in the stables. She blurted out the whole story and wept on his shoulder.
“I knew about it,” he said quietly.
“You—knew?” she whispered, pulling back from him.
“Yes.” He kept his hold on her, protectively. “But none of the servants know, not even the governess so far as I can tell. Hugh probably wasn’t supposed to tell you.”
Her world seemed to be tilting. “How could you know?” she cried.
“I found some papers,” he told her briefly. “Last year when all the house servants were down with colds and I was sent up to the main house to clean out the fireplaces. As I was cleaning the hearth in Sir John’s bedchamber a brick came loose and when I pulled at it, a metal box fell down and papers spilled out. I saw they concerned you so I took the box and hid it and replaced the brick.”
“Where—where are they?” she asked uncertainly.
“I’ll get them for you,” he said. “I’ve hidden them up in the rafters where it’s dry.”
She climbed up to the hayloft with him and took the box he handed her in trembling hands. She was almost afraid to open it.
There were two letters in the box:
The first was a letter from her father, written to her grandfather from London. She read the pertinent parts twice: I know you disapprove of me, sir, and that you will have heard rumors by now about my marriage. They are quite true. Our child—she noted that he said “our child,” which meant surely that he claimed her—was born but five months after the wedding and but six months after I met Anne. You are not to concern yourself about that as I intend to make no claim upon you nor upon the estate. Brave words from a man who had been forced to come crawling back bringing with him his threadbare family! Besides the love she bore him, Constance felt a quivering sympathy for this foster father who had claimed her so bravely.
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