The Master of Winterbourne

by Louise Allen

  A senior colleague of Matthew's was complimenting her on the meal and she turned to answer him politely but her husband’s eyes drew hers again and she turned back like a lodestone to the north.

  Around them rose the hubbub of conversation and laughter, the clatter of knives and pewter. The drink passed round and faces grew red with good food and the warmth of the room, despite all the windows and the great door standing open. Matthew's eyes glittered. Henrietta told herself it was the ale, but knew it was not. She found herself laughing too often, rather too shrilly. Her skin prickled between her breasts, not with the heat but with the intensity of the silent stare Matthew directed at her. She knew now, after last night, why her knees felt weak, why her pulses raced and there was a hollow feeling deep in her stomach.

  As the conversation of the guests grew louder the two of them remained still, quiet islands in the sea of noise. Henrietta supposed she was responding properly to the questions of her neighbours but it was mechanical. All her consciousness was focused wholly on Matthew. She wanted to be in his arms on that big soft bed, learning his body in even greater detail, exchanging kisses and caresses that burned and tormented until at last they lay fulfilled together. She stifled a sigh: it was a long, long time until nightfall.

  Her husband was listening with a very straight face to Serena Willoughby telling a tale which was causing her to blush and cast down her eyes coyly. Henrietta suspected she was asking for advice on her suitors. To all intents and purposes Matthew was following closely, but Henrietta knew his eyes and attention were focused on her. He saw her watching him and one eyelid drooped in a slow wink.

  Covered in confusion, her heart fluttering madly, Henrietta cut herself a piece of cheese. He must have forgiven her for this morning and she wanted his forgiveness so much. She loved him, craved his love with a hunger that astonished her. But he didn't love her, not yet. But he would, she vowed. She would replace Sarah in his heart somehow, and perhaps one day he would love her as he'd loved his first wife.

  The cheese was sharp on her palate, but she didn't notice. Before she did anything she must quit her promise to James, send those papers on their way, and the message in the glove from Robert's Oxford contact promised help.

  The last of the meal had been eaten, the dishes almost cleared. Many of the ladies were already retiring to the cool of Aunt Susan's parlour but Serena Willoughby hung on her mother's arm, begging permission to go and play bowls with the other young people.

  Lady Willoughby cast a sharp look round, decided none of the young men presented a threat to an unchaperoned girl, and gave her permission.

  ‘Come with me and I'll find the bowls for you.’ Henrietta gathered the laughing group around her and led them through the screens to the large press at the foot of the stairs. She showed the men where the wooden bowls lay and reassured the enthusiasts that the green was newly scythed and rolled. They trooped off, leaving her suddenly alone, her skirts brushing the oak chest containing the glove and its message.

  Some of the older men still lingered in the hall talking. She heard Sir Walter and Matthew, still apparently discussing sheep, and realised she had the perfect opportunity to retrieve the message and take it to her room.

  It was the work of a moment to lift the lid and extract the package from between the folds of her heavy winter cloak. The scrap of parchment was where she had left it, rolled into a cylinder in one finger of the right-hand glove.

  A step sounded on the flags behind her. With a guilty start she dropped the heavy lid of the chest, the sound echoing like a thunderclap up the stairwell.

  Hands, warm and sure, clasped her shoulders, and Matthew's lips caressed the line of her neck from earlobe to collarbone. ‘What are you doing out here alone?’ he murmured against her skin, sending the fine hairs on the back of her neck into tingling arousal.

  ‘F-finding the bowls,’ she managed to stammer, speech more and more difficult as his lips moved down the curve of her shoulder and his hands dropped to girdle her waist. Slowly, deliberately, he turned her to face him and as he did so her full skirts knocked the gloves to the floor.

  Matthew stooped, picked them up and examined them. ‘These are fine.’ He ran an appreciative finger over the bullion embroidery. ‘Who gave you them?’

  ‘I don’t know, there was no card with them. They're the ones that arrived last night while we were in the yard with the servants. I must have left them here when we came in.’ All of that was the literal truth; her conscience was bad enough already without adding lying to her sins.

  Matthew discarded them without a second glance, pulling her into his arms against his hard, disturbing body. ‘It's too hot in here,’ he murmured against her lips. ‘Come outside.’

  Striving to stifle her disappointment that he was not carrying her off to their chamber, Henrietta allowed herself to be led across the orchard. Silently she chided herself for having such immodest thoughts. Matthew would come to her in their chamber at night as was fitting and wanting anything else would make her the wanton he'd teased her with.

  Ducking under the low branches laden with hard, unripe apples, her hand in Matthew's, she thought only of the gloves lying on the chest in the hall. What if a servant or a guest picked them up, felt the message secreted in the finger? Oh, James, she thought despairingly, if only you'd found someone else to bequeath your secret to, how happy I could be now. But there had been no one else, and there was no one else now to pass the burden to. It was her responsibility to deal with, and quickly.

  ‘Matthew, stop. I must go back to the house, speak with Letty.’

  ‘It can wait.’ His voice was smoky with promise, lighting an answering fire in her.

  ‘No.’ She wriggled her fingers free of his grasp and managed to look coyly shy. ‘It is something for… a woman's ears.’

  The passion was still in his eyes, but he nodded understandingly and let her go. ‘Don't be long. I will be waiting for you at the willow by the pond.’

  Her heart was thudding, but not because she was running back to the house. She hated deceiving him, using womanly wiles to cajole him. But the message had to come before everything; there were lives at stake.

  The gloves were where she had left them. With a sigh of thankfulness Henrietta lifted the lid and thrust them back, deep into the folds of her winter cloak, releasing a strong smell of camphor and wormwood from the stored cloth.

  Matthew was waiting for her at the pond where he'd first offered her marriage that day when he had arrived so unexpectedly. Now that it was summer the old weeping willow made a canopy of green sweeping almost to the ground. Matthew held apart the branches like opening a curtain and they stepped inside the green coolness. He dropped the branches behind them. ‘I found this place the other morning. Did you realise you could conceal yourself here like this?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Henrietta clapped her hands in recollection, her worries suddenly banished. ‘Alice and James and I used to play here when we were children, but I had quite forgotten. It is like being in a room with just a window out on to the pond.’

  ‘And only a coot to watch us.’ His voice was suddenly husky, full of longing as he drew her down on to the dry grass.

  ‘Matthew? What are we doing here?’ But, joyfully, she knew only too well as his lips travelled down from her temple to the corner of her mouth.

  He traced the curve of her lips with the tip of his tongue, tasting, tantalising, sending shafts of fire coursing down her limbs. Expecting him to kiss her full on the mouth, Henrietta closed her eyes and raised parted lips, but his tongue was busy now at her wrist, teasing the pulse-point, his teeth nipping the swell at the base of her thumb.

  She opened her mouth to protest but only managed to whisper. ‘What if someone were to come?’

  ‘No one will come, they are all occupied. And none will think to seek us today of all days.’

  Questing fingers were loosening the laces at her back and Henrietta leaned against his chest to make it easier for him undo her
bodice. Part of her mind was stunned by his audacity but the drugging sensuality his knowing fingers was orchestrating in her overrode all her reticence.

  The light was green and heavy on her closed lids, the silence absolute save for the murmur of bees and the susurration of blood in her veins.

  Matthew laid her back against the cushioning turf and took a deep, ragged breath. ‘You are so beautiful,’ he said, so low that she hardly caught the words. He slipped the bodice from her shoulders to savour her skin for a long moment. He lowered his mouth to the swell of her breast revealed by the slipping bodice, caressing the warm skin with gentleness. ‘I cannot believe you are really mine,’ he murmured against her skin.

  The tenderness in his voice unleashed all the pent-up guilt and her burgeoning love for him. Her throat thickened with tears and a sob she could not repress shook her.

  One hot tear splashed on to Matthew's cheek. ‘My darling. Henrietta, why are you weeping?’ He sat up, pulling her into his arms. ‘You are overwrought. My passion for you is driving me too fast… the wedding… last night. Forgive me. Do you want to go back to the house?’

  ‘No!’ Henrietta protested with more haste than modesty, her vehemence bringing a smile to his lips. ‘I want to be here, alone with you. Only, I thought you would be angry with me after this morning. I am sorry. I should not have pressed you so or said those things about my father and James.’ He looked away, not meeting her eyes. ‘I know it pains you to speak of it – I will never mention it again.’

  Matthew got slowly to his feet and stood staring out through the screen of spear-shaped leaves to the pond beyond. For a moment Henrietta feared she had awoken his anger again until he turned to face her.

  ‘No. We must speak of it. I was a fool to think I could keep it from you. This marriage must be a clean beginning for both of us. Secrets are like droplets of acid, corroding where they touch. There will be no secrets for us.’

  Henrietta dropped her eyes, unable to match the sincerity in his green gaze. ‘Go on,’ she whispered.

  ‘I knew the King was wrong. His demands were ruining the country and had to be resisted. But I thought then, at the beginning, that I could not bring myself to fight my fellow countrymen. I was already involved as lawyer to Lord Hargraves, a moderate man whose views were much in accord with my own.’

  He shredded a leaf between unconscious fingers, gaze opaque. Henrietta felt he was looking back at his younger, more idealistic self. ‘When he became a colonel with Cromwell's army he asked me to accompany him as an intelligence officer.' Henrietta met his eyes and he spoke sharply as though rebuffing a criticism she had not intended. ‘I held the rank of major, I was not a spy skulking around the taverns for scraps of gossip. Hargraves used me to interpret the information and reports that reached him, to handle his correspondence and cyphers.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘The roads of England must have been thick with couriers carrying concealed messages. It is a wonder any of us can write an open letter in plain English now.’

  Henrietta's answering laugh was hollow. ‘How came you to fight, then?’ She had to turn the conversation from secret messages before her guilt showed on her face.

  ‘As a man of honour I could not avoid it. When the fighting came I found I had no choice, there was no middle path, no party of compromise to join. It was Parliament or the King and to choose either meant to fight and kill.’

  Henrietta looked at him with compassion. How difficult it must have been. Her father and James never had a moment's doubt that their cause was right and that to fight and kill for it was right also. But this man, her husband, had thought deeply, made a difficult choice. He had faced the consequences of that choice and his conscience and his scars would never let him forget. ‘I understand, Matthew. Please believe me, I admire your honesty and I respect your convictions even though I cannot share them.’

  Matthew knelt beside her, his eyes on her face. ‘I have opened my heart to you, Henrietta. I have never spoken of my feelings about this to anyone, not even to Sarah. There is nothing else I am keeping from you. I beg you, be as honest with me. Let us not start this marriage with secrets between us.’

  If only she could. Her heart contracted painfully within her but her conscience held firm. She had sworn an oath not to reveal James's secret and now he was dead no one could release her from that promise. She was a poor liar and he must have read her unease on her face.

  ‘Nothing you are prepared to tell me even now,’ he finished coldly. ‘If this is the way you want our marriage to be, madam, then so be it. I shall return to our guests and leave you alone to the contemplation of your secrets. I hope you find them adequate company.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  The August weather was so hot that the harvest was early that year. The scything gangs had finished cutting and the wheat stood in stooks across the shorn landscape and the village boys were enjoying themselves earning a few pence scaring birds off the drying ears of grain with catapult and pea-shooter.

  From her vantage point on the gatehouse roof Henrietta could see the gleaners stooping to their task in the last field to be cut. The village women and children moved slowly between the stooks gathering the fallen ears of wheat in their kilted-up aprons. Beyond them the occasional gleam of silver marked the course of the Bourne, sadly diminished by the lack of rain since late Spring.

  Henrietta's back ached in sympathy with the women who had been working since sunrise. But they would feel the labour worthwhile, for the right to glean their lord's fields would keep them in flour the whole winter long.

  Small children played among the stooks at hide-and-seek and, when they thought themselves unwatched, slid down the polished slopes of stacked wheat. The older children sat in what shade they could find, minding the babes in arms and watching over the water flasks and baskets of bread and cheese.

  The sight reminded her why she had climbed the tower and her momentary happiness evaporated. She had come to look for Matthew, who had left her bed that morning before she woke as he had done every morning of their marriage.

  Try as she might, nothing she did or said broke through the unnatural pattern of the last month. Matthew was punctiliously polite to her by day, but no more. There was no conversation, no exchange of news, no discussion of the estate. On the occasions when he went up to London on legal business he told her nothing when he returned.

  Her refusal to tell him the secret he sensed she kept had put an insurmountable barrier between them. Henrietta knew she had hurt him deeply, even though he didn't love her. For a proud and private man to open his heart as he had done, and then to be rebuffed, was something he could not forgive.

  Matthew avoided her company, her touch, until they were alone together at night. But in the darkness of their chamber he was passionate, fevered almost, like a man who had thirsted all day but who could now drink his fill. He never spoke to her of his feelings, never asked of hers.

  When he fell asleep she lay dry-eyed, lying still so as not to wake him in case he thought her using her wiles to soften him. She could find nothing to alter his coldness. He had demanded her duty and obedience and she gave both in good measure; the household ran with clockwork precision despite the grumbles of servants used to more easy-going ways. Matthew appeared to accept this as the usual way for Winterbourne. In desperation Henrietta forced standards of deportment and behaviour on herself that had Aunt Susan shaking her head in wonderment and no little concern and enquired, with clumsy attempts at subtlety, whether there were any signs yet and then murmured that it was early days.

  If anyone had thought to ask her opinion Henrietta would not have said it was early days. Matthew came to her every night, yet only yesterday her hopes that she was with child had been dashed. There was no one in whom she could talk of her disappointment. Her aunt and Alice would merely tell her to be patient and she could hardly confide the real reason for her unhappiness to them.

  The crunch of wooden-soled shoes on the carriageway below recalled her to the prese
nt. She leaned over the parapet to see Alice's broad-brimmed straw hat as her friend turned out of the gate and took the road towards the downland. Mistress Weldon carried a laden basket on one arm, its contents concealed by a white napkin.

  ‘Alice, wait for me!’ Henrietta clattered down the staircase, careless of the dust and cobwebs, her own straw hat swinging by its ribbons from her fingers.

  ‘Mistress.’ Alice took in the dust marks on Henrietta's plain green linen gown, and her bare head. ‘You should not hurry so in this heat.’

  ‘And you, Mistress Weldon, should not be carrying that heavy basket in your condition.’ Alice, nearly seven months with child, looked flushed and tired despite the coolness of the loose robe she was wearing.

  ‘Give me that basket,’ Henrietta ordered, wresting it from Alice's grip. ‘Where are you taking it?’

  ‘Mistress,’ Alice protested, ‘it is not fitting for you to carry it.’

  ‘Alice, you are not my maidservant now, nor have you been this six weeks past. You are Mistress Weldon, Robert's wife as well as my friend, as you have always been. Could you not now bring yourself to call me Henrietta?’

  ‘Very well, Henrietta,’ Alice agreed gravely, very much the dignified matron.

  Henrietta concealed a smile behind her hand. Alice had taken to the role of steward's wife like a duck to water. As Mr Halsey the vicar was unmarried Alice's social standing was high in the village, second only to the ladies of the big house. The learning and graces she had acquired as Henrietta's companion from childhood stood her in good stead now and the child she was carrying could one day marry into good yeoman stock.

  ‘Where are you taking this basket?’ Henrietta lifted the edge of the napkin and the smell of fresh bread and the tang of cheese rose into the dusty air. A stone bottle nestled in one corner.

  ‘To my husband. He is overseeing the new sheep pens in Lammas Mead and told me not to expect him home for dinner. I worry he will not stop to eat.’