A World Apart (8 page)

‘That is of little import.' The viscount straightened, fixed his gaze upon his son. ‘As her father's only heir, she comes well endowed. She has the prospect of inheriting a generous fortune.' He coughed. ‘Lately expanded at my expense, when I sold my cattle to Thurber for a song. Her parents, they expect the match. No doubt they see a brace of fine sons flowing from the union; a succession of gentlemen to carry on the family name. Last time I saw Thurber — it was at the horse sales — he said, I repeat his very words, “Your Harry is grown to a fine figure of a man, John. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a handsome look about him. I hear he is a good
horseman, a crack shot, and a mean batsman on the cricket pitch. My Agatha sighs over him for days every time they meet.”'

The viscount turned to his son. ‘To bait the hook to catch you, Harry, he has offered to buy part of our estate for a quite generous sum. A sum which will go some way towards paying my debt to those cursed bankers.' The viscount paused. Harry waited for the fatal blow. ‘But he will buy the land only if the marriage takes place. To put it in plain words, Thurber is buying an estate for his heirs.' Harry reeled. He was being sold as a breeding bull.

‘We are bankrupt unless you make the match, Harry.' Sir John had read the emotions plainly displayed on his son's face. ‘Eight hundred years ago, William the Conqueror gave this land to one of his faithful generals as a reward for his conduct at the Battle of Hastings. Now, hundreds of years of De Havilland family history will end, hacked to death by those ruthless bankers.' He hesitated. ‘Unless you marry Agatha.' He watched as Harry stared into his glass, then continued.

‘Thurber will populate our now barren land with cattle. Because our land adjoins his property, it will suit him well. To sweeten the pill, he has said that if I agree to the arrangement he will let me see out my days in this house. I guess that when I depart this life, you and your young wife will live here. And so may your offspring's eldest sons, God willing, for another thousand years and more.' He drained the contents of his glass, clunked it onto the table.

‘You must marry Agatha, Harry. You must begin to court her forthwith. The Thurbers are to host a ball a few weeks from today with the express intention of having you court their daughter. The date has been chosen to fit with Oxford's end of term. We expect you to woo her at that ball, then become betrothed soon afterwards. Very soon afterwards. My agent has hinted that he may persuade the bankers to hold back from foreclosing if they see some cash glinting on the horizon. Otherwise…' The viscount emptied the last of the decanter into his glass, slumped back into his chair.

Harry took his leave, sick at heart. He had been born into a household that put the value of the family estate above all else. It had provided his ancestors with a gracious, affluent lifestyle for the past seven hundred years. Now reality loomed. His father was poorly, and if his addiction to brandy continued unchecked he would likely die soon. Harry must not let his father die in disgrace, burdened with the knowledge that his foolishness had cost his heirs the estate which had belonged to the family for centuries.

As Harry walked upstairs to his chambers, a picture of Eliza flashed into his mind yet again. As she stood to greet him at their rendezvous, she smiled up at him. Her arms locked round his body. She nestled close against him, purring like a happy kitten. Then she lifted her face to him, eyes wide with happiness. He kissed the open, inviting lips. The heart-pounding joy of her closeness swept through his body. He crushed her hard against his chest, kissing her in a frenzy of delight. At last, at last, she was back in his arms. Their kisses lasted an eternity — an eternity of joy. Then the warmth of her compliant body begged him to explore. His nose caught the warm scent of her womanliness. In his fantasy, he abandoned himself body and soul to the visceral urges seething inside him like a boiling cauldron fit to explode.

‘I suppose Sir John has his reasons,' Hannah said to her foster-daughter when Cook told her that Eliza's schooling arrangements were at an end. ‘It don't do to question the gentry's ways.
No good ever comes of it.' A few days later, Hannah gave her listless daughter a letter handed to her by Mrs Hawkins.

‘It must be from your friend Harry,' she said. Eliza thanked her and hurried to a private place to read it.

As soon as she could steal a moment of privacy, Eliza found pen, ink, and paper and replied.

Not wanting her foster-mother to know about the letter, Eliza decided to waylay Jem the coachman and ask him to make certain it reached Harry. He assured her that he would. A few days before, the viscount had told the servants that he wanted no more contact between the village maid and his children. A certain flush of his face gave them to think he meant it. That look boded ill for anyone who was caught disobeying the new edict. For a while, Jem toyed with
the notion of handing the letter to the viscount, but thought better of it. After a few days indecision he threw it on the fire, glad to be rid of it.

Harry was first puzzled, then hurt, then cynical about the lack of a letter from Eliza. He could not find the courage to write again. When he came home to attend the ball arranged by the Thurbers to begin his courtship with Agatha, he discreetly enquired after her from Mrs Hawkins, who had always loved the little boy, now become a strapping young man.

‘Ah, she be gone back to her cottage. She helps to care for her old father. He be a cripple nowadays. She'll be put to scrubbing and cooking till she's old enough for the dairy, I shouldn't wonder.'

‘But is she — ?'

‘Don't get no ideas about that girl into your head, Master Harry. Your father said if anyone caught you trying to find her, to tell him straight away or he'd sack them from his employ. We're all dumb here.'

Harry had fretted for weeks after his letter to Eliza remained unanswered. During his brief visits home, during which his father ceaselessly supervised his contacts with Agatha Thurber, he could scarcely court Eliza. He recalled again and again the blood vow they had made in their youthful innocence all those years before. Would Eliza remember? Would she plan to honour her vow? For now, he was handcuffed against being with the woman he would always love. He could but hope that she would remember him as he would always, always remember her.

‘I been meaning to tell you, Eliza.' Hannah wiped her hands on her apron and fixed her daughter with a meaningful look. ‘Young Will Hardy, as works as a carpenter. I saw him giving you sheep's eyes at church not so long ago.' She stretched her arms wide. ‘Now there's a decent, upstanding young man. And him with a good trade, as can one day make enough money to build his wife a cottage.' She hesitated, then added a postscript. ‘A cottage fit for a large family.' Eliza turned away. The last thing she needed now was a matchmaking scheme from her mother.

For long months Eliza had dreamed of the kisses they might share if Harry ever returned. From village gossip, she had heard of his obligation to marry Agatha Thurber. Even if he might still love Eliza, they could never share love again. Yet her illogical instincts, her dreams, refused to accept the too-obvious. How many nights had she lain awake, sensing again the desperate hunger of their last kiss? How often had she relived the rapture that had surged through her body as he lay naked beside her by the lake on that last summer afternoon? For too many nights, she let those dreams sweep her to ecstasy, let them take over her mind.

She feels the skin on her naked back tingle as she lies in the soft grass. She watches Harry slide closer. Watches as his hands reach towards her. Her whole body quivers as those hands touch her shoulder, her arm, her breast. She begs him to lie closer, so their nakedness touches from shoulders to toes. She opens her mouth to invite his kiss. Drown in the warm wetness of it. Beg for more, more…

She had wondered often what making love with Harry would be like. What tidal waves of sensation might wash over them as she gave her body to him? What might the future hold for the two of them? What would it be like to bear his children?

Even back then, in the months before that wretched afternoon, a part of her mind — the part fuddy-duddies would call common sense — had told her none of those girlish imaginings could ever be. Now, in the cold light of her workaday mornings, she had ordered herself to accept reality. But to spite her logic, her love had grown each day, a huge oak weathering the storms of winter, gaining strength from adversity.

Now, as weeks turned to months, Eliza wrestled again with cold reality. Her dreams of a life with Harry must now become dust, blown away in a bitter wind. Before his departure, she had never understood her foster-mother's too-often-repeated wisdom that peasants and gentry were cut from different cloth.

‘The gentry are people, and we are people, Mother,' she'd often remonstrated. ‘We have the same arms and legs and hands and feet. We think the same, we move the same.' She remembered her joy at discovering the classics, of reading Shakespeare, of unravelling the mysteries of mathematics. The vicar had told her often enough that her passion for learning was often experienced by the more intelligent of the gentry; another instance of common ground between the classes.

‘They are gentry, and we are village folk, and that's an end to it, Eliza,' her tired mother would say as she kneaded a mound of dough.

‘But I love my learning, Mother. I — '

‘I said that's an end to it, Eliza.'

Now, as she walked to the garden nursing her wounded heart, basket in hand, to pull carrots for dinner, Eliza saw the truth that formed the bedrock of her mother's homely wisdom. She wiped away a disobedient tear, set the basket on the ground, and began to look for carrots ready for the pulling.

In the days that followed, Eliza came to a decision. She might spend an age bleeding for a love that could never be, or she could turn the next page in the book of her life. She would always love Harry. He had been her first love, and he would be her last. Had not many poets rejoiced over their first love, written that such depth of passion could be experienced only once in a lifetime? Very well, then. As some kitchen philosopher had once said, ‘T'is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.' Eventually, Eliza would settle into a new life that would grow from the battered stump of her hacked-down dreams. Indeed, she had loved and lost.

For a time after Harry had left, Eliza took evening walks to the iron gates of the Great House, reliving the sweetness of their kisses in the secret places beyond that forbidding gate. Now she saw the foolishness of that stupidly romantic act. She had cut a scar with a knife each time it began to heal. Now, as she began her new life, she must wean herself away from that destructive addiction.

Hannah had always inundated her foster-daughter with motherly love. Now, sensing Eliza's need, she acted. One evening as Eliza stepped into the cottage, weary after her day at the village school, Hannah greeted her with a strangely bright smile.

‘Look as who's come to sup with us, Eliza.'

Eliza peered into the dark kitchen. There, leaning forward, elbows on the table, sat Will Hardy, eyes following her every move. So her aunt had acted on her suggestion of a few nights before. She had decided it was time for her daughter to consider Will as a husband. As Eliza put down her satchel, the young man stood, bowed, fidgeted with his neckcloth. His smile faltered at the look of weary coldness she couldn't hide from him.

She looked into his face and smiled politely. At the least, she should treat him with good manners. He was a head shorter than Harry, and despite his youth, already a little stooped. His mop of tousled brown hair, his patchy beard, looked as if they'd been scrubbed clean with a broom for the occasion. His workman's hands clenched and unclenched as he groped for words. His humble clothes were doubtless his Sunday best. At least his neckcloth was clean, free of the sweat stains that seemed an essential part of a workman's dress. He had made an effort. For her aunt's sake, Eliza must be pleasant.