Jayne Fresina (29 page)

She collected her wooden box of belongings, kissed Mistress Carver goodbye and left on her brother’s horse.

“Look after him for me,” was the last thing she said, her heart too full and breaking under the unrelenting pressure.

Forlorn, the old lady nodded. “He’ll miss you. You know he’ll never forget you.”

Lucy turned her face away, unable to reply. Of course she’d known this day must come. Why then did it rip into her heart like a bolt from the blue, never expected, striking her dead on the spot?

Chapter 20

October 1588

John watched Alice walking along the verge, a warm shawl wrapped tight around her, breath evaporating in a fine mist around her mouth. She stopped and waved.

On his way out of the threshing barn, he blinked up at the dull sky and sniffed. The autumn air was dank and thick, tinged with the acrid scent of burning leaves, mold and old, dead rotting things. But somehow it pleased him. He supposed it was another of his odd quirks, but he looked forward to winter. Perhaps it was because the summer and spring months were so busy for him, the days long and hard. In winter, as night drew in sooner and daylight came later, he enjoyed a sense of calm, the harvest accomplished for another year, the barns and storage shed full for the winter. His mother worried he’d have too much time on his hands, too much time to think, but he was unconcerned. As he said to her, he had nothing to be sorry for. Life went on. It had to.

“Alice!” he called out, trotting over to her. “Where are you off to?”

“I promised to help your mother salt the bacon and she’s going to show me how she makes her smoked sausage.”

They walked along together toward the farmhouse. “You’re looking well, Alice.” He was trying these days, trying hard.

“Thank you, John.” She smiled hesitantly.

She was a good-looking woman, he thought, considering her profile again, as if he hadn’t seen it before, many times. Alice was a little stern and solemn, took life too seriously at times, but he liked her. They wouldn’t quarrel. She would never disobey and if she questioned, she’d keep it to herself. There were no extremes in her. Alice certainly wasn’t brazen, neither did she hide any vulnerability. Even her unrequited love for him was something she faced and dealt with calmly. She was just Alice.

He ought to marry her. He’d always known it in the back of his mind.

That other woman was a distraction for a while…he abruptly brought the hammer down on that thought, because he kept the bronze-haired deceiver out of his mind as much as possible.

Again he looked at Alice, dear, worthy, patient, pure Alice. She did have a few unfortunate habits, such as chewing her fingernails and clicking her tongue against her teeth. She very seldom met him eye for eye and she didn’t care much for his dog. But all these things might surely be overcome in time.

“I ought to tell you, John,’ she said, looking ahead, “I’m going to be married.”

He almost tripped over a hardened rut. “Married?”

“Aye. Martin Frye asked me.” She sighed. “Did you think I would wait forever, John? I’m four and twenty.”

He was annoyed. That impetuous, sly boy always wanted something to which he wasn’t entitled. Now he had Alice.

“You’re not angry, are you?” she asked softly, finally looking at him. When he didn’t answer, she added, “I know you’re not in love with me, John. You never were, not the way I wanted.” Another sigh drifted by, a fragile, wispy evaporation of air on this crisp autumn day. “I suppose we might have married and been happy enough in our way, but I wanted something more, something special, something I couldn’t live without.”

He bit down on his tongue, looking away from her, afraid she might read in his face those thoughts now flooding through the barrier.

“And I know you want the same,” she added.

They walked on, silent. A stiff wind caught the fringe of her shawl, ruffling it frantically.

“Why did you let her go, John?” she asked, plaintive as a little bird at his shoulder.

“I didn’t,” he responded. His heart beat thickened, the two broken parts shadowing one another. “She left me.”

It was almost six weeks since she’d left him and the wound was still raw. Nothing healed it, not his mother’s calm words that tried to soothe, nor his own need to forget and move on. The day she left, when he came in from the fields and his mother told him, he went up to her room, as if he couldn’t quite believe she’d gone, and found the pearl earrings she left for him. Both of them this time.

In the evenings, by the fire, he sometimes pretended to sleep, just so his mother wouldn’t talk to him. Vince often sat by Lucy’s old chair now, waiting for her to come in, ears pricking at every slight noise, every wail of wind or beat of rain on the windows. His mother, exclaiming no good could come of “sloping around all mournful,” would sing songs with false merriment, her foot tapping as she worked at her sewing or wrote to her daughters.

Only once did she mention Lucy’s name, recalling the pickles in that particular jar were ones she and Lucy made together. The very moment she said it, her expression hardened, she slammed the jar down on the table before him and talked of something else. John had no idea what she said next. Spreading the pickle on his pork pie, he choked it down, not tasting, not feeling.

* * * *

Nathaniel finally came home to Souls Dryft, ready to play the role of war hero, full of unlikely sea tales and a little too much ale. Finding Lucy gone, he accused his cousin of being careless and letting her go.

“I didn’t,” John replied stiffly, just as he’d done to Alice. “I didn’t let her go. She left me.”

Nathaniel ranted and raved. “I thought you’d at least manage to keep her safe here, idiot boy.” Storming up and down by the hearth, stepping over Vince at the turn, he added crossly, “I didn’t send her to you at once, because I knew what a little cork-head you were and she had her own problems to straighten out, but then I had to weigh anchor and there was no more time. So I sent her here, hoping the two of you together would sort it all out.” Lifting his palms to press on the low roof-beams, he exhaled a rich, fulsome curse. “Love conquers all, they say. Let the two lost love birds find one another, I thought to myself. I even wondered if I’d been wrong to keep her away from you, but no, says I, he thinks to marry that Alice creature who has no backbone and will let him walk all over her. I’d best be sure he’s got the idea out of his worm-holed noggin, before I send luscious little Lucy into the fray, or I’ll be blamed for causing mischief, as usual!”

He only paused for breath when his aunt pushed a tankard of cider into his waiting hand and then they watched while he drained it in one swallow.

“I take it you don’t know what you sent her back to?” he growled, wiping the back of one hand across his gray-peppered beard.

“A husband,” John snapped curtly.

“Who beat her with his fist.” Nathaniel held out his tankard for more cider and burped. “I doubt she told you. It took me all my charm to wring it out of her and we all know you have none o’ that.”

John couldn’t swallow. His hands clenched into fists on his knees and Vince raised his head from the hearth stones, as if he heard some warning sound no human ear could detect.

“That’s why I took her to Yarmouth to get away from him,” his cousin added. “Someone had to look out for the poor girl. She wouldn’t tell me what you’d done to her, and I had only my suspicions in that regard.”

Now John felt his mother’s eyes scorching holes in the side of his face, but this was no time for explanations. “He beat her?” he murmured, closing his eyes, seeing the white scar along her cheekbone.

“On the wedding night. She took flight and went looking for you at Mistress Comfort’s. Apparently you and I got our days mixed up. I thought we were to meet there on Friday, so I was there looking for you. So was she.” Another long, low burp rumbled out of Nathaniel’s belly. “Found me instead and I took her under my wing.”

John stood, fists hanging at his sides. “You should have told me.”

“Why? You took off back home, merry as a lark. Weren’t too bothered, it seemed.”

“That,” he said slowly, “is a lie. I looked for her all over Norwich.”

Nathaniel leaned back, holding the tankard to his chest, his face a mask of repressed anger. “How was I to know that? You never bothered about any woman once you’d had her. And she was running from her husband, a world of troubles on her heels.” He set his empty tankard on the mantle. “My first thought was to make certain she was safe. I didn’t know what you felt about the girl. No point saving her from one fire, I thought, only to drop her into another. You were never one for deep attachments. For all I knew she was just another wench you went out of your way to avoid. So I wrote to your mother…”

John rounded on his mother. She faced him boldly. “I didn’t know she was married, or that you’d known her. He only told me she was a young lady in need of shelter,” she said.

“…and your mother told me to send her here, when I went away to sea. So I did.”

The dog by the fire sprang to his feet, perhaps sensing his intervention might soon be needed.
 

“I never thought you’d let her…”

“I didn’t,” John roared, raging, “She left me!”

“Of all the stupid, bumble-brained….”

“If you’d have told me what she ran from, I might have…”

“Big-nosed, hot-headed, infantile…”

“But oh no, I suppose you wanted her for yourself all that time!”

“Enough, the both of you.” His mother bravely stepped between them, hands pressed flat to each puffed chest. “What’s done is done. No sense crying over spilt milk. Instead of fighting, we must put our heads together and think what can be done now. Good Lord! Why is it that a man’s only solution is to fight?”

“She left me, mother,” John turned away. “She deceived me about who and what she was. Now what am I supposed to do? Run after the woman and snatch her away, like one of our bride-stealing Sydney ancestors?”

Silence was brief but weighty.

When he spun back around, mother and cousin were both eyeing him with arch deliberation.

* * * *

Lucy sat in her chamber, looking out on the cheerless street. Frost tipped the window ledge and that morning she’d had to break a thin layer of ice over the water in her wash basin. She didn’t bother lighting a fire in her room, there was no point. She welcomed the cruel, frigid cold. Perhaps, eventually she would be numb and stop feeling altogether.

The walls of the house were quiet, so different to John’s farm. There was no humming, no shouting, and no sounds of animals, except for the occasional whinny of a horse below in her father’s stable. The weather was too bleak today and no one passed in the street outside. There was no sign of life. It was as if she were dead, held here in purgatory, until they all decided what to do with her.

According to the maid, her father was below in his library, deep in discussion with Lord Winton again. They could not, it seemed, reach any decision to satisfy them both. Lord Winton didn’t want her back again, didn’t want, as he said, “damaged goods,” but he refused to relinquish her dowry. Her father, on the other hand, was insistent that Lord Winton return everything, or else agree to take his bride back to Norwich and forget the entire incident ever happened. Fearing no other man would take her now, he saw Winton as his daughter’s last chance for respectability. Sir Oliver Collyer was a notoriously hard negotiator. He hadn’t become such a successful businessman without reason. And Lord Winton was just a stubborn, mean-tempered, greedy old man. They were at an impasse.

Lucy assured her father the marriage was unconsummated and therefore could be annulled, but naturally he believed Lord Winton’s word over hers and, to save his own pride, her spiteful husband insisted she lied. She wasn’t sure whether he truly remembered what happened in any case, since the crack she gave him across the back of the head with the bed-warmer apparently rendered him unconscious for some time, resulting in a sizeable bump and a memory of the evening’s events that was foggy at best.

Until one of the two men backed down, she was kept here, in her old room, under guard and in disgrace. Neither her stepmother nor her stepsister were allowed to visit. She had no letters, no communication with the outside world, apart from her maid bringing meals on a tray and the occasional tidbit of news. It wasn’t very much different to other punishments in youth, when she was exiled to her chamber and told not to think of coming down again until she was ready to show due repentance. And due repentance usually meant until she was ready to admit she was a rotten, wicked girl, and then stoically accept the harsh sting of the cane across her hand.

She picked idly at the wood around the window frame, where similar marks measured years of frustration, boredom and captivity. As a child she’d stood at this window for hours, watching the world go by without her in it.

There was a brisk rap at the door and she jumped, thinking it was her father come to pronounce sentence. If he had his way, she would go back to Norwich with her husband, he could wash his hands of her, and the shameful event could be covered up. Knowing her father, she feared he would win.

But it was not her father.

“Lance! Are you allowed to see me?”

He looked askance. “Of course I am!” Closing the door behind him, he took barely three steps across the room and she flew into his embrace, the side of her cold cheek pressed to his velvet doublet.

“Oh Lance, thank you for fetching me before they found me.” She’d had long hours to consider her brother’s gallantry and thoughtfulness in riding ahead to find her before her father and husband did.

“If not for Mortimer Oakham sending me a letter, I might not have got to you first, Lucy. It was lucky he recognized you.”

“And fortunate he didn’t write to father instead of you.”

“Yes. He’s not such a bad sort, although he’d like to be.”

Lance assumed his old friend wrote to him out of concern for his sister, but Lucy suspected Oakham’s main interest was in removing her from John Carver’s arms. If he couldn’t have her, he didn’t want his competitor claiming victory. That was the way men were.