Red Rose, White Rose (39 page)

‘If I stay …’ I held my hands out to the flames. ‘You do not think I should?’

‘What I think is not important. It is what you think that matters.’

‘That is not true. I value your opinion, and it is your house.’

‘I cannot judge you if I do not know your intentions. Lord Neville will meet you here and then what?’ Cuthbert pulled a wineskin out of one of the saddlebags and went to the cupboard where he found three horn cups.

‘We will talk. But perhaps he will not come,’ I said.

‘He will come.’ He put the cups down on a chest. His voice was flat, pragmatic.

‘You sound very sure. What makes you think that?’

Expertly he aimed wine from the skin into the cups, one after another. ‘He loves you. Anyone can see that. I think he has loved you ever since Aycliffe Tower, perhaps even before that. You are his honoured lady. He rescued you from bandits. Some men, knights in particular, cannot resist a damsel in distress.’

I shot him a sharp glance to see if he was teasing but he was concentrating on his task. ‘We were young. It was a bolt from the blue. I do not know if the feelings are still there.’

‘And if they are?’

I shrugged. ‘The same thing will happen.’ There was a silence. I waited for him to speak but he said nothing. ‘You do not approve?’ It was more of a statement than a question.

Cuthbert shook his head. ‘I swore an oath to protect you physically, Cis, not morally.’ He approached with two full cups and handed me one. ‘God would not approve.’

‘There are many things of which God does not approve but we do them anyway and ask his forgiveness afterwards.’ I looked down into the dark red wine that filled the cup then looked up at him. ‘If you do not wish us to stay in your house, Cuddy, we will go somewhere else; perhaps to a hayfield, like my father and your mother.’

He smiled broadly at that. ‘My proud sister in a hayfield? I cannot contemplate it.’ He raised his cup to me. ‘You deal with your conscience, Cicely, and I will deal with mine. May God be good to us both.’

We drank to it and then I leaned forward and kissed his cheek. ‘You are the best man I know, Cuthbert of Middleham,’ I said.

‘But it is only to be once.’ He held my gaze sternly. ‘Hilda has not been to Red Gill yet. Once we have made this place our own it will no longer be available.’

I nodded slowly. ‘It will only be once,’ I said.

By the time John arrived the rain had stopped and the sun was hot, drawing steam off the stubble fields around the bastle. Cuthbert and I were collecting water at the well when he rode in through a haze of mist wearing dull, yeoman’s clothes and a pilgrim’s hat. Cuthbert took his horse to the byre.

‘Watch out for my stallion,’ John called after him. ‘He tends to kick when he is in a stall.’ He received a wave of acknowledgement.

I was still standing by the well, a pail of water at my feet. John removed his hat and held it before him, turning the brim in his hands like a supplicant at a Halmote.

I eyed the hat. ‘You do not make a very convincing pilgrim,’ I ventured with a nervous laugh.

He squinted back, the sun in his eyes. ‘Allow me to say the same about you. Nevertheless that is what we are, for the time being.’

‘So Cuthbert has informed his sister-in-law. She is going to come and cook for us while we are here,’ I remarked, picking up the pail of water.

He took it from me and we walked towards the house. ‘Have you been in a bastle before?’ I asked.

‘I think it is something like a peel tower, is it not? I have been in one of those.’ His voice held a distinctly wry note.

‘So you have,’ I said, putting my foot on the entrance-ladder.

Cuthbert emerged from the hatchway as we entered. ‘I have unsaddled your horse, my lord,’ he said rather stiffly. ‘I am returning to Middleham now.’ He looked directly at me. ‘You know where I am if you need me.’

‘Thank you, Cuddy. You have thought of everything,’ I said.

‘Yes, thank you, Sir Cuthbert, we are very grateful.’ John’s words sounded clipped. Perhaps, like me, he was anxious to be free to talk privately. We had only exchanged a couple of letters since our meeting at Nostell Priory and there was much ground to clear between us.

While we waited for the jangle of harness to indicate that Cuthbert had ridden away, John found the wineskin and cups, filled two and handed one wordlessly to me. Then he picked up a cushion, placed it beside him on the settle and patted it, inviting me to join him.

I sat down and took a sip of wine. ‘There is so much to say,’ I began, studying him solemnly, ‘but suddenly I do not know where to start.’

He gave a rueful laugh, took another gulp of wine and set down his cup. ‘Well one of us should apologize,’ he said, ‘and I do not think it is me.’

My instant reaction was anger because I had not been the one to make the move which first stirred passions at Aycliffe Tower. Then it came to me that I was thinking like the green girl I had been then. Now I was older and wiser. I had lived long enough with another man whose honour could no longer brook the slights it had been offered, to understand the bruising effect of disparagement on a nobleman’s self esteem. In John’s mind the means by which I had achieved my covert departure had been a betrayal, a slap in the face of his male pride, whereas I had come to regard my actions as a justifiable way of escaping an impossible situation. Of course it also turned out to be an event in my life that had played havoc with my own self-respect, while preserving the honour of my family. It was years before I paid full penance for the episode at Aycliffe Tower. Perhaps it had still not been paid.

John obviously took my silence for obduracy and he pressed his case. ‘I was not then, and never have been since, a man who played lightly with love. When I gave you mine I thought the gift was reciprocated.’

I regarded his earnest expression and felt a sharp stab of guilt. ‘It was reciprocated – at the time,’ I protested. ‘John, it was a glorious
coup de foudre
! We were both overwhelmed. I cannot apologize for that. There was no question of a lifetime commitment.’

‘Yet that is what I made.’

I could hardly believe what I heard. Blood suddenly pounded in my head. He relieved me of my cup, placed it aside and took my hand in both of his.

‘You asked me why I had not married and that is the reason. You were my chosen love and still are. No one has ever compared. Unless I am wielding a sword or holding a Halmote, you fill my conscious thoughts – and much of my dreaming as well.’

He spoke with such passion that I felt driven to contest his words. ‘Marie! Are you saying that I am responsible for all those raids you have led against my brother’s tenants? Skirmish after skirmish, causing injuries and deaths, for twenty years, just to take your mind off me? No, John – it is a joke. I do not believe it.’

He thrust my hand away roughly and stood up, pacing away across the room, to turn on me with a thunderous expression. ‘You think it is a joke? That merely confirms what the Church teaches us – that all females are daughters of Eve; light-minded, easily tempted and never to be trusted.’

As I rose to approach him, my unruly temper fired up further and I struggled to maintain a measured tone. ‘And all men are sons of Adam I suppose, simple-minded, easily led and hostage to their gross desires? No – all that is nonsense, John; the babble of illiterate priests. Do not insult me with its rancour or expect me to accept that you believe it.’

We were standing eye to eye now, lips compressed, arms rigid at our sides, hands bunched into fists; the fine line between vehemence and violence was all that kept us apart and fierce as it was it suddenly dissolved in the passion generated by our blistering blue on grey gaze.

‘Ah Jesu, Cicely!’ John exclaimed and faster than a falcon’s stoop I found his arms around me in a tight embrace, his lips on mine, his tongue seeking the moist inner rim and causing my senses to vibrate like the strings of a lyre.

Memories surged up from nowhere, carrying me back to the night when I had discovered the heart-stopping glory of two bodies melding together with the explosive effect of oil meeting fire, a sensation I had never experienced before or since. This was the man who had seized my surrender with the simple stroke of a finger on my cheek; the first man to lead me into the inferno of mutual enthralment and the subsequent joy of sated pleasure. It had started with a clash of minds and it had resulted in long languorous love-making, just as it did now. John did not take me the same way Richard did, as a lord demanding fealty from his vassal, but invited me to share in pleasure and this time I appreciated his love-making even more than I had before, when I had known nothing about it.

After we had made full use of the bed behind the blanket curtain we lay face to face in dreamy lethargy and talked in peace, as we should have done before, orchestrating our conversation with gentle stroking and soft laughs and sighs. We were cocooned in shadows because the one thing John had managed to do before our passion consumed us was to kick the entrance shut so that the fading sunlight only filtered through the smoke vents. It was when we eventually noticed that there was no smoke curling around the rafters that John left the warmth of my arms, leaping from the bed with an oath.

‘The fire!’ he exclaimed. ‘We have let the fire go out.’

I could not help laughing and spluttered, ‘No, my love – I think you will find we have just re-lit it,’ to which John reacted with a low chuckle.

I pulled the covers up to my chin and watched him find his chemise and pull it on, relishing his body’s fitness, the tight buttocks and the ripple of taut fighting muscles down his back and arms. I did not know his precise age but calculated that he must be over forty. Very faint streaks of white were just discernible in his flaxen hair but there was no sign of slack flesh, only the various scars gave evidence of his frequent calls to combat.

We spent five blissful days at Red Gill bastle, days when we gave no thought to feuds or factions, when we wandered up the fell-side through bracken turning russet in the shortening autumn glow, drank sparkling water from the beck and watched harriers swoop for prey along its banks. When a glorious sunrise greeted us the morning following our arrival we looked out on a world that seemed to have been created especially for us; verdant fields dotted with black-faced sheep and a sky as blue as the Virgin’s veil, scattered with clouds like goose-down. The dale was our playground and we used it like children on a holiday.

Cuthbert came soon after sunrise as he expected but one look at my glowing face told him how things stood: he would be riding back to Middleham alone. He brought with him his sister-in-law whom he called Bee, and each morning afterwards she did indeed make herself as busy as a bee around the bastle, cleaning and sweeping and bringing freshly baked bread or barley bannocks and butter and cheese from her own farm dairy; there was a different pot of stewed meat or fish each day, depending on the demands of the Church calendar. She was a fount of information about the area, telling us which paths to follow and which to avoid if we wanted to stay safe; there had been lead mining on the fells and the ground was peppered with hidden shafts. ‘People sometimes disappear without a trace,’ she told me in a hushed voice. ‘Perhaps the devil pulls them down a hole and straight to hell.’

We did not encourage too much of this folklore because, pleased though we were with the supplies of fresh food, we could not wait for her to leave us to our own devices. As soon as she departed we saddled the horses and took easy, loping rides along the Cover Beck, stopping for a picnic of bread and cheese and ripe apples picked from the indomitable little trees growing in the shelter of the narrow ravine behind the house; the Red Gill which funnelled the fell stream that lulled us to sleep at night. The fruit grew sweeter by the day as the September sun shone down. In the afternoons we returned to the bastle and made love, delighting in the warmth radiated by the sun-kissed stone and the big bolts on the sturdy door which gave us the freedom to shed our clothes and enjoy each other in a private and secure world of our own. ‘You are like these balmy days of autumn,’ John said one afternoon. When I asked what he meant he gazed at me intently, and his voice was solemn. ‘You are like the sweet-sharp apples we pick from the wind-blown trees. You have weathered the world and all it can throw at you and yet you are luscious and ripe and you fill my senses with delight. The sight of you as you are right now will be with me for the rest of my days.’

I drew breath sharply, for his words brought me back to harsh reality. ‘You think so? Even on those days when you make love to your nubile young bride, whose body will be soft and smooth and supple? At such a time my image may shrivel and vanish from your mind.’

His expression clouded. ‘You may think that if you wish but one thing I know – she will never look at me the way you are looking at me now.’

I climbed on to the bed beside him, my naked skin touching his from shoulder to thigh. ‘And how is that?’ I asked, kissing the hollow behind his collar-bone.

‘You are untamed and beautiful and I worship you.’

He rolled onto me then and I opened to him willingly, eagerly, demandingly. He was right, at that moment, on that day, with him, I was wild and untamed in a way I knew I would never be again in my life. I felt him move in me and I whispered in his ear, ‘This is the real me, the girl you carried off to a tower in the marshes and turned into a woman. You are a magician and I am your creature.’

Much later, when we had wrapped ourselves in sheets, placed the latest pot of stew on the trivet to warm and poured some wine into our cups, we pulled the cushions near to the fire and talked, reclining.

John was in thoughtful mood. ‘What you said, it’s not true, you know.’ He did not look at me but at the wine in his cup, his eyes bleak. ‘You are not my creature. And I am not a magician. If I was I would make these stolen days last forever and our love would only die when we do.’

My wine suddenly tasted sour on my tongue. ‘I remember you said I had filled your thoughts for all the years since we met. Will I no longer do so now you have had your wicked way with me?’