This Loving Torment

by Valerie Sherwood

  But there was no pity in Charity’s heart for the unpleasant Mr. Derwent. He had spoiled her evening, robbed her of a few harmless dreams—and what was he? A damned smuggler.

  Unable to resist questioning the servants, she was told the tall stranger had not stayed long after dancing with her. At least no one had seen him after that. Perhaps the house had been too crowded to give him a place to sleep and he was staying at a neighboring manor, Gerda suggested vaguely. Charity doubted it. She longed to retort that the aggravating Mr. Derwent probably never stayed in one place for long, lest the authorities catch up with him and end his career with hemp. But she stayed the angry rush of words to her lips because Roger Derwent’s business was obviously with Killian van Daarken and she must be careful what she said to the servants.

  She longed to say something nasty about the haughty Mr. Derwent to the patroon, but that would be to say she knew about their business together, and she felt that would not be wise.

  Biting her lips, she went out to the kitchen and found herself a bite for breakfast. The big dining room was full to overflowing with invited guests and the staff completely distracted—it would probably have been another hour or two before anyone thought to bring her a tray.

  Pieter mended rapidly, although his cough hung on, and Charity spent most of her time with him, talking to him by the fire. Sometimes they walked across the crisp lawn, once through the first skiff of a snowfall.

  He seemed to tire more easily and was often irritable. Sometimes she waited for him and he did not come down at all, but slept late in his room.

  One day she saw another less attractive side of life at Daarkenwyck: Pieter was supposed to take her riding, and she waited for him impatiently for some time at the stable, astride a dancing horse eager to be away. Finally, when Pieter did not appear she rode on without him, supposing he would catch up to her. In this way, she reached one of the small bouweries, as the farms belonging to the manor were called, where she came upon a man in his shirtsleeves and loose fitting leather knee breeches in the act of chopping wood.

  He straightened up at her approach and eyed her curiously.

  Just at that moment a woman carrying a bucket came around the corner of the house. She had big rolled-up sleeves, a laced bodice and full skirt of coarse dark cloth reaching to her ankles. Her frayed white collar was plain and swept to her shoulders and in long points to her waist, and her serviceable old apron had one big pocket across the front.

  This was Charity’s first time to have a chance to speak to any of the people on the bouweries, for Pieter always would have her nod and ride rapidly by. So, she smiled at them and they greeted her deferentially and warily, for although they did not know her, her clothes told them she came from the great manor house and was thus a subject for awe and some distrust.

  Pleased to try out her knowledge of the Dutch language on these Hollanders, she admired everything and asked questions: how did they like the life here, was the game plentiful, had the crops been good?

  The woman warmed to her and the man, with a smile, went back to his chopping. Invited into the small thatched log hut, Charity accepted a wooden mug of beer. As they talked, the woman grew confidential. Life was very expensive here, she said, not at all as she had expected when Jan Peter and she had set sail from Holland. Fortunately, the crops had been good this year—which was the patroon’s good fortune as well, since one-tenth of all their produce went to the patroon. Charity was surprised, saying she had thought the patroon received his rent in money. That too, sighed the woman, a rent of 500 guilders each year they must pay for their bouwerie. In addition, her husband must give three days service with horse and wagon each year to the patroon, repair the buildings, keep up the roads and cut ten pieces of fir or oak and bring them to the waterside; as quit rent he must furnish the patroon with two bushels of wheat, twenty-five pounds of butter and two pairs of fowls—and Jan Peter must cut and split and bring to the water’s side two fathoms of firewood—that was what he was doing now; he had no time to stop. She sighed.

  “It is too bad you cannot supplement your income by weaving,” murmured Charity, remembering many had done so in England.

  “Yes,” said the wife sadly, “it is too bad. On the patroon’s land no man may traffic in furs and no woman may spin cloth. He keeps to the old ways.” Her mouth trembled. “It is all so different from what Jan Peter and I expected.”

  Charity left them, sobered. What had seemed to her an idyllic life in Daarkenwyck loomed unprepossessingly hard outside its graceful tree-shaded lawns.

  She returned to find Pieter very angry with her. She had strayed out alone, he told her fiercely. She could have been insulted by trappers who sometimes came through these lands, attacked by Indians, set upon by wild animals.

  She smiled at him, her heart softening toward him. Pieter’s storming meant just one thing to her; he was genuinely concerned for her safety.

  He was more than concerned. Suddenly rough, he swept her into his arms and kissed her fiercely. Charity spun away from him breathless.

  “You kiss others,” he accused angrily.

  “No, I do not!” she cried, thinking guiltily of the arrogant Mr. Derwent.

  “You do,” he flashed. “I saw you with Ryn van der Doonck in that clump of willows!”

  So he did not know about Roger Derwent. . . . Still, Charity winced, remembering that during the brief time the pond was frozen, while dancing on the ice, Ryn had indeed spun her into the clump of willows and not only kissed her but had pinched her as well. She had slapped his face.

  “You are mine!” cried Pieter in a jealous voice. “Ryn cannot have you.”

  Charity looked at him steadily.

  “Oh, why do you not favor me, Charity?” he demanded. “Ryn does not love you—he and the rest seek your favors only that they may brag of it, but I—I care for you, Charity.”

  Her eyes softened. “I know you do, Pieter.”

  He took a step forward and seized her around the waist again. They were standing in the big stable with its massive beams where she had brought her horse. The grooms had discreetly disappeared, seeing the patroon’s son apparently wrestling with a lady. “Oh, Charity!” In a sudden abandoned gesture he drew her against him. “Will you not pity me, Charity? What am I to do?”

  Charity pulled away, for the moment thinking bitterly of Roger Derwent, who had also seized her without asking. “I—I do not know, Pieter.” Her voice hardened. “But this much is certain. You cannot have me here in the hay like a dairymaid!

  Charity straightened her dress and continued. “You must not treat me with disrespect as you might a servant girl,” she said through her teeth. “You will never gain me that way.”

  He nodded in dumb misery, and to her horror sank down on his knees and threw his arms convulsively around her thighs, pulling her to him, his head pressed against her skirt.

  “Name whatever price you want,” he said urgently, his voice half smothered by the material of her skirt, “and it is yours.”

  Her lips twisted. Name your price! Roger Derwent’s insolent handling of her had suggested that she had a price too.

  She looked angrily down at Pieter’s golden curls. She could feel the pressure of his head against her trembling thighs, feel the almost hysterical grip of his arms around the back of her knees, nearly causing her legs to buckle. “I am not to be had for gold,” she gasped, shaken.

  He looked up, and she saw that there were beads of perspiration on his brow. “I was not thinking of gold,” he said. “I ask if your price is marriage.”

  For a long moment she stared at him as he gazed up at her pleadingly.

  Marriage ... to Pieter van Daarken . . . wife to the future patroon of Daarkenwyck.

  It was a tempting offer.

  Seeing the momentary indecision on her face, he followed up his advantage.

  “Will you, Charity?” she heard him ask in a voice now wistful.

  “I—I will think about it,” she said brusquely,
and flinched as his fingers touched her shoulder.

  “I—am sorry I was so rough,” he said. “It is that you are so beautiful and so desirable to me.”

  “I know how you feel.” She turned and faced him. He had risen and was looking down at her with anxiety in his face. She spoke to him in a gentler tone. “I thank you for your offer of marriage, Pieter, but—I cannot give you your answer now, not here in a stable.”

  He looked taken aback. “I—I had not thought of it that way,” he stammered in consternation.

  “If you had asked Cordelia van der Doonck to marry you,” said Charity bitterly, “you would have asked her on your knees beside the rosewood harpsichord. You would not have chosen a mound of hay as a setting for your courtship!”

  “But I love you none the less, Charity.”

  “We will see the temper of your love,” she replied. “When you have told your father of your proposal, and he has forbidden it—we will see how much you love me then!”

  “Ah, but wait.” He leaped forward to seize her hand and stay her going. “I would not tell my father of it yet.”

  She gave him a cynical look.

  “Do not look at me so,” he chided fiercely. “I will speak to him of it, but this is not the time.”

  “I see,” she murmured. ‘This is not the time.”

  “My mother’s father who lives in Holland is very wealthy,” he surprised her by saying. “It was with her dowry that my father purchased Daarkenwyck.”

  Charity pricked up her ears.

  “When I go to Holland,” he said eagerly, “I will ingratiate myself with him. He has no other grandchild and he is now old and feeble. I will find a way to get him to settle a large sum of money on me, and with that, when I return, we can live as man and wife! For I promise you, Charity—” his eyes glittered recklessly, but his voice held a ring of truth— “that when I return from Holland I shall be a rich man!”

  Charity studied him. She did not love him but . . . he was a way up, a way to rise above the sneers of the Cordelia van der Dooncks and their kind. Was she not justified, she asked herself, in using men as they had used her? And was not here a man pleading on his knees to be used?

  She lifted her chin and seemed to see beyond the confines of this stable and into the far distance. A great new world beckoned to those who were hard and purposeful and seized their opportunities.

  She would be such a woman!

  “I give you permission to try,” she said. Hope sprang in his eyes and he would have seized her again had she not lifted a hand to push him away. “But not to use me in the meantime,” she said wearily. “Would you take your future wife in a stable? Would you have your first child born out of wedlock while your father fumes and your doddering grandfather decides what he is to do with you? Ah, I see from your face that you had not considered these things. But you would do well to consider them, Pieter, for if we chose your course of romping in the hay, we would face them soon enough. You will wait and—we shall see how durable is this love you profess to bear me.”

  “But—you will have me, Charity? You arc saying that you will?” His voice trembled with passion.

  “In a marriage bed, Pieter—yes.”

  Very solicitously, Pieter bent to brush some hay from the hem of her skirt. He made no further attempt to touch her.

  She told herself that she had tamed the wild boar in him and that he would turn a gentler face to her, in the future, now that she had promised to become his wife.

  Somewhere in that decision—although she would not admit it, and closed the door of her mind hastily upon the whispering voices that told her it was so—was a smoldering resentment against Roger Derwent, who had treated her as something less than a lady.

  She could not resist thinking how shocked Roger Derwent would be when he came back to Daarkenwyck—if ever he did—to find that she was mistress of the manor and could turn him out of the house at her pleasure.

  She even went so far as to imagine a hangman’s noose for him in her fancies, but hastily retreated from that—not, she told herself carefully, because a knife twisted in her bosom at the thought of his long attractive body dangling at the end of a rope—no, only because a living man feels taunts and scorn better than a dead one.

  She hardly noticed Pieter, such a fiendish delight did she take in tormenting the memory of the hated Roger Derwent.

  Damned smuggler that he was!

  She turned absently to the man beside her. Pieter was speaking. She had no idea what he had said, but she bobbed her head earnestly and Pieter looked pleased.

  His hot admiring glance followed Charity as she went into the house through the kitchen, but grew distracted when Elyse the maid came out and scowled at him, hands on hips.

  Pieter’s blood was up. He raked Elyse’s young desirable body up and down with his hot gaze and she bridled under it. “Perhaps you’ve an errand that takes you to the barn, Elyse?” he asked slyly.

  Through the small panes of her window above, as she sat in her room sewing a new hook on her bodice, Charity watched Elyse run from the kitchen to the barn. And, a little later, she saw Pieter saunter casually toward the barn, and stand gazing about him for a moment before he went into its dark interior.

  Charity frowned. She told herself it did not matter. What mattered was not the fact that she did not love Pieter or that he would not be faithful to her.

  What mattered was becoming the wife of a patroon. Rich. Powerful. Able to laugh scornfully in the faces of all the Roger Derwents of the world. In her anger she jabbed her finger with the needle. Tossing her sewing aside, she jumped up and paced restlessly about the room in her chemise.

  Of course she was doing the right thing by marrying Pieter, she told herself.

  But that night when she fell asleep it was not of Pieter she dreamed, nor yet of being a patroon’s lady and commanding servants in a stately manor along the river. It was an arrogant and irritating stranger that she dreamed of, feeling his arms delightfully about her, feeling herself yielding happily, eagerly, vibrantly to his caresses, lifting her ardent mouth for his lasses, feeling his strong but gentle hands tingle down her body.

  CHAPTER 17

  Annjanette had not been present for meals the day before and when she sulkily flounced down for breakfast, the reason became apparent—she had a black eye.

  Clothilde, whose face was a drawn white mask these days—the mail from Holland had arrived three days ago and she had been distracted ever since—looked at Annjanette without interest, perhaps without really seeing her.

  Turning from the sight of Annjanette’s bruised face, Charity could not help glancing at Killian van Daarken. The expression on his broad-jowled face was bland.

  When Pieter asked Annjanette what had happened, she said she had fallen over a stool in the dark and struck the corner of the bed. And, with a sob, she jumped up and left the table.

  Charity remembered, suddenly, that two nights ago someone had stood outside her room, breathing hard. She had clutched the covers around her and stared frightened at the latch, but whoever it was had gone away.

  Had Killian struck Annjanette down and then . . . come up and stood by her door?

  The thought made her uneasy.

  Talk at breakfast centered on last night’s high winds, probably presaging a change in the unseasonably warm weather the Hudson Valley had been enjoying. Charity did not take her part in the conversation. After breakfast she went upstairs and found herself drawn to Annjanette’s small bedroom—that dressing room tucked between the patroon’s bedroom and his wife’s. Clothilde’s door was standing open, so, she walked through the room and knocked on Annjanette’s door.

  “Annjanette,” she called softly.

  There was no answer and she turned away, but as she did she brushed a book from a table near the door to the floor. Bending over to pick it up, she saw that beneath it was a letter from Holland, addressed to Clothilde.

  A letter from Holland . . . whenever the mail came from Hol
land, Clothilde spent the day in her room crying.

  Charity held the letter uncertainly in her hand. She crossed to the window and looked out. As she had come upstairs, the patroon had spoken to Clothilde and she had listlessly accompanied him outside to look at a cherished shrub from Holland, badly broken by last night’s wind. Her eyes swept the lawn. Yes, they were still there looking at the broken branches.

  Though she did not read Dutch, but only spoke it Charity opened the letter.

  To her surprise the letter was written in English—and tearstained. Clothilde’s tears. Charity thought soberly.

  It was a very tender letter, such a letter as a lover might write. It referred sadly to “our little M of loving memory” and wished Clothilde “all good things—and sweet memories ever,” and added wistfully, “Would that I could come to you, but I am like to die soon. The old wound plagues me, but even were I not so crippled by it, I am so weak I could not walk the stairs. The monks here at the abbey care for me kindly as always and daily take me to the courtyard to spend a time in the sunshine. Do not cry, my dearest, for surely it is best for both of us that my death comes soon. You can then return to Holland and visit your kin without fear, and I will have earned only my just deserts for what I did so recklessly without regard to your welfare. I have your last dear letter before me as I write this and will hold your sweet words in my heart forever—nay, longer than that, a thousand forevers. Farewell, my dearest heart.” And it was signed, “Ever your devoted J.”

  A melancholy letter—perhaps the writer’s last—and written to a Dutch lady in English.

  That puzzled Charity.

  Suddenly her eyes widened. The reason was obvious! It was written in English to cloak its contents from Killian van Daarken! Killian, for all that he spoke two languages, was not an educated man. He read and wrote Dutch, she knew. But English—no doubt Killian was unable to read English, while his better-educated wife did! There were some books in the library downstairs in English—and the patroon’s lady seemed to be the only member of the family at Daarkenwyck who cared to read. Certainly Pieter and his father shunned books. So, by penning his message in English, the writer could manage a private correspondence with Clothilde even if Killian did open the letters.