The Gamekeeper's Wife

by Clare Flynn

  Christopher stopped. She walked a few steps further then stopped too, waiting for him.

  ‘What’s wrong now?’ She was irritated.

  ‘I love Martha, Mother. You may as well know it. You’ll have to find out sooner or later as I mean to marry her.’

  This time her laugh was a hearty one.

  ‘Stop laughing. I’m serious. In fact I’ve never been so serious about anything. I’m going to Cambridge tomorrow to find out if I can get funding from the college to go back to Borneo. Then I’ll sort out everything here. I’ll find an estate manager. I’ll talk to the board at Shipley’s about appointing a managing director. I’ll make sure I don’t leave you in the lurch, Mother.’

  She was staring at him, open-mouthed. ‘Stop it, Christopher. Stop it at once. It was amusing at first but I don’t find it the least bit funny now.’

  ‘I’m not joking. And I’d be grateful if you would authorise the trust to continue my allowance until I reach thirty and have control.’ He touched her arm. ‘And don’t worry – even then all I want is my allowance. That will be enough for Martha and me to get by. I’ll make the necessary arrangements to transfer everything else over to you. You can do what you like with the money. Sell this place if you wish.’ He saw the anger in her eyes and risked stoking it further. ‘You can even pay for Lord Bourne’s new roof. That should help smooth the waters there. I imagine Lavinia will be relieved to be off the hook.’

  Edwina turned on her heel and walked rapidly up the driveway towards the house. He let her go and set off in the direction of the little cottage in the woods.

  Chapter 10

  Kit pushed the door open. Martha was waiting inside, her hat and coat thrown carelessly over the back of a chair as though she had not long arrived.

  He pulled her into his arms and they kissed each other hungrily. He started to move her towards the stairs, but she leaned her back against the door so he couldn’t open it. ‘Wait. We have to talk.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘I’ve thought of nothing all morning but being here. Of carrying you upstairs and making love all day long. I couldn’t stand it in church. Seeing you. Wanting you. Then when you disappeared I thought I’d go mad. I thought you didn’t want to see me.’

  ‘You made it so obvious, Kit. The whole parish must know. That’s why I slipped away before the service finished. I didn’t want people to see us talking. Your mother could see what was going on. What on earth were you thinking?’

  ‘Of you. Only of you.’ His gaze was locked on her face.

  Martha sighed. ‘You’re being rash. You’re risking everything. Your mother… she won’t like it. You’ll make her angry. What’s the point of upsetting her? Oh, Kit, why are you being so headstrong about this?’

  ‘Because I love you and I don’t care who knows it.’

  She shook her head and went to sit at the table. ’Shall I make us some tea?’ she asked, looking up at him, her eyes, solemn.

  ‘I don’t want any tea. I want to kiss you.’ He moved towards her and pulled her back onto her feet, holding her against him. ‘Anyway it’s too late for caution. Mother knows. We talked just now. I’ve told her I intend to marry you.’

  Martha seemed alarmed, but he bent his head and kissed her tenderly.

  ‘There’s nothing she can do. I’ve said that she can have everything. All the money. The dividends from the business. Everything. I don’t need it – we don’t need it.’

  ‘She’ll never agree. She’ll find a way to stop you.’

  ‘My love, you worry too much. I’m twenty-six and in four years I’ll have full control of my affairs.’

  ‘Four years is a long time. Plenty of time for your mother to foil your plans. Oh, Kit, why didn’t you wait?’

  He sat down, pulling her onto his lap. ‘Because since I met you I have become like a mad man, crazy for love of you, so that I can I barely think straight.’

  Martha laughed, and he cupped her face in his hands. ‘I love you so much. Your sad and solemn face that bursts into life when you laugh or smile. It makes me feel like it’s something for me only. Do you smile for anyone else? Please say no, my darling. Please tell me it’s a secret gift to me alone.’

  She laughed again and stroked his face. ‘You are indeed crazy, my beautiful man. And you have made me crazy too. Crazy with happiness. And until you came along I had little to smile about.’ Then her face clouded over.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I feel too happy. That makes me nervous, I’m scared that such happiness is more than I deserve. More than I’ve ever had before. It can’t possibly last.’ She sighed. ‘And I’m frightened your mother will make sure it doesn’t.’

  He noticed the reflexive plucking at her sleeve that she did whenever she was nervous. His heart swelled with love for her.

  ‘Tomorrow I’m going to Cambridge. I’ll be gone for two days then when I come back, no matter whether I manage to convince them to give me a bursary or not, we will be married. We’ll go away and marry elsewhere – somewhere my mother won’t find us. Then once you’re my wife there’s nothing she can do about it.’

  ‘I wish I shared your confidence, Kit.’ She frowned.

  As he studied her face he marvelled that less than a week ago he would have seen that frown creasing her brow and thought her plain. Now he wanted to kiss it away and thought her beautiful.

  ‘You don’t need to. I have enough for both of us. And do you know why?’

  ‘No. But I think you’re going to tell me.’ Her face lit up again with a smile.

  ‘Because the way you have made me feel has already changed my whole life beyond recognition. It was only a week ago that I saw you for the first time. That I talked with you. Then I started to fall completely and utterly in love with you. When I rode here on Monday morning my heart was heavy. I didn’t want to meet you, to tell you about what had happened to your husband, to ask you to leave this house. But more than that, I was weary of life, of the burden of responsibility on my shoulders. I was weighed down with misery and self-pity about what had happened to me in the war. There didn’t seem any point to anything.’ He lifted her hand, turned up her palm, then bent his head and kissed it. ‘You changed all that. You gave me my life back. You gave me purpose, meaning, love.’

  He looked into her eyes and saw that they were brimming with tears. As they ran down her cheeks, he took out his handkerchief and wiped them away. This time, when he lifted her into his arms and moved towards the stairs, she didn’t resist.

  * * *

  ‘I love listening to you talk,’ Martha said. They were lying entwined, in a tangle of bed sheets. ’I thought you’d be quiet, have little to say, but once you start, you talk so beautifully. Words flow out of you. I could listen to you like this all day long.’

  He laughed. ‘I never run out of things to say to you.’

  ‘Do you really think we have a possibility of being together, of always being this happy? Or is this the best it can possibly be and from now on, every day a tiny little less happy, until eventually we aren’t happy at all?’ She smiled at Kit but her eyes were sad.

  ‘As long as we are together, I will always be happy. The idea of being with you and not being happy isn’t possible.’

  She ran her fingers over his chest.

  ‘Besides,’ he said. ‘My grandmother foresaw this for me.’

  Martha rolled over and lay propped up on her side, looking at him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It was when I was about ten years old, not long before she died, she said to me one day “Your brother must marry for the family but you will marry for love”.’

  She smiled. ‘Tell me about her.’

  ‘She was small, rather plump. Big smiley eyes. I loved being with her because she always held me on her knee and cuddled me. My mother never went in for any physical contact beyond holding out a cheek to be kissed but Grandma was warm and loved to show affection to me and Percy – especially me. I think she saw that he was
the favoured son so she always tried to make it up to me, to redress the balance.’

  ‘She sounds a good woman.’

  ‘I loved her because she never tried to be anything different from how she’d always been. My grandfather played the part of the landed gentleman, always trying to fit in. Grandma never bothered. She wore finer quality clothes than she had done before they were rich, but nothing fancy, and that was about it. If it had been left up to her she’d have stayed living in Yorkshire in a little terraced house on a street with all her friends and family around her. She never liked Newlands. Apart from the sunken gardens. She loved to sit in the shade under the big sycamore tree on the south lawn there, near the stream, and do her tatting – making little bits of silk lace.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘I always thought Mother and Father were slightly ashamed of her. Didn’t much like the house guests having anything to do with her. They thought Grandma’s presence and her Yorkshire accent were embarrassing evidence of Father’s working class roots. But she wasn’t keen on mixing with their friends either. She much preferred to be with the hoi polloi, but since my grandfather decided it wasn’t done for her to be over-familiar with the servants and the villagers, she kept to herself most of the time or visited Percy and me in the nursery.’

  Kit glanced at his watch, sighed and said he had to leave. Martha told him she would walk with him part of the way. They set off through the woods, hand-in-hand.

  He bent down and cleared some dead leaves away from the base of a beech tree. ‘Look,’ he said, revealing a cluster of pale cream coloured toadstools, with pinkish gills on their undersides. ‘Make sure you don’t put those in a stew.’

  ‘Deadly fibre caps. I know they’re poisonous. You’re talking to a country girl, Mr Botanist. I never take risks with mushrooms. My father taught me well.’ She smiled at him. ‘But thank you for the warning.’

  They walked on through the beech copse, and took a path up a hill, past a ruined folly, its bricks tumbled down and covered with grass, and with ivy growing over what had once been an ornamental tower.

  ‘I used to play here when I was a child,’ she said. ‘I loved scrambling over the walls.’

  ’So did I!’

  ‘I know. I saw you. This was my secret place. When I was older I used to come up here to read books, sitting on the grass, there behind the wall, where Walters wouldn’t find me, and then one summer – I must have been about eighteen – I came here as usual one day, only to find a little boy playing in my refuge.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You. Home from boarding school for the summer. I was annoyed that you’d taken possession of my secret hideout.’

  ‘I’m sorry. You should have come in. I wouldn’t have minded.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ she said. ‘Of course you would! What small boy would be willing to share his secret hiding place with a grown-up? And especially with a servant.’

  He felt his skin prickle, uncomfortable with the way she was highlighting the difference in their age and status.

  She went on. ‘I used to watch you riding your pony. A little bay mare. I always thought you had a kind face. And you smiled at me when you saw me. Unlike your brother, who was aloof. Haughty. People like me were invisible to him.’

  Kit said nothing.

  ‘I never dreamt back then that this would happen. That you would come to mean so much to me. So quickly. So absolutely.’

  ‘Martha, I have something to tell you.’

  ‘Yes?’ she said, her expression curious, perhaps even anxious.

  His face was solemn, frowning, his eyes serious. ‘I have no recollection of you whatsoever back then.’ He burst out laughing and she slapped at his arm. ‘Seriously. I find it impossible to imagine now, but I hadn’t even realised that Walters was married to the last keeper’s daughter. You simply hadn’t registered in my consciousness. When I rode over to talk to you on Monday I hadn’t the faintest idea what you looked like. How is that even possible, my love?’

  She smiled. ‘I hope I’ve made more of an impression since?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ And he pulled her into his arms and kissed her again. ‘So much so that I don’t know how I will survive for the next two days while I’m in Cambridge without you.’

  They walked on, past the ruined walls and up a grassy slope.

  ‘Tell me more about Borneo,’ she said.

  He raised his eyebrows. ’Are you really interested?’

  ‘Would I have asked if I wasn’t?’

  She was right. There was nothing about her that was pretence. No room for feigned interest, idle small talk. She said what she thought and did not dissimulate. That was one of the things he loved most about her.

  So he told her about the first time he came upon the giant rafflesia flower and how he had spotted it when climbing through the rainforest, close to a waterfall. He told her how the five-petalled parasitic flower could reach more than three feet wide but lived only for a week or less, capturing insects inside its fleshy red heart. ‘Its petals are covered in raised spots like warts. And it stinks to high heaven!’

  ‘A flower?’

  ‘The pong attracts flies. That’s how it pollinates. Smells like fish that have been rotting for days.’

  ‘How horrible. It sounds revolting. I won’t be in a hurry to see that then!’

  ‘See it you must – but I won’t mind if you choose not to smell it.’ He laughed, already imagining scrambling through the undergrowth with Martha by his side. ‘You can hold your nose!’

  She asked him again what the plant was called. ‘It’s common name is Corpse Flower but its proper name is rafflesia.’ She repeated the name experimentally.

  ‘After Sir Stamford Raffles. It was on his expedition that it was first found in Sumatra. His wife was with him. Just as one day you will be there with me.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘I long to show you the beauty of the island. To have you by my side.’

  Martha leaned her head against his shoulder. He placed his arm protectively around her and his heart soared in his chest.

  They reached the top of the slope and there through the trees, in the distance, they could make out the west wing of the big house as the sun caught the pale stones.

  Remembering his mother and their recent quarrel, Kit said, ‘I must go. I have to try and appease Mother. Pour oil on the raging waters. I’ll be back on Tuesday night. Wednesday at the latest. And then, my darling girl, we will make our plans.’

  He kissed her quickly, then broke away and walked off, down the slope towards the distant mansion house. He didn’t turn back to look at her, fearing that were he to do so he would lack the resolve to leave her at all.

  * * *

  Martha watched him until he was no longer in sight.

  As soon as she wasn’t in Kit’s presence the hollow fear and dread returned. She was playing with fire. Risking everything. She should never have let it get this far. But how could she have prevented it? There was no doubting their feelings for each other. Her resolve disappeared the moment she was in his company, making her lose her reason, drawing her into his arms as if it were her natural home.

  Now that his mother knew about them she was sure to cause trouble. Perhaps Mrs Shipley knew Martha’s secret. But that wasn’t possible. Was it?

  Chapter 11

  When Christopher walked into the house, Bannister appeared in the hall and asked him to join his mother in his father’s study, where she was waiting for him. Puzzled, as his mother had never used the room – even when George Shipley was alive – he made his way there. The room was sombre and masculine, panelled in oak with carvings in the shape of Tudor roses between the panels and mirrored in plasterwork on the ceiling. It was dominated by the huge mahogany desk.

  Edwina was sitting behind it, a pile of papers in front of her.

  ‘What are you doing, Mother?’

  ‘Looking for something. I know it must be here somewhere. Have you been moving things?’

  ‘Of course not. I haven’t set foot in he
re in years.’

  As he said the words, he remembered how much he used to dread receiving a summons from his father to attend him here – sometimes as the result of a poor school report, but more often to be punished for a trivial misdemeanour such as lack of punctuality. How many times had he been here, arms by his side, standing rigid, terrified at incurring the wrath of his parent. His father had never punished him physically, but being on the end of what Percy used to refer to as a ‘parental tongue lashing’ was as bad. Christopher had never grown out of his fear of his father.

  Edwina Shipley signalled him to take a seat in one of the two winged chairs in front of the mullioned windows, then followed him over there. She perched on the cushioned window seat.

  ‘You’ve been with that woman all day.’ It was a statement not a question.

  He stared her straight in the eye, summoning defiance, but feeling nervous. His mother knew exactly how to get under his skin.

  ‘Has she told you anything of her history?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, already feeling defensive.

  ‘She told you how she came to be married?’

  He nodded.

  ‘What exactly did she tell you?’ Her arms were folded.

  Christopher bridled. She had no right to ask him. ‘What she told me was in confidence.’

  Edwina narrowed her eyes and tutted in irritation. ‘She has evidently spun you a yarn. If you were aware of the truth you wouldn’t be persisting in the relationship.’

  ‘Stop. I don’t want to hear any more.’ He lifted his hands, palms outward. I’ve told you I intend to marry Martha and nothing you say can possibly dissuade me from that. I love her.’