by Jean Rowden
Bored, annoyed with Mortleigh and illogically irritated by not finding Jonah alone, Lucille returned to the ruins, the steady crack of steel on stone growing louder as she approached. She tiptoed through the arch, and stood watching him at work, slightly stirred by the rippling muscles of his back and shoulders. It had been his physique that had led her to seek out his company a few weeks after her arrival at Knytte; the monotony of married life had already threatened to overcome her, used as she was to a round of balls and parties. Since flirtation with men of her own class was denied her, she’d tried her art with the stone mason, and found a lover who was willing to grant her every wish. Jonah Jackman, she was sure, would die for her, were it asked of him, in the true tradition of romantic chivalry.
‘Poor Jonah,’ she said softly, ‘did I spoil your romantic assignation? It must be hard to find a time to meet your pretty little inamorata.’
Despite her quietness he must have known she was there, for he answered at once, and seemed not to be put out by her accusation. ‘Phoebe Drake is my cousin,’ he said, ‘as you well know. We were brought up almost like brother and sister for some years, and that is how we think of each other.’
‘So, you were speaking of family matters when I interrupted you. That hardly seems to account for Miss Drake’s pink cheeks, does it?’
A slight frown furrowed his wide forehead. ‘She’s concerned for me; somehow she’s come to suspect our attachment.’
‘Poor Jonah,’ she said again. ‘And now that we have visitors in the house I must be so much more careful. There can be no moonlit meetings for a while. My husband sits later with his guests, and their rooms overlook the grounds. We mustn’t risk being seen.’
He turned to her at last, a look of pain crossing his face. ‘I don’t know how you can bear being tied to that old man, lord or no lord; it was wrong of your parents to make you marry him, but you are married, and our brief spells of happiness are equally wicked.’
Lucille nodded gravely; she had invented a miserable childhood, woven around with a web of intrigue, to win this man’s sympathy and quiet his conscience. To that she added tales of her husband’s cruelty, although he was innocent of any crime except that of being old.
‘So must our love be seen as sinful? Can there be no justification for finding a little warmth and affection in our lives? Perhaps you’re right. What we can’t change, we must endure,’ she said, her voice breaking.
‘I’ll be guided by you,’ he said softly. ‘Phoebe may be right, my feelings have made a fool of me. The world will never allow us to be together. I ask nothing more than the few snatched hours I’ve already spent with you. Their memory will keep me warm through the coldest and loneliest nights.’
‘Dear Jonah, must we condemn ourselves to being alone? It’s so unfair, for you are free and one day you’ll leave and find another love. Perhaps this should be our last meeting.’ Glancing around to see that they weren’t overlooked, she stretched up and pulled his face down to hers, bestowing a lingering kiss upon his lips. ‘Don’t leave me, dearest love, not yet.’ With a sigh she left him, suppressing a laugh as she turned away; the lovesick fool would have a chance to prove his devotion before too long.
The afternoon passed slowly, and after many attempts to occupy herself, Lucille called her maid, and spent an hour deciding what she should wear that evening, berating the woman at every opportunity. Her husband was home by the time she made her final decision; she chose a gown that accentuated both her slim waist, and her pallor.
Mortleigh had not returned, but as Lucille dismissed her maid she looked out of the window to see the landaulet bowling up the drive. Her heart quickening, she hurried to accept her husband’s proffered arm as he came to her door. Leaning on him as they descended the stairs, she brought her mouth close to Lord Pickhurst’s ear. ‘I trust you’re not excessively tired, dear husband. You did not visit me last night, and I am pining for want of company. Now that our guests have gone I have you to myself again.’
She had timed it perfectly. A young footman was just bowing Mortleigh into the house, but something was wrong. The servant gave a gasp as he straightened, unable to hide his reaction to the visitor’s appearance. Lucille found herself staring too; her new lover was dusty and dishevelled. Blood trickled from a cut upon his forehead, and there was a livid bruise on his cheek. Once she recovered from her shock, she felt a malicious wish to laugh. Had he been a few minutes earlier he might have slipped up to his room without being seen by his host and hostess, and repaired his appearance before the dinner gong sounded.
‘What a fortuitous return,’ she said haughtily, clinging more tightly to her husband’s arm; she wanted Mortleigh, and his dishevelled state merely aroused her lust, but she would be content if neither man knew what she was feeling. It was pleasant to watch her lover humiliated, just a little, as payment for the fear he’d inflicted upon her.
‘I apologize, your lordship, Lady Pickhurst,’ Mortleigh said, ‘for returning so late. I fear I took a tumble from the carriage. The horses took fright at a grouse. I was perhaps unwise to drive back without a groom, but I didn’t want my sick friend to travel alone, so I sent Tomms to care for him on the train.’
‘We shall delay dinner for a few minutes,’ Lord Pickhurst said. Waving away his guest’s attempts to protest, or to apologize, he gave the appropriate orders, and had Parkes, his valet, sent to Mr Mortleigh’s room.
‘I dislike having the servants put about in this way,’ Lucille declared, once Mortleigh had gone upstairs. The colour had rushed to her face at the sight of her lover, and she knew her husband would notice; let him interpret her excitement as annoyance. ‘I had so hoped we might be alone tonight,’ she added in a whisper.
‘I am flattered, my dear heart,’ Lord Pickhurst said, patting her hand. ‘Perhaps our guest will be tired after his ordeal and not wish to sit too long over the brandy. We must be grateful that he’s returned safely.’
She gave him her most brilliant smile. ‘I shan’t pretend to share your interest in the gentleman, but what pleases you can be nothing but agreeable to me.’
During the meal Lucille took little part in the conversation, being civil to Mortleigh, but no more. She rose as soon as it was polite to do so. ‘I’ll leave you to the decanter and cigars,’ she said, darting a meaningful look at her husband. ‘Do not hurry. I shall retire early. Goodnight, Mr Mortleigh.’
‘Lady Pickhurst.’ He bowed low, a sardonic smile on his face. ‘Thank you for the loan of your landaulet, I trust I shall find a way to repay your generosity soon, and I assure you my friend Laidlaw will be eternally grateful. I wish you a very good night.’
Beddowes’s head was full of cannon fire. He didn’t move a muscle, yet pain erupted somewhere behind his eyes, spreading with awakening consciousness down through his neck, shoulders and back until his body was a red hot agony. Except his legs. He couldn’t feel his legs. Fear gripped him; had they gone? Had shot or shrapnel left him with nothing but bloody stumps?
He put out a hand and encountered something ice cold. The feel and texture was familiar and he knew it to be dead flesh. Only now did he force his eyelids open, breaking the crust of dried blood that had held them shut. He was lying on the naked body of a dead man. Only inches from Beddowes’s eyes there was a mass of blackened bloody flesh; his gorge rose as he realized that what he was looking at had once been a face.
The two of them lay snugly at the bottom of a hole, a narrow space about eight feet long, and almost twice as deep. It appeared to have been dug a long time ago, for the sides had sprouted grass and weeds, while the sky up above was almost obscured by a thick overhang of gorse.
Beddowes had been a soldier too long to let the cadaver bother him, once the initial shock had passed. He returned to the matter in hand, and, teeth gritted against the pain, he curled his body round, searching with his right arm until he located his thigh. He pinched it hard, and a whole new set of fiery needles were thrust into his flesh, all the way down to his
foot. Knowing that sensation could lie, he didn’t accept this as sure evidence, but continued exploring with eyes and fingers until he had satisfied himself that no vital parts of his body were missing. As to his injuries, his head and his left arm seemed to have taken the worst damage. One side of his skull was matted with the blood which had glued his eyes shut and run into his mouth. His left arm was swollen, and he had no doubt that it was broken.
The barrage of shot had faded into the rhythmic thud of his own pulse, hammering inside his head. A lull in the battle perhaps, or had the sounds existed only in his mind? Beddowes shouted as loud as he could, hoping to summon some other survivor to his aid. His mouth was dry and his voice lacked its usual volume, but he was confident it should be heard above ground. There was no response, however, and after a while he fell silent. He began to think, and his first thoughts were troubling; he couldn’t remember where he was. His clearest memory put him at a skirmish not far from Maiwand, yet he was sure he had survived it. Hadn’t Colonel Margrave complemented him on his conduct during a parade a few days later? As he pondered, the scene became clearer, and he lifted his right arm, remembering something. He was mildly puzzled to see the filthy tattered sleeve; he wasn’t in uniform, but for the moment that was unimportant.
Beddowes gripped the thin cloth in his teeth and tore it away. He stared at the small white scar in astonishment; it was old, barely visible under the layer of dirt that caked his skin. He’d been unlucky enough to take a spent bullet in the arm as they flushed out a nest of rebels from the ruins of the town. In the heat of battle he’d barely noticed, completing his mission before reporting to the surgeon to have the pellet of lead removed. This had been the subject of Colonel Margrave’s commendation and, as more slivers of memory returned to him, he recalled that the incident had resulted in some good-natured leg-pulling from his platoon.
Hurt, baffled and exhausted, Beddowes allowed his eyelids to drift shut, and for a while he gave no more thought to his predicament. He awoke in darkness to a new problem; he had a raging thirst. A faint sound from above suggested it might be raining, but only a few stray spots of water made their way through the tangled bushes above, most of them falling on the cold naked flesh of his silent companion. He licked at these damp spots avidly; he knew of men who turned cannibal when it was their only chance of survival, and was grateful that for the present he wasn’t bothered by hunger.
To distract himself from thoughts of fresh water, Beddowes investigated his clothes, and found that all of them were as filthy and dilapidated as his shirt, and none bore the faintest resemblance to any kind of uniform, except one of his boots, which might, a very long time ago, have belonged to a soldier, though it had been a man with feet at least one size smaller than his own. He found, to his disgust, that his hair was as long and matted as his beard, and that it was infested with lice, a plague he’d fought successfully during most of his military career. Beddowes had no idea how or when he’d come by a discharge. More importantly perhaps, he couldn’t understand how he’d fallen into such abject poverty, to end his days starving and thrown into a pit.
By dawn the rain was falling harder, and showering down upon him; a trickle of water was dripping off the leaves of a plant a few feet above Beddowes’ head. He drank thankfully, though his body began to shiver as the wet penetrated his ragged clothes. Hugging his right arm around his chest for warmth, his hand encountered something tucked inside his shirt; it was a lump of bread, hard, but perfectly edible. Soaked in water, this made a welcome breakfast.
Fed and watered, Beddowes looked at the walls of the pit which might well be his grave; with two sound arms it would have been easy enough to heave himself out, but crippled as he was, the process would be difficult, maybe impossible. The rain stopped, quite abruptly, which gave him heart for the task. As he attacked the wet mud with the heel of his one half-decent boot, a flash of memory came to him. He’d returned to England, he was sure of it, and he recalled exchanging his military uniform for another, that of an officer of the law. It was a heartening thought. But what then?
No matter how he racked his brain he had no recollection of the reason for this fall into destitution; all he achieved was an increasingly severe headache. At last he gave up and concentrated on digging his way to freedom.
After some time the sky above him turned to a deep summer blue. The sun crept along the top of the wall of the pit, coming gradually lower until he could feel it warming the top of his head as he worked. With three steps dug into the wall, and some hopes that he might be able to climb out, Beddowes turned to look at the dead man who lay at his feet, illuminated now by sunlight. The cut of his thin hair and the softness of his hands proclaimed the corpse to be that of a gentleman, as did the faint scent of some kind of pomade, now overlaid with a far more pungent and unpleasant odour. Since the man had no features, it was doubtful if anybody would be able to recognize him. He’d been of slender build, and perhaps a little over five and a half feet tall. There was no clue to suggest any link between them.
Since his memory had failed him, Beddowes turned to speculation. It seemed likely the two of them had been attacked at the same time, and the other man robbed of his clothes because they were of some value, whereas even a scarecrow would have provided better garb for a thief than his own poor rags. Was it chance that obliterated the man’s features, or had it been a deliberate attempt to make him unrecognizable? His right hand had also suffered a severe blow, perhaps as he tried to protect himself; it was black with blood and grossly swollen.
Beddowes’ eye caught something that looked out of place among the dried gore, and he bent to take a closer look. There was a ring upon the man’s little finger, only the barest glint of silver giving away its presence; the thieves must have missed it. Beddowes looked about him but there was nothing sharp, not even a stone, which he could use to cut away the dead flesh that surrounded the tiny glimmer of metal. Despite his desperate poverty, he felt a surge of distaste at the thought of stealing from a corpse; if only he could remember something about this man. He might have been a friend, or a deadly enemy. The thought brought another, but common sense assured him that he hadn’t killed his silent companion. The absence of the man’s clothes, the similarity of the injuries they’d both suffered, not to mention being hidden together from prying eyes, all suggested otherwise.
The removal of the ring with no tools but one bare hand and his teeth was an unpleasant task, but Beddowes managed it eventually. Without stopping to examine his prize he wiped it clean and tied it up in his shirt tail. A few minutes later he climbed into the warming sunlight, aching in every part of his body but very much alive. He found himself in a bleak moorland landscape. A jagged ruin of stone, evidently the remains of a chimney, gave the world a two-fingered salute, only yards from the pit. He had no recollection of ever seeing such a place before.
He felt sure he was in England. A clear blue sky stretched above him. The plants at his feet suggested late summer, as did the height of the sun. He needed no other compass but the one in his head, although he had no idea which direction he should take. Some instinct, perhaps some shred of recall, turned him to the west. With his back to the fallen chimney, he chose a lone tree and began to struggle towards it through the wilderness of gorse and heather.
Chapter Eight
Lucille tossed and turned in her bed. When Mortleigh returned from his mission of mercy, she’d been shocked by the strength of her feelings for him; she’d never known such a powerful longing, and during that first evening it had been difficult to keep up the pretence of a civil conversation with her husband while her lover sat at the table. Every time she met Mortleigh’s eyes she saw the naked hunger in them, and knew her own were answering with equal desperation. All her life she’d been independent, and emotionally cold. To care so much for anyone was deeply disturbing. She was enslaved, in thrall to a man; it dismayed her to acknowledge she was as helpless to escape as the foolish Jackman.
She reminded herself that
she was Lady Pickhurst; thanks to her father’s careful handling of the marriage settlement she was one of the richest women in the country. It had been her choice to accept the empty attentions of a doting old man in return for a life of wealth and ease. It was too late now to wonder if she’d done the wrong thing.
When Lord Pickhurst came to her bed at the end of the evening, she welcomed him with warmth. While her thoughts were with her lover, she was able to close her eyes and her mind sufficiently to prevent recoiling at her husband’s touch. When he rolled away from her and began to snore, she was free to think of the man who lay sleeping in the guest wing. She edged to the side of her bed, lying wakeful, aching with longing to be in Mortleigh’s arms. It was pointless trying to pretend; ever since that first encounter, her body burned for his touch. For a moment she even considered going to him, but she dared not.
Having slept badly, Lucille felt weary and distracted the next morning; Mortleigh knew how it was with her. It was obvious in his secret smile and the kiss he blew off the top of a finger when Lord Pickhurst’s back was turned. The day passed in long hours of torment; even to see her lover sent a rush of heat through her body, but it was impossible to avoid him. Now she lay in her bed again, listening to the familiar rhythmic snorts from the next room.
She would be free of her husband’s attentions for a few hours; he rarely had the energy to visit her two nights in a row. Tonight, once again, the men hadn’t stayed long at the table, but when her husband came upstairs he hadn’t come near her door. She heard him grunting peevishly at Parke as the valet helped him into bed.