Folly's Reward

by Jean R. Ewing

  In fact, I think she is beautiful.

  He could not have meant her to hear it. With a desperate attempt at calm, Prudence stood up and shook out her skirt. Then she turned around to put away Bobby’s mended suit.

  Hal was still busy with the rope.

  Light and shadow ran in beautiful patterns over the muscles of his forearms. He laughed at something that Bobby said to him and squatted down to speak to the child. Every movement was lithe and frighteningly masculine.

  Prudence stepped into the tiny cabin and closed the door, her breath coming fast beneath her prim bodice. She sank down onto the narrow bench opposite the tiny stove and the clever dresser with its drop-down tabletop, and buried her face in her hands.

  Who was he? Who was he?

  * * *

  “Which would you prefer, angel? Darkness and ease, or light and exercise?”

  Hal was standing at the door of the cabin, looking down at her.

  “We’re about to pass through a tunnel,” he went on, “known when it was built, according to Sam, as the eighth wonder of the world. It’s well over a mile long and will take about two hours to get through. The horses must go over the top. Shall we walk with them?”

  Prudence stepped out to join Hal on the tiny deck.

  A ridge of high ground lay ahead, blocking the path of the flat, meandering waterway. Yet the canal ran straight toward it and disappeared into an arched opening. Several narrow boats were lined up along the bank waiting their turn to enter, for the tunnel allowed only one foot of clearance on each side, and a string of boats was coming through the other way.

  Sam maneuvered The White Lady into the bank to wait her turn.

  Prudence watched as a boat slowly emerged into the daylight. A crew of men lay on their backs on each side of her, pushing the narrow boat along with their feet thrust against the walls of the tunnel.

  “It’s called ‘legging through’ and I’m going to leave it to the professionals,” Hal said. “Sam will hire these same fellows to take The White Lady to the other side. While she disappears underground, shall we walk over the top? Sam and Davie will take Bobby ahead of us with the horses. And no angel should spend two long, dark hours alone underground.”

  “I asked you before,” she said. “Not to call me that.”

  “Yet I persist. Wrong-headed, mad, entirely lacking in contrition.”

  “Are you?”

  His blue gaze pinned her. “Am I what?”

  “You are certainly lacking in contrition, but are you really mad?”

  He laughed. “I hope not, in spite of my vacant brain. Pray, forgive my careless tongue! Yet I hope you will walk with me. There’s something I need to ask you, and this may be our only chance to be private.”

  “What could I know that would help you?”

  “I don’t know, but I am humbled that you still offer to help me, after—”

  He broke off, and took her fingers to help her off the boat.

  “No,” Prudence said, stepping onto the towpath beside him. “You are never humble.”

  “Come,” he said. “And we’ll see.”

  Still holding her hand, palm to palm, he strode off up the path as if with no care in the world. Her blood racing, Prudence hurried at his side.

  At the top of the ridge he stopped and allowed her to catch her breath. She watched as Bobby and Davie rode the tow horses away down the hill to rejoin the canal, Sam leading the way.

  “Now,” Hal said. “Please tell me about Dunraven.”

  Prudence spun about to face him. “Why?”

  “Because the very word is haunting me. I have no idea why. Ever since I learned it was Bobby’s title. Sometimes it even echoes in my dreams.”

  “Do you think you have heard it before? That you come from a world where peers are your friends?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Well, I think that you do,” she said, gathering courage. “So I won’t tell you anything. What if you’re an earl yourself? What if you’re an enemy? It’s already bad enough that you’ve enthralled Bobby with your tales and your attention. He found you on the beach. He thinks you’re the silkie. And he’s right. You’re bound to abandon him.”

  “The silkie abandons his lover, not his child.”

  “Yet you swim, even when it’s cold or raining or pitch dark. You swim in the canal every night. Why?”

  “Ah!” He glanced away. “If you don’t understand why I do it, angel, that’s exactly why I must.”

  “But you swim for hours. You swim like a madman. You exhaust yourself.”

  “Perhaps that’s the idea.”

  “And perhaps I understand more than you know,” she said, her heart full of pain. “Perhaps I’m not quite as naive as you think. But you’re never really honest with me, are you? And now you want me to tell you about Bobby and Dunraven? I will not. I will not. Leave me alone!”

  Leaving him gazing after her, she ran away down the hill after the horses.

  * * *

  That night they arrived in Stoke-on-Trent, where the cargo was unloaded and replaced with crates of finished pottery. It was very late when they finally tied up alongside several other boats.

  Once again, Prudence crawled alone into their little bed.

  It rained all night. As if she wept with the heavens, for no reason she could fathom, silent tears slipped down her cheeks until she fell asleep.

  Yet Hal did not swim in the canal that night. The water here near the warehouses was hardly inviting. Instead, he disappeared into the town, and did not reappear until morning.

  * * *

  The next day they traveled steadily southeast in the broad, shallow valley of the Trent, through Stone and the Haywards toward Rugeley. The simple repetitive tasks of the canal occupied everyone’s time. Hal talked with Sam about what he had learned in Stoke: Napoleon had escaped Elba and landed in France.

  Prudence barely listened to the news. When The White Lady arrived safely in Oxford, she would send word to her sister. She would never see Hal again. This long, slow torment would be over. Plain, uncomplicated Prudence Drake could regain her common sense and her equilibrium.

  When Hal joined her that night, she had already undressed and slipped into the tiny bed. Once again, he had first gone for a swim in the cold canal. Chill emanated from his skin. Yet his silent presence burned her heart as if she had a fever.

  Prudence lay with her back to him, her eyes tightly shut, and pretended to be asleep.

  “I think I would very much like a payment, angel,” he whispered softly, as if to himself, with a wry, dreamy edge to his voice. “For God’s sake, I am working so damned hard, and getting nothing for it, but your frowns and disapproval. Just one sweet payment. A very gentle, innocent, friendly payment, if you like. Just once more, before you disappear into your sister’s respectable household. But, devil take me! Better yet, I think I would like a kiss, freely and passionately given, and offered from the heart.”

  Prudence sat up, drawing the blankets up under her chin.

  “It’s not fair,” she said.

  “Oh, dear God!”

  Hal slipped instantly from the bed and sat down on the edge of a canvas-wrapped bale. He put his head in his hands.

  “It’s not fair,” she insisted desperately. “I did not ask you to come with us from the Manse.”

  “Forgive my careless words, I pray! I thought you were asleep.”

  “I didn’t agree to any payment. You work our passage out of some idle whim of your own, and from your own free will.”

  Hal dropped his hands and looked up at her.

  In the shifting light she couldn’t see his expression, but his wet hair curled back from his pale, moon-washed face like the slick coat of some wild beast.

  “And so I do, angel. Forget that I spoke. It was only the folly of fatigue. Go to sleep.”

  There was the edge of something close to anger—or close to despair—in his voice.

  “Sam is becoming suspicious that
I don’t behave as a fond wife should, isn’t he?”

  “It doesn’t matter. If Sam puts us off because our marriage is in ruins, we shall no doubt find another narrow boat. Though it would be easier to stay with him as far as Oxford, of course.”

  “And after Oxford?”

  “Let us just get so far! In the meantime, can’t we do a little playacting? For Bobby’s sake? You don’t need to kiss me again. But for God’s sake, couldn’t you meet my eyes once in a while, or smile at me when I sit down to dinner, or speak to me without being spoken to first?”

  Her fingers closed tensely on the blanket. She felt wary, even afraid. “Perhaps.”

  “You don’t believe in subterfuge, Miss Drake, even in a good cause?”

  “I shall try to be more friendly in front of Sam and Davie. I’m sorry if I have seemed cool, but it’s not a very amiable situation, is it? To pretend to be wed, when we are strangers.”

  He laughed with a sudden, strong passion.

  “Strangers? You are a sane, unpretentious, and benevolent person, with a real existence in a real world. It is only by accident that you find yourself in such an odd predicament. Only I am the stranger—with nothing but a head full of verses and book-learning, and a body with unknown skills I discover daily—I can shoot, I can box, and I know how to handle the ribbons. But I don’t seem to have any personal history, or even a name.”

  “You remembered the name of your brother, didn’t you? John?”

  “Ah, yes, so I did. But the name has no face, and I can’t place the feelings connected to it.”

  “And a woman’s name?”

  “Yes, Helena!” A deep raillery edged his voice. “I have dreamt about her, but I don’t know who she is. In the meantime, if I see myself in a mirror, an intruder stares back and wonders what the devil he is doing there. My own face shifts meaning with my mood, as if I changed shape with the tides. I can’t know what I might do next, because there’s no anchor in what I have done before. Nothing but confusion glares at me out of a mirror.”

  She sat frozen, feeling small and flawed. “Not benevolent. I am not kind.”

  “Yes, benevolent. You have no idea how kind your heart really is. For when you look in the glass, you see the familiar features of Miss Prudence Drake. You have grown so used to them that you hardly notice the way your eyes are sometimes green and sometimes brown, or that your eyelashes are two shades darker than your brows, or that when you smile there is the most enchantingly severe dimple in your left cheek. You only worry in case your hair isn’t parted quite perfectly, or if your mouth is not just a little too straight. And the lady behind that face is someone you even believe you understand. What do you want out of life, Miss Drake?”

  Prudence stared at him. The breath seemed stuck in her throat. Her voice came out as a hoarse whisper. “What do you mean?”

  “How do you envisage your future?”

  “I don’t know. I’m a governess. I’m very happy taking care of Bobby.”

  “Which is a form of slavery. You will never earn enough to gain independence. Old age will await you with the degradation and pain of real poverty, or the mortification and pitfalls of being taken in by charitable relatives. Meanwhile, although you are a lady, you’ll always be trapped in a humiliating position halfway between the family and the servants, belonging nowhere. There will never be love, except that of children.”

  “You think that’s not real?”

  “Too real! That’s the problem. You give your heart to Bobby, even though he may be taken from you at any time. In a few years, he will be sent to school, or handed over to a male tutor. Then what? Another post taking care of another child, until your heart breaks again? Don’t you want a husband and children of your own?”

  Prudence felt desperate, as if the future were closing about her in the dark.

  “I don’t think about it. Governesses don’t usually have those kinds of choices. What about your future? What do you want?”

  “How can I know?” He laughed, but his voice almost betrayed him. Beneath the light, cynical amusement, Prudence sensed something quite different. “How can a man without a past plan a future? Unless we know where we’ve been, how can we make sense of where we’re going? For all I know, my future lies in Newgate among the debtors, or the thieves, or the murderers.”

  “Stuff and nonsense,” Prudence said with more conviction than she felt. “If you had murdered someone you would know it—in your bones. You would feel the enormity of it every day weighing down your soul.”

  Hal pushed up from the cotton bale. Thin muslin drawers covered him from waist to knee—the fine undergarments of a gentleman, as her father had worn under his knee breeches. The three-inch waistband was tightened at the back with tapes. Three small vertical buttons fastened the front.

  They were barely damp. So he must have swum naked and put them on afterward.

  A hot flush burned her cheeks and washed through her belly.

  She tried desperately not to notice, when he bent to slip from their little tent, how the fabric below the knotted tapes clung to the hard, rounded, muscled shape of him, every bit as revealing and far more enticing than the nakedness of her dreams.

  “Oh, goodness!” she said under her breath, but she scrambled from the warm bed and hurried after him, gathering the voluminous folds of her muslin nightgown in both hands.

  Hal stood silhouetted against the dark, willow-covered banks of the canal, as lovely as the silkie. Prudence hurried her gaze up over his lithe midriff and chest to the enchanting lines of his strong throat and jaw.

  Moonlight broke suddenly through the clouds. As it caught his features, she could see that he grinned at her and that this time his amusement was genuine, though it was only a riotous, wild mockery directed at himself.

  “And if I am a Casanova, Miss Drake, with a trail of ruined women and bastard children behind me, would I feel the enormity of that, too?”

  Without removing the unmentionable garment this time, he dropped back into the water.

  Prudence leaned over the low rail.

  “Are you mad? You will die of cold.”

  His head moved sleekly through the water as he swam back to her.

  “Would you care, angel?”

  He somersaulted and disappeared for a moment, before surfacing again in a different spot.

  “Of course I should care if you made yourself ill.”

  Spreading his hands in the water in an exaggerated gesture of surrender, he laughed up at her, his black hair spilling over his face.

  “Because how then would you get Bobby to your sister’s?”

  His strong, long-fingered hands closed on the rail. Hal slipped out of the canal, water streaming down his body, and grabbed at a towel that he had apparently left ready.

  With a burning confusion of emotion, Prudence watched his neat movements as he dried himself.

  “Well, of course, that’s a consideration—but only for Bobby’s sake.”

  He toweled vigorously at his hair. “And is there nothing you want from me for your own sake? You have been avoiding me as if I carried the plague. For God’s sake, seize the day! Take the opportunity to discover something outside of the schoolroom. How do you know if the chance will ever come again? Why don’t you use me while I’m here?”

  She felt frantic, trapped by his forcefulness. “Use you? How?”

  “We could see what we could learn from each other.” He reached out a cold hand and touched her cheek. The gentleness of it was infinitely disarming. “With honesty, even with affection, perhaps. I don’t ask for your virtue, for God’s sake! ‘Be not coy, but use your time, / And while ye may, go marry.’ Or at least try a little harmless courting. Was what happened at the waterfall so dreadful? I felt your response then, and again in Gretna Green, deny it though you may.”

  “You think I should kiss you again?”

  “Maybe. After all, you survived twice, didn’t you?”

  “But what could we discover, sir?”r />
  He turned with a desperate violence that left her shaken. “Whether I am really a rake, perhaps. How the devil can I know? But a lady should be able to tell.”

  “So you will use me to find out something about yourself? What on earth can I learn?”

  “Whatever you desire! You are in charge. Wouldn’t you like to know something about pleasure? The delight of a caress, a shared touch. Remember, we are married.”

  “No, we’re not. That business in Gretna Green was a mockery. I don’t imagine I shall ever marry.”

  “Oh, yes, you will.” He took the loose end of her long plait to run it idly over the palm of one hand, sliding the knobby braid past his fingers. “You just don’t know why you must. Have you never felt your own hair? It’s so soft, like the down on a chick. Close your eyes and just feel.”

  He took her hand and turned it palm up, then brushed it softly with the silky blond plait.

  “Now that is a harmless enough pleasure, isn’t it, Prudence?”

  “Don’t!” she said blindly, closing her fingers over the delicious sensation, before tearing her plait out of his hand. “I don’t want to learn anything from you.”

  Hal turned away and slid to his haunches, dropping his damp head to his knees. He remained quite still, his hands pressed over his eyes and mouth, the curve of his back sculpted in the moonlight.

  Prudence glared down at him. “And don’t laugh at me! I know I seem foolish and ignorant to someone like you.”

  “Oh, dear God, angel! I am far from laughter. Though the amazing absurdity of my situation brings me daily amusement, of course.”

  As he lifted his head, Prudence saw his face clearly in the moonlight.

  Like Abou Hassan, I might believe I am the caliph, for I’m damned if I know otherwise. Abou Hassan, the young man of Baghdad, carried in the night to the bed of the Caliph, Harun-al-Rashid, in the Arabian Nights.

  Hal was ravaged, not by laughter, but by despair. The frost of it seemed to have sunk to his bones.

  Hot tears slid down her cheeks. Without thinking, Prudence tugged a blanket from their bed and wrapped it about his shoulders.

  As she did so, Hal caught her hand in his own and pulled her down into his arms.